Effortless Swimming

I’ve got Ioannis Aliazis on today’s podcast episode. He has recently been through the 8 Week Faster Freestyle course and is here to share his improvements over the last couple of months. Ioannis is also a freediving instructor, and we will talk a little bit about some of the crossovers from freediving to swimming.

01:01 Swimming Background

THE 8-WEEK FASTER Freestyle Course

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

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. I’ve got a guest on today who’s recently been through the Eight Week Faster Freestyle course, which I know many of the listeners to this podcast have. And Yanni, you were in the comments you were commenting every week about your progress. And I thought this is excellent to hear how well you’re going. And you’re also a freediving instructor. And I want to talk a little bit about some of the crossover from freediving to swimming as well, but also just talk about your improvement over the last couple of weeks and last couple of months, because it’s been great to see that happen in that Eight Week Faster Freestyle course. So welcome to the podcast to start with. Thank you. Thank you. So you’re, how did you come across Effortless Swimming and what we do? Because obviously you’ve got a big background in freediving and was swimming something that you started to do a bit of cross training or how did that all

come about? I found you on YouTube, basically, like I saw some videos because I started, I’m not a swimmer like I don’t have a swimming background. I’m a sea person. So I live in Greece and we’ve always been in or near the water. But I did, I don’t know, like three months of swimming, I guess when I was a kid in a pool and that was it. So after I started freediving, I realized that swimming is the best exercise you can do for freediving because you’re just in the water, get a good feel for the water and like it improves your stamina, your CO2 tolerance and all these things. And I started to get more into it. And I was looking for videos like every once in a while, I would go on YouTube and look for a technique. For example, I like nothing diving, freediving without things. So you just swim down and swim up. So for that, I was looking into like the breaststroke kick, for example, like technique for that. So over over the years, I

guess I was I have a playlist like a freediving playlist on YouTube. And I’ve been adding videos and since I found your channel, I’ve been subscribed and watching everything like I said, and like listening to everything just absorbing and sending to people. I’m a huge fan. That’s that’s awesome. I appreciate that. And with your swimming when you first started the eight week course, where were you at in terms of pace and how comfortable you were in the water? I think, like, I was doing some training in open water, my goal was open water, it wasn’t really so much like to compete or do something in the pool. But with open water, it was very difficult to go under the two minutes for 100. And we were tracking that with the Garmin watch or I have a watch. Yeah, cool. It’s not I know the Garmin is a little bit more moral, let’s say statistics oriented, you get more feedback, more information. But this is just fine. I had a goal to swim to a smaller

island that we have here, which is 2.3, 2.4 kilometers. So I was just swimming along the coast. And it was very difficult, even the two minutes was like really hard for me. And I knew it wasn’t so much in terms of the pool, it wasn’t so much strength. But I was doing something wrong, it wasn’t lagging in the water enough. Like my feet, my leg was sinking, I was just I was struggling. So I needed help. And as you went through the course and you picked up some of these things, is that what primarily changed for you? Do you feel like your body position improved, you’re able to lengthen out a bit more? What were some of those things that sort of struck you as I didn’t know that before, or something that maybe clicked when you were So a bunch of your videos before. So I was trying to apply some things from your videos to what I was doing. But I think in the program, it’s structured much better. So you start from like completely basics, which some things I was

okay with, but it was good to start from foundations again, and start building up the huge difference for me was I think like week seven, which was where you liked all the timing with the kick. That made a huge impact. But it’s only because I had the foundation before, like I worked on the whole thing before. And of course, you are training two times a week, three times a week. And you build up the strength and the stomach. But at the same time, I think it’s also really nice that you have exercises that are fun. It’s not just punishment. We just there are things that you can do. And you have fun with it. For me, like intellectually as well, there were things there were times like I mentioned, the one comment, I think that there’s four different things that have to keep track in my head to swim correctly with talking and squeezing and stretching and all these things. But that’s what keeps it interesting. And I think the kick timing was the game

changer for me, because I am having the water in general, like even with freediving, I sink like a stone. So it was difficult for me to stay on the surface, especially in the pool where you have less buoyancy. So that was like a big difference for me. Yeah. Can you talk about the kick timing? What did what do you think you were doing before? And what did you change before? I think I was kicking the wrong way. So I was instead of doing the catch and the kick and the same movement, the same timing, I was doing the opposite. So my legs were like playing a little bit more. And they were dragging behind me basically, I was it was more like an anchor than to push me alone. So with that, I was I’m doing the two bit to beat that seems comfortable. And with the two beats, I can do pretty not 100% tired. I can do like a 130 per 100. So right, I like an old if you’re going for an old at 100. If I’m going for a no out, I would probably do better. Yeah. But

yeah, do less than 30. I’m sure. But that’s a proven improvement from two minutes. Yeah, yeah, it’s a huge I’m super happy when I’m ecstatic for this. And it doesn’t feel like I can do the 130 ish and doesn’t feel difficult doesn’t feel like I’m gas completely at the end, you know? Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, a couple of things that with the two bit kick if you’re primarily in the ocean, which has the extra buoyancy because of the salt water, it’s almost like wearing a wetsuit in a way because you sit up higher and you often need less of a kick, especially for what your primarily training for is that swim across the island or yeah, like that for that sort of stuff, I think a two bit kick is really good. And it’s very efficient as well. So that’s where a lot of people can just find a really good rhythm and swim for a long time as well with that two bit kick. Obviously four beat and six beat kick are great as well. And it’s

different for each person. But particularly for what your training for, I think that two bit kick is probably the best thing to be doing there. Now also just you mentioned is you’ve watched a lot of videos and listen to some podcasts. And then you eventually did the eight week course and you found it had the structure that helped you improve. And I find if people have watched a lot of the YouTube videos, for example, it’s not always extra information that they need. It’s they need sometimes just the structure to be able to follow and say, I do this now and do this first, then move on to this thing and then this thing and then this thing because if you have got, yeah, if you’ve watched a lot of videos over the last year or two, you’ve probably seen a lot of the stuff that we talk about in many of the courses. But because there’s just so much to think about, you might you probably might not be doing it in the right order, a number of other things. So that’s

why I think these courses are getting the results that they’re getting is it just gives you tells you what to do, basically. Yeah, but it’s also super important that you’re there as well. If anyone has a question, you’re there to help us like in the comments and in each week, people are posting their workouts and their times and then you’re there to help them suggest things and stuff which you don’t get on YouTube. It’s a more personal touch from someone who is like super experienced. So you can help you can identify things more quickly, because you have the experience and you can help us. We need something you’re there 100% to help and then you I as the trainee, let’s say, can see the difference the next training I do. And it’s really helpful. Yeah, and I bad weather or not, I had a comment section where I like I’ll jump in each week and answer them. But I’m glad I did because I’ve picked up a lot of things from some of the

questions that people have asked. And often there’s quite similar questions for each week. And it’s helpful for me as a coach to go, okay, when over I’m teaching this topic, then I’ve got to I think I should make a certain point clear. And one of those with the kick timing is that often people think of the kick timing as they should enter with say the left hand and kick down with their right hand, which is correct. But for many people, the easy way to think of it is especially with the two bit kick is right arm catch, right leg kick down at the same time. And so I think that’s not really taught like that very often. People are thinking, isn’t it the opposite? But no, it’s not. It’s just a different way of explaining it. So there’s things like that. I want to go into some crossover from free diving, which is your area of expertise and swimming. So from what you’ve gone through over the last couple of months, what do you see

those sort of crossovers being amongst the two different sports? I wanted to note as well, like what you said before is really important to get feedback from the students is really good because then that informs your teaching the next time. Like it’s the same with me with free diving. I always ask them why you did this and to give me feedback. And then I can fine tune to the student and to the next students for the crossover. There are lots of if you take a professional swimmer and you try to turn them into a free diver, they’re going to destroy everyone because they have the strength and they have the feel of the water. They have a good technique. They have good CO2 tolerance because of all the swimming that you do. So it just as a form of exercise, it’s perfect. But it also translates, I think for me, 100% because there are different kinds of free diving you can do, right? So you can dive without fins, which means

you’re just swimming up and down. So the kick for that is a breaststroke kick. Right. So you learn how to do a breaststroke because it’s more efficient than a freestyle kick? Or why did I choose that? Yeah, you just kick like this, you’re not going to go anywhere if you’re trying to go down. So the arm stroke for that is like the breaststroke, but the actual movement is the movement of the freestyle mirrored. So if you’re, I can move it back a little bit. So you go up and you try to push the water behind you like this. So it’s basically the movement of freestyle, but with both arms. So once you learn to do a nice, to stretch in a nice way with your freestyle, you can stretch up, you can catch the water, pull it behind you. It’s the same movement. So you get a better feel for the water. You strengthen the muscles that are going to make this movement for the no fins. And then the kick is the breaststroke kick. There is

another style which you go down by down and back up by pulling on a rope that does a dive line. So you just stretch, you pull and again the same. But, and again, I think this translates as well because when you go in, when you’re swimming freestyle and you go in, you have to learn to be comfortable to make a nice stretch, right? You have to be comfortable lengthening your body to have a nice stretch. And for this is called free merger. So for this, you need to be able to stretch comfortably and as far as possible. So you can have a long pull on the rope. So your pull is going to be longer in distance. And then typical, the most usual kind which is with bi fins, usually let these carbon fins. The freestyle kick, again, like it strengthens your legs. And if you want to do other kinds of swimming, it strengthens your core as well. So if you want to dive with a mono thing, like the big thing that you put both feet in, you need to have a

strong core. So again, it translates 100%. And at the end of the day, like, why would you do anything else as an exercise for freediving other than something that involves the water? You get more comfortable. Yeah, I can see why there’s so much cross. Yeah, you get more comfortable with the water. You have a better feel for the water. It makes sense for me 100%. And I tell all my students that they have to swim more. This podcast is brought to you by Form Goggles. Form empowers swimmers at every level to reach their goals. Whether they want to get stronger, faster, swim further would be more efficient. Get lap by lap motivation with real time metrics and workout instructions right in your goggles and forms recently released form plans, which include a progressive series of workouts to help you achieve your fitness skills or triathlon goals. You can follow along with the plan and your weekly swims will be automatically synced to your

goggles. So you’ll swim through your workouts with real time metrics and workout instructions all in your goggles. So it’s like having a coach right there with you. And I’ve had to look through these training plans. And I think they are excellent for people who want to train for certain triathlons or reach certain fitness goals. It will build on each week and a really good way to progress progressively build up your fitness. So if you’d like to follow along with some plans to help you reach your specific swimming goals, then check out form goggles at formswim.com forward slash effortless. And this will give you 15 dollars off your purchase of form goggles. So formswim.com forward slash effortless to get your pair of form goggles. Yeah, I can see why the one experience I had with free diving. So like we went to I did a swim trek in Turkey. It’s probably 10 years ago now. And I can’t remember we’re in cash at the time. And I

don’t know how deep the water was but it reasonably deep in my sister and I were swimming out there and I was comfortable swimming down getting to the bottom and coming back up. And so that wasn’t free diving, but it was, you know, we’re still going down reasonably deep. And I was fine with that. But then when I did a very brief free diving course in the Maldives a couple of years ago, and the instructor, we only got the chance to do one sled with the instructor on the sled going down. That’s fun. And because I was, yeah, it’s fun. But I thought I was gonna be good. I’m fit. I’m a swimmer. But then my panic on my fear set in a lot earlier than I was than I would have thought. And so I got I don’t know how deep I got but it was like half the depth of some of the other guys. And I was just like, yeah, because I wasn’t in control. And it was the first time I did it. I was just like now I’ve got to tap him say that’s enough. And I’m

ready to go up. But yeah, when I’m in control of it, it was like, it’s it really like mentally, it was quite it was a real challenge, which was such a surprise to me. I didn’t think that fear or that panic would sit in because we’re going down so fast. And then you do it. Yeah, this is a very particular like for me, the first couple of times were scary too, because you relinquish control to something else, right? So it’s not just me kicking down and kicking back up. I’m on this thing that something might go wrong. It’s going super fast and stuff. But then once you get used to it, it’s fun. But the mental aspect is very important with freediving, like mental and emotional aspect. It can completely ruin a dive. You tense up. And it’s the same. I think with swimming is the same thing. Like you need to be relaxed in the water. Like yesterday, I went for example for a little swim in the pool. And I thought it was like super comfortable. And like this

time it’s been a few weeks that I haven’t been and I thought I’d be super tired. But I was doing a nice comfortable two beat kick and I was getting around 130. And there was a guy next to me who was moving more, but not swimming as fast. So it’s important to have the technique, but it’s also important to mentally be there and be able to relax. Because if you’re overthinking or if you are stressed or if you’re whatever, you can’t relax in the water, then it’s going to translate, I think 100% to your speed and your comfort and your endurance. Absolutely. Even more so in for many the triathletes and open water swimmers that I coach who are racing. Those that are newer to open water, there is often quite a bit of fear and panic. And one of the athletes that I do some stroke coaching with online, he’s been swimming mostly in a lake recently because he’s got a race coming up. And the first group swim that he did, I think it was 1500 meters

that they did, there was like, there’s only 10 of them. But because it was, yeah, it was like a mock race for them just to get that practice off the bat. He was like, he had to stop, get his breath and then go and then he’s started to panic. And so it took him quite a while to just relax and get into it. And then he found his rhythm, got into his flow when he was, he did really, but it happens pretty often, especially the first time that you do an open water race. And it’s quite, I think it’s really enjoyable to find those challenges, particularly those mental challenges where once you get over them, you’re just like, man, okay, that’s great. I feel like I’ve leveled up and I can push again. And for me, that thing is like surfing big waves. If I’m out there and it’s big, there’s not many people out, might be a dark day. It’s yeah, it’s like mentally, you could easily go, oh my God, I’m in trouble here. What if I get held under? But if you

keep your mind in check, and then you get out of the water, you had a great surface. Wow, that was really, that was really cool. You just feel like you’ve gotten to that next level. And I found that with long distance swimming to training for the 20k swim to Rotnest Island was longest I’ve done was 10k. But then once you do that 20k, that’s possible, can do it. And you just build that confidence. Yeah, for sure. Even when I did the 5k, like I stopped and I was like, okay, I could do more. Yeah, you build the confidence like you do two, I did three and I was like, you know, I just go for five and see what happens. And it was like super comfortable, like I could do it in the sea, I could probably do a little bit more. I don’t know about the 20, you build the confidence over time, I’m sure. And I’m really sure you swam to that island, did you? I did. Yeah, I did. That was a 2.3 kilometers. And I did it in like 156 was the pace. Yeah, cool. Yeah,

did you do that by yourself or did you have others with it? I was by myself, but I had my father with the boat next to me for safety. Yeah, because now it’s in the season now. So there are boats with tourists and so on. So he was next to me, I don’t know, max five meters distance. And I was sighting the whole time. So every, I don’t know, 10 strokes or something, I would just look up and see where I’m going straight. And he was there next to me the whole time. Yeah, that’s cool. And how did it feel when you once you’ve done that swim? Was it a goal that you had for a while? And did you think it was? I did it again last last summer with a group, but there it was, I was like responsible for the group so I couldn’t relax that much. And this time, I was, it was very comfortable, like in a little bit before the halfway mark, I felt tired. But then I relaxed again, and it was super easy. Like I came out. It was a 156. I could have gone faster. I’m sure if I

was going to do just the goal was to go there and swim back. So the idea was to do 5k, but the seed picked up and then we stopped it on the way back. So if I was going to do just a 2.3, I couldn’t go faster. I’m sure I could sustain a 140. Maybe I’m not sure, but I think I could have done faster. And it was comfortable, like the 156 was very nice, like we’re very comfortable. I don’t help you. And with your swimming now, what what are you thinking about? What are you working on at the moment with your swimming? No, I think I have a like a friendly competition with one of my teachers for for 400. So I want to see what kind of time I get. Like the last time I checked the first time I’ve ever done a 400 and I timed it was a seven minutes. So now I have to start slowly chipping away at that. Yeah. And like the open water, I would like to do longer swabs. Like I would like to do like a 5k open water, maybe a little bit more slowly. And overall, I

want to like more comfort, like more speed with more comfort, basically. Yeah. Yeah, getcha. It’s I find when people come to clinics, like that so many people will say like that one of their main motivations is to either beat their friends, the people that they swim with or if it’s like a parent who’s got a kid who’s 10, 11, 12, they’re like, I need a delay then getting fast. I mean, by by another year or two, because the kids start to catch up to him with the speed. So it’s yeah, it’s nothing like just trying to beat a friend is motivation to say that that’s really good. It’s also great for any sorry for like for me, as an instructor, this is super informative because I can help people like because for the courses that I teach, they have to be able to swim a little bit. So depending on the level level one is okay, you can swim level two has to have a little bit better technique level three has to have even better technique for knowledge

that I gained from you and from them from this program, I can help the students even more. Yeah, that’s it’s great that it’s able to help you with that. For anyone listening to this, what advice would you have them if they want to if they want to get faster, if maybe they’re stuck with their swimming? I know we’ve talked about the eight week course, that sort of stuff, but just from someone who’s improved a lot over the last couple of months, what would be your main advice for them? I think practices is important, right? Like you need to put the hours in for sure. So it’s not something like I’m realizing as a non swimmer that it’s not definitely not something that you can get like hugely better at in two trainings, because I know like you and like a lot of other swimmers have swam hundreds if not like thousands of kilometers in the pool. So they need to put in the work. But I think the information is there like you can find

anything on YouTube, right? But you need to have someone that will give you a structure and that can be there for you. That’s why I said like the comments are super important. So it’s good to have someone that will be there to help you and to have good structure in your training. And the most important that for me is to enjoy it. Find the reason to enjoy it. If you’re just doing it because, okay, let’s say you have a goal. I want to do I don’t know 20, 20 seconds less on the hundred or whatever, five seconds less or whatever. If that feels like a chore, it’s not going to be a good thing over like at the end of the day, it’s not going to be a good thing. So it’s good to find a reason to enjoy. And that’s why I said like your the exercises you have are fun, like in the warm up stuff. It’s orange. It’s interesting. And one thing I saw I wanted to mention about the kick timing is that for me, like it took a while to figure it out

because I was doing it the wrong way. So I think you have one exercise where you just do it on one side first, right? So I had me only thinking about all months, but yeah, yeah, so I had the board on one side and I was trying to figure it out only on the one side. And I think the right side clicked first before the left because the one side clicked first, I was like, okay, just do the one side, do like some distance on the one side so that it becomes automatic and then switch to the other side. So it’s good to also you give us like a very good structure, but it’s good to be open to listen to your body and adapt things on the fly to figure it out by yourself because at the end of the day, I will be by myself. I have your training, which is good, but like, I’m by myself in the water. I need to be aware and try to figure things out. So I think like practice and like a good coach and being aware of what’s going on while you’re doing not just

do it mechanically. Yeah, shooting into how things feel in the water because it’s very easy to get caught up in the in your head with so much to think about, especially sometimes during some of these courses is you can overthink things. And then you’re just not aware of what your body is doing. But swimming is such a feeling activity that that we want to almost try and get out of our heads as best we can while maybe just keeping something in the back of our mind. But yeah, just go by feel it’s it’s much more enjoyable that way to rather than trying to cycle through 10 things at once that you’re that you’re trying to do. I think that’s great advice. So just get in the water enough to be able to improve two to three times a week. Three times a week is great if you can. I find that’s sweet spot for many people three times a week or more. And having that consistency over time, that frequency is how you will improve. You mentioned

obviously technique and structure, just yeah, having something to follow. And I look at some of the YouTube comments that I get on some of the videos and I go, oh, geez, I hope people don’t actually listen to what this person said because I feel like that’s completely wrong. So if you’re going by YouTube comments, you might get some good advice there, but it’s very easy to get distracted and go, okay, maybe I’ll try this. Just yeah, keep it simple. And yeah, and then just you said, just go by go by feel just tune into to how your body’s feeling and how you’re feeling, which I think is excellent. So, Yanni, thanks very much for being on the podcast and for being so active in the comments as well on the course because I love to see that feedback from people and especially how well you’ve gone over the last couple of months. It’s awesome to see. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d

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

The post [Case Study] How A Freediver Went From 2:00 to 1:30/100m with Ioannis Aliazis appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Today, my guest is Anthony McDonald, who has been going through some of our online courses and made such incredible improvements over the last couple of months. Tune in to this episode now!

01:01 There’s Always Room For Improvement

Join our Stroke Analysis Membership:

8-WEEK FASTER Freestyle Course:

5 Day Catch Challenge:

Form Googles:

Watch the episode on Youtube:

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 Anthony McDonald, who is a swimmer who’s been going through some of our courses and been working with a little bit and made some incredible improvements over the last couple of months. So I really wanted to get you on the podcast, Anthony, to talk about what you’ve done to see a significant improvement in your, in your times. Just I’ll bring up those times before we get into it. So your 400 has gone from an 825 to a 713 and your 200 meter time has gone from a 405 to a 325. So really big improvements across the board there. So first of all, welcome and well done on those improvements so far. Yeah, cheers. Thanks for having me. I guess when you start from such a low base, you’ve got plenty of room for improvement. So yeah, it’s it’s been nice to see those improvements for sure. That’s what I’d like to say to anybody who comes to our clinics, you know, there’s sometimes they’re a bit nervous

or sometimes they’re maybe a bit embarrassed that they’re quite beginner. But the thing is, like, you’ve got so much room for improvement that, you know, the best swimmers, they’ve only got those 1% is mostly where if you’re starting from a low base, it’s quite exciting to see those big, big gains and big improvements. So for those that are listening, what’s what’s your background in terms of swimming and sport and triathlons? I know you’re training for triathlons, but what where did it all sort of start for you? So like growing up, I played a lot of field sports. So AFL was probably my main sport growing up, played a little bit of basketball. So like a lot of running and and like riding bikes and things like that came quite natural as well. And then I joined the military when I was 25. So I joined the Air Force. So got into a little bit more cross training, a lot more in there’s a lot of endurance and relative

strength, not a lot of swimming, especially in the Air Force. So yeah, did a fair bit of like CrossFit style training and then got into some Olympic weightlifting. And then three to four years ago, we had a group of friends who were training in a gym together, and they all decided to jump on the triathlon bandwagon. So I gave that a crack for about seven or eight months and then COVID hit and all the races got cancelled. So that sort of demotivated me a little bit and swimming, being pretty poor at it was definitely the first thing to go and probably the easiest thing to cut away. And like you said there before, like, if you’re bad at something, it’s usually a lot harder to be consistent at it. So so yeah, that for me was definitely the first thing to go. And then got back into a little bit of weight training and Olympic lifting. And then my wife, who trained for a triathlon post pregnancy. So I think she was like nine months post having

a baby did a triathlon down at Husky. And it was just a really good group of people and all our friends did it as well. And that’s what motivated me to go, Okay, well, I better I really enjoy training with these guys and girls again. And it started to jump back in and train for it. But the biggest weakness for me was was definitely the swim. I mean, biking or running just by doing them, you can sort of get see improvements quite drastically where swimming being such a skill based sport, it didn’t really matter what my level of fitness was. It was more that yeah, the fitter I got didn’t mean that I got better in the water. I felt like I was almost stuck in the mud every time I got in the water. The first email you sent you said, originally, you were struggling to get under the minute for a 53. And then you went through the catch challenge and you were down to a 55 for the for the 50. And then you went through the

eight week course inside our membership there and like pretty quickly, you started to see some some improvements there. So what what was it that what were some of those things that you felt made a difference to bring those times down so drastically, which was about like 10 almost like, yeah, sort of 12 seconds per 100 for that 400 time trial like what were some of those things for you that maybe you didn’t know before. And then you went through this you know, okay, put this in place and you can actually swim faster. Yeah, I think the biggest thing when I when I was initially swimming, I would think about like 10 or 15 different things. Like when I’m sorry, and knowing coming from like a sports background or a waylifting background, it’s like, or even as a as a coach, it’s like, just trying to focus on one thing. But when I was in the water, it’s like, Oh, what am I doing my kick? What am I doing my breathing? What am I doing

my catch and going into that five day cats challenge? Initially, it was it was really broken down. So hey, focus on the entry into the water and extending the arm and then out in front, where are your hands? And when you pull through the water, like, where’s that elbow position? And probably each session just focusing on that one thing was was really beneficial for me. And trying to discard what the times were when I was doing those drills or doing the swims, I wasn’t really focused on the clock. So having those drills and just focus on one, maybe two things. And then when I’d go to swim is just continue to focus on and build on that thing as well. So the five day catch was was was great for me. And I saw big improvements. And then when I went to that eight week challenge, having that week to focus on those one or two things, especially within the stroke, were really beneficial for me in to go, well, you can just

continue to build on this. And through the session, just pick one or two things and and just concentrate on that.

Yeah, so keeping it keeping it simple and just not thinking about multiple things that once made a made a big difference for you. And

did you have much did you have much no idea of what you should be doing prior to this? Like did you have much coaching in the past or was it just get in and turn the arms over kick a bit? Yeah, like, like, I would watch videos and and jump in the water and try and replicate that. Or we’ve got some really good swimmers in our group who would give advice. But you sort of don’t want to take away from their session either. And even jumping into squads, I’ve jumped into squads previously. And nothing to take. I’m not taking anything away from those squads. They were they were good from an atmosphere point of view. But from a coaching point of view, it was was more of a do a 50 in every on the 115. And then there was just a whistleblower and I’m like, well, like my fitness is is great, but I’m not getting any quicker in the water. So so yeah, like,

you’re prior to this, I didn’t really have that that coaching or that specificity within within the training. So yeah, that’s definitely been beneficial as well. And you also mentioned in one of your emails that you feel like sometimes you’re going backwards with the drills or it like it feels a bit slow with the with the drills. But then you have these good sessions where it’s like, OK, yeah, like I’m feeling good, I’m moving through the water, water well. And then some sessions where maybe you feel a bit heavy again and like it might be swimming through mud. So you sort of a few ups and downs with some of the sessions there. Can you tell me a little bit more about about that? Yeah, I mean, that’s some you’ve explained it pretty well, but some sessions you feel fantastic in the water and and you’ve got position of the drills and I can’t put my finger on it, but sometimes you just feel good in the water. And then you’ll come back 24 hours

later. I’m moving nowhere. I haven’t got any feel for the water. And and I guess sometimes, like, especially for me, I get a little bit frustrated with that for sure. And probably try and overthink the stroke. And that’s a bit more retrospective in looking back on it going. But when you’re in the heat of the moment of training and you want to continue to improve and you see other people around you that are better swimmers and probably not at not necessarily the same fitness level, but they’re just better in the water. So that’s definitely frustrating. But just at the end of session, knowing that like 12 weeks ago, you were swimming a 825 and now you’re swimming a like you’ve improved by over a minute like that’s that’s always motivating as well like to see improvement. But yeah, I continue to have days where I feel great and days where I feel really, really bad and the bad days are probably more often than the good days to be totally honest.

But I guess that’s the that’s the thing about being like learning a new sport is on learning a new skill is being vulnerable in that and just accepting it for for for what it is and knowing that you’re going to take one step forward and sometimes three steps back within a week. So yeah. And it’s even even the very best swimmers in the world experience that probably not as often. Yeah, I think like when you’re learning something, you might get, you know, if I’m working with someone at a clinic, they might get one out of every four strokes right initially when they’re making a change. And then we just want to increase the consistency of that over the coming weeks and months. But the best swimmers in the world experience that that too. I was watching a video on a guy Caleb Dressel who’s there. He won the 50 and 100 free at the recent Olympics and he was journaling every day and he was going through his journals and his logbooks for swimming

and a couple weeks out from Olympic trials, he was one of the things he wrote was just like, yeah, I suck at this. I hate it. I’m going to give it away. Like this is the fastest guy in the world. So like even he has sessions where he’s just like, I can’t swim anymore. So yeah, it’s part and parcel. And I think if you know to expect it, if you can prepare yourself mentally to know that that’s going to happen on occasions and just push to it and tomorrow’s another day. I mean, my equivalent I feel is surfing because I didn’t do that as a kid, took it up as an adult and there’ll be times when I’m out surfing where I feel like I’m just surfing so well and like, I’ve got this thing now. Then the next session is just like struggling to stand up on the wave. Like there’s just there’s times where it’s just so frustrating like you’ve gone backwards. But it’s the comparison, the analogy like there’s it’s kind of like walking up a mountain with a yo-yo

where like you’re always going to be continuing to go up if you work on these things. But the yo-yo is like yeah, you’ll go up, but then you’ll also go down. But as long as you just keep progressing, you will eventually get up that mountain. And yeah, and see those those improvements. What does the swing feel like when it feels good?

I guess for me, like I feel like I’m on top of the water, like almost like yeah, swimming on top of the water, but also that pull through the water is being able to I almost feel like I’m grabbing the water and pulling it past myself as opposed to sometimes I feel like I’m just swinging my arms through the water. And I’m not really capturing like any load out in front or capturing that water. So being able to pull myself through the water, that that’s probably the the thing that I look for when I when I’m swimming is how can I get that feeling of being able to grab the water and pull it through. And if I get that, I usually feel pretty good. So but yeah, the bad days, it feels like it’s like a windmill just sinking through the water and not grabbing anything. So yeah. And is there any particular thing that you’re thinking about or you focus on when you’re trying to get that hold of the water? Yeah, I probably, like there’s

probably a couple of things is initially with every session, I try and do drills focusing on that entry into the water, the catch, do a lot of sculling and the dog paddle drill. They’re probably the the ones that I do every session, regardless. And they probably set me up. So

for instance, an example of a session might be I jump in the water and do 100 to 200 meter warm up before I’d even start the drills. And that 100 to 200 more, 200 meters never feels good. And then I’d be able to then going through some sculling and dog paddle drills or even single arm drills. That just gets me a better feel for the water. And then from there that the feeling within the water always progresses and gets better no matter what the session is. But yeah, I mean the setup of the catch and that pull through are probably the two biggest things. And then on top of that is since the video analysis that you gave me in that breathing position and also over rotating I try and concentrate on those things a lot as well to focus on those drill drills that you gave me and try and do some type of drill that replicates the drills that you gave me in most sessions as well. And talk to me about that breathing position. So what were you doing

and then what are you looking to do instead? Yeah, so for me every time I went to my left hand side which was my breathing side, I’d pop my head up. So my head would almost tilt up and then rotate through. And then with that rotation I would also over rotate with that catch as well. So the shoulder that was in the water would actually rotate too much. So it would almost be probably almost be 90 degrees to be totally honest.

So then from now it’s just off balance and probably pushing my head up would then no doubt push my legs down. And I’ve always had issues with feeling like my feet were dragging along the bottom of the water, bottom of the pool majority of the time. So just being able to

focus on the bottom of the pool a little bit more as opposed to up when I breathe and then also just being on that

swivel if you like and just looking out to the side has definitely helped me. And not over rotating which just felt weird. It feels like I’m always square at a lot of the times when I’m in the water but because I was over rotating so much I guess that’s the feeling that that’s going to be is because I’m trying to change a position which I thought was right and now it feels like I’m like swimming square a little bit. Yeah it’s it’s so often the case with with that one and I mean that’s such a common one is that like turning either turning the head too far and then the shoulders go with it and then the arm drops happens with with so many things that I coach and I was doing an analysis for someone in our stroke analysis coaching yesterday and he and we’re we’ve almost fixed it but what was causing him to over rotate and you know for that arm to drop was a couple of things he was first of all he thought he had to roll side to side he thought

and more rotation the better so he just thought he had to do more than what he was actually doing so do more than what he actually had to he was also trying to reach out as far as possible so I think as long as I can get the better as well so we’ve had to sort of tune that tune that back a little bit and we’ve also just had to

he’s sort of had to force himself to keep his arm out in front for longer through that reach phase before he starts moving it down and not just stopping and pausing but just just slow it down through there take your time go out be patient with it and now he’s really close to it now once he gets at this his whole stroke and timing is just going to be so much better and more efficient but it’s just yeah it’s just a matter of being willing to put up with something that feels very different than what you used to so yeah it sounds like it’s probably quite quite similar for you and most people are like that on their breathing stroke it’s if they didn’t have to breathe the headed stay down and the stroke can stay pretty good but when they turn to breathe that they either turn their head too far or the shoulders too far and that’s where they lose they could catch or whatever it might be so if you can have the breathing impact the rest of stroke

as as little as possible then that’s sort of the the goal but it just takes a little bit of I think patience with that arm extending out out the front there and then just overdoing that side of things too like it’s okay to hang out for ages out there just to start with and then you can bring it back bring it back until you’re in the right sort of timing I think it’s hard I think it’s hard to there’s like the internet is an amazing thing and YouTube especially and anyone that’s learning something new we always well me personally I’ll troll YouTube to see what’s out there from an instructional point of view and sometimes what I interpret a drill to be is I’ll rotate and you’re on your side you’re like oh yeah I’ve got to rotate and be on the side or they’ll be like reach for the end of the pool you’re like okay I’m going to reach for the end of the pool as far as I can so probably over exaggerate

like what what the intended output of a lot of videos are as well so so having having having someone that coaches is is definitely a benefit this podcast is brought to you by form goggles form empowers swimmers at every level to reach their goals whether they want to get stronger faster swim further would be more efficient get lap by lap motivation with real-time metrics and workout instructions right in your goggles and forms recently released form plans which included progressive series of workouts to help you achieve your fitness skills or triathlon goals you can follow along with the plan and your weekly swims will be automatically synced to your goggles so you’ll swim through your workouts with real-time metrics and workout instructions all in your goggles so it’s like having a coach right there with you and I’ve had to look through these training plans and I think they are excellent for people who want to train for certain triathlons or

reach certain fitness goals it will build on each week and a really good way to progress progressively build up your fitness so if you’d like to follow along with some plans to help you reach your specific swimming goals then check out form goggles at formswim.com forward slash effortless and this will give you $15 off your purchase of form goggles so formswim.com forward slash effortless to get your pair of form goggles there’s so much nuance to all of that stuff that it’s so easy to take something and then just take it take it too far and with with most things I find you want the Goldilocks approach like not too little not too much just that in between for most things so but I get it like it’s just very easy to take something and just go go with it you talked about in your email like one of the things that that helped you was posture so what do you think you’re doing before with your with your posture when you’re swimming?

I definitely wasn’t thinking about my glutes or my legs

so I just like you know if I’m strong enough in my upper body surely that’ll pull me through the water and don’t worry too much about the drag but yeah just it’s almost like engaging my belly button so it pushes through the sky and and keeping my glutes on and for sure like that’s definitely something I can continue to improve because 25 meters into a into a lap I’m not really thinking about it squeezing my butt cheeks together so that can definitely improve but also like being the IQ that you give is being proud of the chest and keeping extended through the head as well and and not being like a little like like a turtle almost so keeping long through the water has has definitely helped and staying engaged and probably the kick is is the other one on top of that as well is not kicking too much like really if I was kicking I would be like big kicks are the way to go so keeping those like in a little bucket another cue that you

give is is definitely helped yeah that’s that’s fantastic and and in terms of distance with your swimming do you feel more comfortable swimming longer distances or is there like a sort of cap at the moment that you’re couldn’t swim swim further then but we’re out in terms of their yeah longer distance like like distance at the moment is feeling pretty comfortable I wouldn’t say I’d be able to hold those speeds that I that I did in the time trials for the 1.9 and that’s that’s the goal is to try and swim me a 145 150 for 1.9 so yeah I think I can swim the distance it’s just at the moment it’s at like probably a a minute per 100 or per 50 pace so two minute hundreds and if I can continue to get that down that that’s that’s what I’m trying to aim towards yeah yeah nice and I mean that’ll that comes with time and I think if you’ve got if you’ve got sort of if you’ve got any workouts like I like to have two or three go to workouts

in the lead up to to an event where like over time you can just see that improvement and and progression and it’s it’s about being able to sort of sustain

sustain that pace over longer distances so just doing the sets that can help with it like for example that might be a set of like you might do some warm-up and then you have like 21 hundreds maybe you do it on 15 seconds rest might be 15 or 20 seconds rest and just see if you can hold the same pace for all those 20 and if you do that every two weeks in over the course of a couple of months you can just see you know how you go how you’re tracking with it so yeah having those those go to sets can certainly certainly help and I mean you looks like being really consistent with how often you’re getting in the water and you mentioned that that’s that’s helped a lot as well like you’re getting in quite a few times a week by the look of it yeah and that was probably a goal early on is to make sure that I was getting in the water four or five times a week

my approach to most things is if you’re really poor at it then doing it more often than the known is probably going to be of benefit so and especially swimming because it doesn’t really impact the legs of the biking or running so getting in the water more consistently didn’t really have a detriment to the those other two if I think it was probably beneficial for it so I found that really important is to make sure like you know before out to five a week I’ve seen the biggest improvements and last time when I was training for the try it was it was more like two to three sessions like three sessions would be a max because I was just avoiding it I was like if I could go for a run or a bike or a swim I’m going to choose the other two I’m not going to choose the swim but this time through I’ve probably flipped that and leading up to the race I probably won’t swim five times a week but I definitely try to keep it at four times a week yeah nice and

what is do you do you feel differently about your swimming now than you did last year? oh yeah I think going to the pool and knowing you’ve got something to work on and not always looking at times is probably been the biggest change in headspace for me is like just even this afternoon if I go to the pool it’s like okay just pick one or two things and just really nut down and work on those even three sets like if we’ve got for instance I don’t know six 200s it’s like in those 200s don’t be concerned about the time just be concerned about working on the things that you’ve done in the drills and that’s made swimming a lot more relaxing for me not comparing my times to what I did last week it’s more comparing or can I just stay focused on that one or two things so that’s been a huge benefit and a huge motivator because in a session you can you can feel really good about well I’ve nailed down that one or the one or two things that I was working on

so yeah the sessions always come out as a win as opposed to negative yeah it’s yeah that’s right like it’s it’s good to sort of see the time see see where you’re at but if you’ve got that longer-term approach of look if I can just train myself to hold good form over distance and you know not every session and I’m going to be breaking breaking records on my on my Garmin or anything and and that longer-term approach that it comes and especially when you are changing your stroke it can feel kind of clunky and you can have those ups and down sessions and sometimes it doesn’t feel great sometimes it feels good but over time it’s it’s going to get more consistent and it’s going to feel better more often and and I like that that approach that you take into it you know it’s what I see a lot of the swimmers that I work with who have really good successes they’ve got that that same sort of approach to their to their swimming so yeah it’s great to say

because so many triathletes like yourself it’s it’s often not a matter of I need to get fit out yeah swim fitness can and swim fitness and strength is a bit different to that on the bike and the run but for the most part that improvement will come from better technique and then being able to hold that better technique over over the course of their race so sounds like you’re you’re well on track yeah but I’ve probably made a lot of mistakes though learning into that I just probably spent a year going the other way and didn’t see any improvement so less on learn yeah gotcha and what about someone who’s listening to this who might be in a similar situation to yourself that might be training for a for a triathlon and there might be a bit frustrated with their swim what what advice would you have to to people who want to get faster with their swimming yeah I I think like the biggest benefit for me was was signing up and committing to something and making sure

that you’ve got that that structure within the week and having someone look at your stroke like that’s been a huge benefit

but but again I I’ll just keep back and keep reinforcing is just try to make small changes like don’t make it’s impossible to make huge changes to your stroke and taking off 30 seconds per 100 in a couple of weeks so I don’t think that’s feasible for for most people so just try to make small changes and small improvements and in a long-term approach and just be consistent and that’s the same with with majority of training is if you can just be consistent and consistently improve then that’s that’s a longer term approach yeah yeah that’s excellent and that’s why I wanted to do the video analysis on our for the video members like we do our once a month call where people send in their videos and I’ll give them one or two things to to focus on I want to be able to do that for for people in the the membership and not just the stroke analysis athletes that I that I coach because even just like some people send a video every three months for example and sometimes you just need

that little bit of a direction change something to focus on go and practice it could be a couple of months and then you can just kind of check in and just adjust that direction as you as you need because with a lot of people it’s just like they don’t have that in their squad and yeah I’ve coached squad it’s very hard to give that much feedback individually to athletes when you’ve got such a big group and you might be taking times and that sort of stuff so yeah that’s that’s what I’ve seen with a lot of the video members recently is is those that have sent in videos of being able to just get something that’s specific to them which is sometimes all you need to to actually make a change so yeah great to great to hear and and I appreciate being on the the podcast and sharing this because I was really pleased to see what an improvement you’d made in a recently short amount of time and it doesn’t come without getting in the water consistently it doesn’t come without

actually thinking about this stuff as you’re swimming so you’ve done the work to to get there and I’m excited to see what happens over the next six to 12 months because with with what you’re doing

yeah cheers Brandon like yeah you’re coaching and the effortless swimming especially the YouTube and also the the membership access have been brilliant for me and really good for my swimming so yeah thank you as well my pleasure and yeah thanks for being a part of it so yeah all good luck for year for triathlons in the upcoming season and yeah we’ll talk soon okay cheers mate thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to effortlesswimming.com

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My guest today is Brant Best. We’ve been working together on a product called SwimBETTER by EO, which helps swimmers swim faster. Check out this episode now!

00:22 The SwimBETTER

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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 Brent Best. Brent, welcome to the podcast. Thanks Brenton. Cheers. Good to be with you. We’ve, we’ve sort of gotten to know each other over the last couple of months. We’ve been working together on a product that those are listening right now will be available and released. It’s called the Swim Better by EO and it’s kind of like a power meter for swimming. And it basically looks at and in high detail that you’re forced throughout the different movements of the stroke. So there’s, there are these two devices you wear one on each hand and it measures the direction of your force and how much force you’re producing. And there is just, it’s well beyond anything that’s been available on the market. And what was it

that attracted you to, to the product when you first found out about it? Oh, how long have we got?

Really, really, the number one thing is that, like, we know that force is important in swimming. I mean, there’s really only two things that drive your speed and it’s force and it’s drag. And we know that force is important, but we’ve really had no way to measure force output. We’ve measured overall speed and overall velocities and ups and downs with that. And that’s very good technology, but we’ve never been able to isolate force. So we don’t really know what the hands are doing and how the hands are going. We’ve been great coaches with great eyes that think, we think we know, but we don’t really understand because we know what it looks like for somebody to keep moving, but not what’s happening with force. So it really fills in the gas for, for me, as far as it takes to guess work out and actually enables us to quantify what we’re doing in the water as far as the force production goes. So that’s the number one out of about

10. But I could, I could go through and we probably could be talking for two hours on what I’m excited about with it because I just wish I was coaching. I’m currently mentoring with swimming queens and have been up for five years, but this is exciting enough to really make me want to jump back on pool. They can see what it does. Yeah, athletes. Yeah. And you’re coming from, from an elite, working with elite athletes and probably most notably coaching James Magnus into two, two world titles, I think it was. And especially at that elite end and we were doing some filming for this, this product and we’re working with some fairly high level swimmers and we were both there looking, looking at the footage, looking at the data and going, Oh my God, these guys have so much room to improve. Still, there’s so much opportunity there for them to get better. And that’s with quite high level athletes and compared to the swimmers that

I’m usually working with, they might be around the 145 to two minute mark per hundred as adults. There’s always big opportunities there. But even at that top end, there’s so much. There is. It’s exciting to know what the data is saying because it explains what we don’t know. But it’s also really exciting because we’re dealing with it. It’s about selling the message. And if you can’t sell the message, no one’s going to buy it. If we can sell that message of what we’re trying to convey with actual data and be able to quantify it to our elite swimmers, it takes away the, the feel is the only parameter for how effective things are because people are comfortable with what feels normal rather than what feels good sometimes. So to be able to say, Hey, this is this quicker or you’re producing more force here or you’re losing force because you’re in a different position in the water, it’s massive. It’s massive. But guys at those level at the guys

swimming around the 145 to two minutes per hundred, it’s just it’s just incredible the changes that are going to be able to be seen and also to be able to compare it with swimmers that are going quicker and working out why? Because there are only a couple of real reasons why swimmers are going faster than you or your beating swimmers. And again, it comes back to force and drag. And if you if your force isn’t there, then you can’t get there. It measures the only the peak of your force, but the length of your force, which is exciting as well for the amount of time you’re on the water per stroke. A lot of people think it’s about power, but it’s actually a lot to do with the amount of time are you producing force through your stroke? We’re seeing big lumps in the middle of that for some swimmers that really if we fill in those lumps in their force through the middle of their stroke, they’re ridiculously faster and more

efficiently and probably easier too. So yes, absolutely. It’s crazy what we’re going to be learning what we’re already learning from this product. And then what we what we do with that with those those ideas. That’s a I want to dig into that a little bit because I think it was trying to remember the coach who was listening to my yeah. Anyway, it was talking about you always want to keep pressure on the water. It’s kind of like a phrase that’s stuck in the back of my mind. Always keep pressure on the water. And this is and with with the device, we can see where there is no no pressure on the water where there’s that that gap. And and that’s kind of what you’re talking about in terms of how long do you keep pressure on the water? So or how long do you keep contact with it? So for someone listening, if you think of when you enter the water and you begin reaching forwards, then you start, you catch you want to try and hold that pressure on the water

all the way through at the back. And you want to sort of lengthen lengthen that you don’t want to rush to it and slip and produce a high amount of force, but actually have it slipping through. We want to try and maximize that that contact time and away because that way, it means you’re creating the best shapes and you’ve been able to maintain that pressure rather than just looking for a huge spike and then it drops off. And one thing we can do is lengthen that out. And that’s something that I’ve heard you talk a lot about when you’ve been working together on this this device. And why is that? Why is it something that stands out to you based on your coaching experience?

For me, length is a little bit misunderstood in swimming. Generally, we talk about length and you see people reaching out too far at the front or overreaching at the front or pushing too far to the back or over rotating the hips to the back. Now, I like to think about, I mean, it’s obviously important. We don’t want to be too short on their stroke. And so a little bit of length is important, but there’s a point at which too much length is not good for you. It doesn’t help your rhythm. It doesn’t actually add to

too much of your length of stroke. And if it does, it is at the expense of your cadence or the speed of your arms. Secondly, and to that probably, I like to look at length is how far you travel through the middle of your stroke. But how far you reach out at the back or push out of the front. I was talking to a running coach the other day about the same concept with running and overstriding is one of the worst things you can do in running because it does interrupt your rhythm and it doesn’t make you an effective runner. And it seems to me that overstriding or overreaching swimming is a lot more widely accepted. I like to think of it as more like a rower where you put the aura in the water and then you, for an effective amount of time and then you pull it out. You don’t overreach at the front and you don’t end up with the oars up around your nose because, well, the handles up around your nose because that’s not an effective use of your force is a

combination between stroke rate and how much length you travel. So it’s important for understanding what length is truly about and the amount of time we are on the water effectively through the middle and how and what we do with the water is why that is so important. It’s what drives length and we look at the best race analysis of the best swimmers in the world is the ones that have the best stroke length that get their in combination with how fast their arms are going. Overreaching isn’t doing that, it’s effective because you’re efficient at a certain stroke rate or a certain speed.

Long answer or short question but that’s why I’m excited about what this measure is. Yeah, I think as well when someone is overreaching, either at the front or at the back, when you’re at that absolute extreme of your capable reach, you’re not very strong. You’re not very strong out there, like there’s that that point and for a lot of people, if I see someone overreaching and it’s evident, one of the cues, one of the things I’m getting to do is say shorten your reach by 5% and it brings you back in that comfortable range where you’re controlled, you’re more balanced and you don’t get that point where they’re overreaching and then the hips might go too far and the legs will play like it’s very noticeable once you’re looking for it. Yeah, absolutely and you see that loss of balance and again, I like to talk about other sports because that’s where we learn the best but in any sport or if I just pop down to the gym and I’m not

balanced, if I’ve got to do my squats on a on a swiss ball rather than standing on the ground, I’m off balance, I can’t produce the same amount of force and an overreach puts us off balance and that hip roll you’re talking about puts us off balance and then we just can’t produce the same amount of force, especially at the, like you say, right at the edge of our range. So the balance that we get is important to produce in the force and that also is something that we can we can measure with the device. So and measure and see when we when we go too far, I know that we’re looking at one athlete and they they overreached and we saw something that’s fairly common in freestyle where the hand goes in and faces up in the front of the stroke just a little bit but I was excited that not only did we see a delay in the force being reduced, we actually saw negative propulsion which he saw the device brought out but it caused us some drag

actually causes cost us some

cost us, yeah, cost us some drag

it wasn’t it wasn’t ideal for I mean obviously it’s not ideal but I mean I always think it was going to be a length measuring device but to be able to measure resistance as well obviously it does because it measures force but to put it in the opposite direction and say hey we’re actually putting something in the way we’re actually putting the brakes on our stroke at the front by trying to reach and get more length and more speed we’re actually costing ourselves. The other thing I found interesting with it too is because it measures the direction of the force you know if your hand comes up palms facing forwards well it measures that but it also measures as you’re going through the stroke yeah you’ll have a bit of out sweep in sweep there’ll be a bit of a curve to the hand but I see a lot of swimmers particularly at the back once they’re sort of about their belly button the hand will turn into the body and so it’s almost like

they’re just slipping out the back they’re not holding that water all the way through and the force that’s generated there it’s not a lot because you’re not obviously not there’s not a lot of generated force if you if your hand is turned you know that way and it’s slicing out the back but you see you basically see well they they lose all that propulsion and there is a little bit of force actually going if you listen to this like I guess in towards the center we want to try and keep it keep it behind us so the thing that was a little bit of a surprise I guess it wasn’t a surprise once I once actually thought about it it was okay there’s not much force off to the side there at the back but you can actually see it’s happening so it just indicates that okay this swimmer isn’t keeping the palm facing back behind them the whole way through so it’s good to be able to see that part of it as well yeah absolutely is it can then

help us identify whether we’re using a core appropriately because there’s a lot of talk through the back of our strike then we and there’s a lot of talk about using core and and connection through the middle but we can see athletes lose that and as often as I see anything we’re not looking with these devices and because we’re going to look at see when the force drops off we can actually identify on the video and slow the video down and look at what’s actually happening we see the hand slide off and a lot of that happens because again we see the balance the hip rolls too far too early and we see the hands slide off and lose pressure because we’re losing talk through the middle so it not only helps us identify but helps us get to the root cause of where we’re going wrong and we don’t need to we don’t need to find a lot of length to get a lot of improvement we look at our very very best I think Carl Chalmers takes around about

65 strikes per per hundred and if he picked up a five centimeters doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s a hell of a lot for a guy like that because five centimeters times 65 strikes going up with three point two five meters now that’s that’s a significant chunk under the world record if he swims three point two five meters faster because he’s swimming at almost exactly two meters per second and at the end of the race probably a bit slower than that too but around two meters per second

that gives you a one point I don’t know I’m not great with math 1.5 to 1.6 second advantage now five centimeters is a lot for Kyle as a hell of a lot but probably not for you the sort of people you’re talking about five centimeters is

something that’s quite comfortable to be taken off within a two month three month six month period but it will produce that much increase in speed I I see some master swimmers I think they can take 10 centimeters per stroke and you know and they take a lot more than 65 strokes per 100 meters you know so I across the board being able to measure that and actually quantify a stroke length like that when there’s a lot of stroke counting going on which is not the most effective tool I think either for measuring stroke length this is a much more effective tool yeah and one of the things you also that we’re looking at too was and we were looking at some of the footage of the swimmers that got recorded for this promotional video and you were really dialing into when the swimmers connected and when they’re not so one of the things that you’re looking for which I’ve looked at a little bit in the past but you you really open my eyes to the

importance of keeping everything connected so when you you’re into the catch position you’re applying power so someone’s listening to this it might be when the hand is kind of just out in front of the of the shoulder so kind of when you finish the catch there you’re looking to see where are their hips at that point and

and do you want to talk a bit about why it’s important for the hips to be in the right position when they’ve finished their catch they’re about to really start to apply some force certainly for a few ways but to keep it really really simple

if your if your body is twisted or you’re on your side at all you can disconnect from from the middle of your stroke and you can’t get you can’t struggle to produce force because you’re not in that good balance you’re not in that balance position where you cause able to produce force if you’re on your side while you’re trying to reduce force or you’re in that breath strike and your hips aren’t in that in a stable position where you can produce force now the very very best they can be on their side a little bit and still be in a stable position and produce force but you the average hunter and some very very good age swimmers need to be facing as they start to produce force through the middle of their stroke if their belly is facing the bottom of the pool they’re going to be able to produce more force but if you’re on your side and the more on your side you are the harder it is to stay stable if you are in that unstable position you can’t produce force

and all you’re doing is directing your body back and forth and side to side almost because you are off balance whereas if you are on your belly you’re in a pretty well balanced position and you can produce force through your stroke so for me you get through your catch and some swimmers depending on where their timing is going to be and I’m going to move back here to demonstrate a little bit but if we’re here like that you get all the swimmers are on their side there so you’ve got someone like let’s say like an Ian Thorpe who comes up who has a timing in around here before he starts to get onto his before he starts to get onto his catch gets into a really nice catch position but through when you see him really producing force he’s in somewhere around about that 45 degree to 60 degree angle at the front of the stroke and is very very flat through his belly through that point of your stroke and it’s common amongst our best swimmers

that they’re they’re flat at that position there and they produce their best force in that position but if you are off to your side and you took our on your side which I think is what you’re talking about you won’t produce good fault force until you come back and you won’t be connecting until you’re on your belly

so that’s what’s really important for me

in what you’re talking about and to be connected with your stroke and it comes back to where we talked about before with balance for me Bretton if we are on our belly we’re much more balanced than we are on our side if I want to again make it really really simple and the sooner we can get on our belly

the sooner we can produce force yeah so

I started looking at that a bit with some of the stroke analysis

swimmers that I that I work with so I’ve got a bunch of athletes they’re setting their videos underwater footage and I’ll I’ll analyze them every one two or three weeks roughly and I started looking at that this with with some of them and there was a few where they were much too far on their side usually their breathing side so they’ll finish their catch their hips are still sometimes they’re at like 60 degrees even even more sometimes and then you look at it and then their hips they’re not getting back to flat until their hand is almost at their hip it’s kind of at their belly button and when you just play it in slow motion you see well that point as they’re going through their catch they’re passing on their shoulder all the way through the arms moving but it’s not really connected up very well with the body at all so it’s just that slippage it’s that big slip slip there and if someone’s listening to this thinking okay I think I understand

what they’re talking about have a look up some slow motion underwater footage on youtube maybe of someone like in Thorpe or Cagley Deckey have a look at it slow it down and and pause it when they finish their catch have a look at where their hips are and you’ll see they’re back to flat or very close to being back to back to flat there’s a cracking video

of Cam McAvoy doing the 50 and 2016 at trials and it’s on youtube so it’s easy to find I think there’s one of Kate as well and you see this demonstrated really really effectively because the breathing complicates this but if you take the breathing answer pure stroke and when he’s the torque that he’s getting with the minimum amount of hip movement that he’s getting I think it’s when he would have gone you go 21-4

in that 50 there’s only a little dude I mean he would have weighed

75k ringing wet which he probably wasn’t even got out of the water and but he’s stroke length for the guy that size was absolutely phenomenal and Cam like Cam’s a good sprinter but probably not jumpy enough to be considered to be a real 50 guy but the length and connection that he’s getting in that video is a great demonstration for me of where you want to be well when you’re not breathing but also where you want to be when you are breathing I think that the closer we can get our breathing stroke to our non-breathing stroke the more effective we’re going to be when we’re swimming because the breath is a pause and it’s a stop and it’s a loss in balance like you’re talking about another thing that you were looking quite keenly into was there was the breath timing and when and one thing that you pointed out was that you see a lot of some is breathing too late so do you want to talk a bit about what that looks like and then what’s

what’s the optimum for most people so getting I mean back the real basics for me is we want to be we want to be on our belly early in our production of force we want to be connected to our body if we’re hanging out there too long on our side we’re not going to be connected so if you breathe late you’re on your side late and if you’re on your side late then you’re not producing force or you’re minimizing the amount of force you’re producing and something interesting about the swim better device is that what we’re seeing is that force isn’t great but we’re also seeing that there’s

a lot of drag there when you’re in that position as well so not only you’re not producing force you’re not connected you’re actually producing a little bit more drag than I’d considered was was an issue here because I really thought about it as a propulsion issue and looking at the positions they are under water it appears that there’s more drag than I’d taken into account but if you’re on your side you can’t produce force and I actually challenge everyone at home to try to actually be on your side get across to 90 degrees and see how your power feels and or get back onto your belly with your chest or your belly face on the bottom of the pool get down the front of your strike even if it isn’t a drill even if it’s something like one of my favorite drills is a long dog drill where your hands recover under the water and because they do this shoulder doesn’t get right up over the top so you’re in a really nicely balanced position

if you try the long dog drill when you’re on your side and you’re staying on your side you’re actually paddling away at nothing and you feel the difference in force so I’d encourage someone to try those drills out just because again if you don’t buy it then we can’t sell it so get in there and try it for yourself get on your side so for that reason if you breathe late and you are still breathing and you’re breathing high when you’re trying to produce force it’s very very difficult to get the length of strike that you want so I want to be I want to be taking that breath if you’re sprinting I want to be I want to be starting to move the head before we’ve entered the water so I want to be have the head started to move here and the roll starting to happen only because once you get into your extended position here you want to be able to put your head back in the water by the time your hand is in a really good forceful position if you wait too long

if your head’s still up here you’ll as you’re talking about before you’ll decrease the amount of time that you are in that power phase of your stroke where you are on your belly so I want to be back in that position nice and early because if I wait too long as you go I’m losing my 5, 10, 15 centimetres best stroke of effective power

and while I remember seeing Nathan Adrian in I don’t know if it was 2012 or 2016 one of the Olympic games and I remember he had a very very early breath I reckon he’d trained to just bring it back so quickly just to be able to get back into that into that powerful position that really stood out to me and I think I remember maybe one of the commentators talking about it or his coach talking about it do you remember you recall that? I do yeah I remember Nathan Adrian he’s a very good swimmer and a fantastic racer he was the guy that beat Maggie for 2012 and and did it because he made good changes to his stroke from even from 10 to 12 some really good effective changes on his stroke and that was one of them he breathed quicker to get back in line because and we’ve seen it with his finish he finished I think at least the last 10 without a breath we’ve seen Dressel now going out a little bit further than that without their breath because you know that

your breath costs you because at the end of your race if you are hanging out on your side then you’re going to decrease your momentum decrease your rhythm and decrease your stroke length these guys aren’t breathing at the end but when they are breathing and they do need to breathe Nathan’s very very short on his breath two videos to watch I’d watch Nathan in there and I know that with with James when he went 47-1 it’s a really good video because Nicole Stevenson is commentating it we had a bit of a a bit of a giggle to ourselves afterwards because he got to the 35-meter mark James at that race she said he hasn’t taken a breath yet and he’d take he breathes too but he breathes so low because we worked a lot on making sure that we were backing the line on that breathing strike I should actually go to the other side there because James with this side breather on that side he to get back to to minimize the amount of roll would breathe down

rather than even breathing sideways so a lot of swimmers breathe up and they end up more on their side but we didn’t want to be on that side so he actually breathed down she couldn’t see him breathing so from a commentator’s point of view I was super proud to say hey it didn’t look like he’d breathed at all and he breathed too for the whole of the race so far so between those two you get an idea that breath costs you so you either decrease the amount of times you breathe you breathe quicker get your head back in a line earlier or you breathe lower or a combination of all of them because a breath is just going to cost you every time you do one unless you work really really effectively on that breathing strike and I had a few guys Jess Ashwood was very very good at she was breathing twos James was breathing twos but because we worked 80% of our time technically on the breathing strike on the other side so what that arm was doing

how quickly I’m getting back in the water I one of the things I’ve had good success with with a number of swimmers that have been breathing late is the the cue of pull into the breath so if you think of I’m going to breathe to my left hand side when my left hand begins to to pull it’s coming underneath your shoulders or your head pull into the breath and start to turn your head there and then you can get it back fairly fairly quickly so that’s been an easy to remember one for them and that seems to stick for those people that are that are struggling with it and the other the other one that I’ve seen it

sort of lead to more with some of the swimmers around like the 140 mark give or take a few seconds either way is I talk a lot about like keeping your head on a skewer like we don’t want to turn our head a lot we don’t want to lift it up too much you’re just taking everything centered which is a good thing to do but sometimes people actually take that too far and they’ll have their head actually too deep in the water they’re too low so by the time they turn their head to breathe they’re having to turn quite far because they’re so low in the water with it so I just want to make sure that people keep the top of their head just above the surface of the water so you can turn the head you get the breath quickly and easily and then you you bring it back so some people are coming from almost like underneath the water trying to get that low breath but it’s like well you’re going to have to turn far if you’re too low with it yep

agree completely see a lot of that with age groupers because there’s a lot of talk about making sure and the phrase I don’t use a lot is keep your eyes down

it works but if you’re close off here I mean if you’re too high you switch your power off if you’re too low you switch your power off through your middle so I’m all about that that force through the middle and I agree with you on the breath but I like to talk about with the genius and I do a lot of clinics with a lot of kids we talk about wrinkles in the back of the neck and we don’t want wrinkles because we don’t want the head to be too high we also don’t want wrinkles at the front we want length here length here and length here and you’re going pretty well if you’re doing that and then you can get up into your breath because you’re in a more functional position too because you are like a skewer this isn’t a skewer and you can’t turn very effectively and you actually limit your rotation through your thorax spine if you are too close off and your head is like beside the fact that you’re absolutely right you’re going to come from a long way

under the water you actually functionally can’t rotate and I can sit there in the chair at the moment hopefully everybody could at home as well if you’re in the right position you can rotate really nicely if you’re closed off you feel that rotation go and that’s not where you want to be in the water so I’m absolutely right across the board and when we talk about we talk about it only being or being the guys that are around the masters or the adosthenes you’re talking about but it’s all the way through the top you have a look at the we’ve got some pretty good guys who you look at from the front watch and you can still see the goggles pop up out of the water from the front of the stroke so head position universally not done very very well I think and if it is an issue for you wow it just changes everything if you can get it right but I decide to say rather than let us as coaches tell you the exact right position play Goldilocks a little bit

go okay this is too high this is too low this is just right and then you use your coach’s feedback to say okay I agree with you or disagree with you there but I think you’ve got to you’ve got to find it for yourself and we’re as most effective and then use coaches if you as an athlete if you’re not in that discovery mode yourself

you are just solving our problems on what we see but we can’t feel what you feel so I’d say anybody go to your coach have a chat to them about your head position and whether it’s effective to reduce drag for propulsion and for your best breathing position

the other important part of that where a swimmer can go back and forth give yourself permission to experiment with that kind of stuff because then you actually build up that awareness around okay this is what it’s like when I’m really low with my head this is what it’s like when I’m looking straight forwards and this is what it’s like when I think I’m about halfway and I feel like I’m right and then that way as you’re going through a session you might just realize oh crap okay my head’s gone down too deep now I can I can bring it back up so building up that that awareness is much easier to do when you go back and forth between the extremes and then you find that that sweet spot in between and one of the one of the drills we do at our clinics is is essentially that with the head position it’s like okay I want you to swim 25 meters looking all the way forwards eyes are in the water but you’re looking pretty much straight

ahead and then on the way back I want you to look down then look a bit further forwards play around with it and I think sometimes it’s just feeling like you’ve got that permission to do the wrong thing because yeah it’s just like oh I don’t want to you know I don’t want to train the wrong thing well you just give yourself let yourself do that yeah you do but you do as well I mean you definitely want to train the wrong thing because well I want swimmers to be able to know what the wrong thing feels like if you don’t do it on purpose you’re not going to catch yourself out yeah so I love contrast training I think as you say a really good point it increases your awareness if you’ve got better awareness then when that neck blocks up and you get that same feeling you’ve done it before and you’ve corrected it and you know how to correct it again so awareness is absolutely everything and awareness and then being on your own path of your own

discovery is also important rather than waiting to be told because if you’re in a typical squad you’re going to have 15 to 30 people in your squad and which means you’re going to get anywhere between six and three percent of your coach’s time but if you’ve done your contrast training and you know what position feels best and you’ve chatted to them about it then it’s a collaboration of everybody and you can try your own stuff out try a strike count with your head too low try one with your head too high try being on your side get a feel for what it’s all about put your power of your in charge of your swimming that’s what I say to some of the age group kids who come to our clinics there might be a change in their technique where I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s going to be the right or the best thing for them because it might be a very subtle change or you do see some differences between elite swimmers so if I’m not sure I’ll say to them

okay if you’re ever getting timed fifties or timed hundreds from your coach say it’s like 10 fifties all at the same effort I want you to do one of these in your old position one of them in the new position go back and forth see which one is quickest see which which is most efficient and use that as your gauge of whether or not it’s the the right thing to do yep absolutely you should be able to get it by feeling I think we’ve got to give everybody who’s in the water an opportunity to feel because we’ve got some people out there that are well everyone’s going to feel it better than we feel it because we’re standing there watching as coaches we’ve got an eye but we’re not feeling like like swimmers are too often too I’ll tell us we’re going to do something and they’ll try it and you can see that they’re not quite bored in but they don’t want to bring it up let’s say bring it up with your coach tell them that you’re not feeling

what you should be feeling or it doesn’t quite feel right and I’ll give you the reason why that is there isn’t the right thing to be doing but get on the prices of it of being invested because as a coach myself anybody who’s invested in this for me who wants to find out more I’m super happy to be talking to them rather than anyone that’s plowing up and down the pool but I’m a coach more than I’m a trainer so I want to be working with my athletes so I’d say athletes out there speak to your coaches about what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to experiment with yeah and I think some of that pushback from not pushback necessarily but if you’re the if you’re the Sumayu coach you said like whatever put your head down and maybe like it doesn’t feel great and maybe that’s why you don’t stick with it and then the next session coaches put your head down have that have that chat and tell them why and be be honest about it

because whenever any of the athletes that I’ve coached have given me some pushback about something or they’ve said oh okay I’m making this change but it’s it’s slower or it doesn’t feel good then you can actually get to the root of it and you can figure out a way that actually actually works but I think sometimes because of that coach-athlete relationship sometimes it’s they’re reluctant to bring it up as the as the athlete it has to be a collaboration

and besides the fact that the coach will tell you to do something based on something they’ve seen somebody else do but between their instruction and your doing it as an athlete there’s an interpretation difference there’s body size differences you look at the differences straight between someone like a a Libby Lenton or Libby Tricket and and Kate Campbell Kate is six foot whatever she is and Libby was five foot and a half five foot five or something and she had the smallest hands in the world and and Kate’s a completely different swimmer they both swim within very very close time to each other

and they swim very very differently so you’ve got to and and if they’re if they’re that different the difference between what your coach has seen and the master swimmers in the water or junior swimmers versus senior swimmers is going to be a lot of differences so you’ve got to be able to collaborate with your coach and understand what works best for you and and why

and you as you said you’re now going around lots of different clubs running lots of different clinics and stuff for for some age groups swimmers what what are some of those things that you’ve picked up over the last couple of years in your role where if say a coach is listening to this or maybe someone who’s got kids that are that are young what are some of those core fundamentals that if you could just go click your fingers and go this is this is what all our Australian young kids are swimming like now what are a few of those things that that you’ve seen in the last few years okay so I call them non-negotiables because I don’t like to patent specifically so specifically on a swimmer they look like somebody else I want to work with with with with their strength so my non-negotiables are body position is number one if you’re in good body position you’ve got the right shape through the water you’ve cut through the water a whole lot better

and you’re reduced drag that’s my number one if you’re not reducing drag you need a whole lot more propulsion to overcome that little bit of drag so you need to be cutting through the water very very nicely in the right shape if you’re moving sideways if you’re lifting your head if you’re dropping your head too far if your feet are coming out of the water too far because you’re trying to kick too hard it’s all going to affect your ability to move through the water in a straight line and in the straight line you can move through the water the more you’re cutting through the water so it’s the reason why kids can go so comfortably down the first few to the hundred some of them almost in PB 50 time because they are smoother and smoothness is everything you’re swimming so smoothness will also give you probably a what I would call my number two which is balance if you’re in a good low drag position there’s a good chance you’ll be in

a balanced position if you’re in a nicely balanced position you’ll know because you can produce the best force so getting a good balance position wherein we talked about it in freestyle is being in a position where you are close to being on your belly or with a stable core where you can use your core and you can use your talk through the middle of your stroke

balance is absolutely number two for me and they all kind of link together because if you’ve got good balance then you’re going to be propulsive and if you’re propulsive then you’re going to be able to anchor at the front of your stroke and travel as well as you can through to the back of your stroke if you’ve got those three in line there then you’re going to be swimming with power

distance per stroke and distance per stroke is everything and on top of that I would say once you’ve got that together then you can start to add your rhythm or your cadence and that will give you stroke rate so that’s kind of the way that I look at it very simply body position first balanced position second think about your power through your stroke or your propulsion through your stroke with with controlled hands not gripping hands don’t grip too tight tension is the enemy of speed and then add your rhythm to that so you’ve got a good rhythm and a good cadence it’ll take you for a long time it’s so much more important than trying to produce speed from gripping and ripping and rushing because gripping you’ll increase your drag we increase your body position we increase your body position worse you’ll have less balance and you’ll tighten up and tension you can’t grip you can’t hold good water with tension so speed is not just about

max effort speed is about producing yeah like I’ve been talking about there’s a really good video that

I posted a video on youtube about two weeks ago it was a Caleb Dressel getting interviewed by a guy Graham Benzinger and Caleb he’s talking about he loves to watch nature animal videos and he’s talking about it when you watch a cheetah run in slow motion you see like their fingers are relaxed and moving through the air and just sees how relaxed they are at top speed and so he tries to

do that when he’s swimming so at the back of his stroke is his arms coming over through the front of his cat she’s trying to relax as much as possible and I love this this clip of him talking about it because it’s like oh it’s just so true isn’t it and one of the things actually that I found interesting with the swim better when I first came across it and did a little bit of testing with some different athletes

some of these slower athletes had a higher output of force in their stroke like you know peak force then some of the swimmers that were much faster and it was because they were just ripping so hard in the water at the front whereas the swimmers are actually faster it was a little bit more of a gradual build up and then a taper off and it’s like wow okay like and it was not insignificant with how much less that peak force was so it just yeah it goes to your goes to your point this podcast is brought to you by form goggles form empowers swimmers at every level to reach their goals whether they want to get stronger faster swim further or be more efficient get lap by lap motivation with real-time metrics and workout instructions right in your goggles and forms recently released form plans which included progressive series of workouts to help you achieve your fitness skills or triathlon goals you can follow along with the plan and your weekly swims

will be automatically synced to your goggles so you’ll swim through your workouts with real-time metrics and workout instructions all in your goggles so it’s like having a coach right there with you and I’ve had a look through these training plans and I think they are excellent for people who want to train for certain triathlons or reach certain fitness goals it will build on each week and a really good way to progress progressively build up your fitness so if you’d like to follow along with some plans to help you reach your specific swimming goals then check out form goggles at formswim.com forward slash effortless and this will give you $15 off your purchase of form goggles so formswim.com forward slash effortless to get your pair of form goggles absolutely we’ve been working with

with QAS work with that with the devices as do all these study institutes called the RecS device basically and they put a little bit of a fishing line on the back of their togs and it measures the output of their stroke the swimmer that produces the highest amount of force is around about a second and a half slower probably a 1.2 second slower over 50 meters than our best guy’s over 50 he produces the most force

it’s unbelievable and so we’ve looked at that and then we put the same we measure that force by measuring with a rope so the same sort of thing on an output device but a different device on something similar and a very similar sort of way to how you weigh your suitcase but a lot more better technology than that so put them on a rope as well and we measure the absolute force output without generation of speed and this guy produces force through the roof but when we get on to actual times he’s a fair way off so we know that if you’re producing a lot of force and this was exciting about the swim better too because maximum force doesn’t necessarily mean maximum speed by speaking with one of their biomechs from swimming australian we’re talking about this the other day but what we do know is if we are producing force and we’re not getting a lot of speed we can then diagnose your stroke as being a hydraic stroke and say there are other things in the way

other than you know the force that you’re producing and it’s great to walk on pool deck and look like you’re about to walk on the local bodybuilding competition but that doesn’t produce force and dry land strength doesn’t necessarily reduce force either just by everybody a lot of people try and walk around and look like Caleb Dressel we look at the speed of camera macabre in that 50 and you look at their dive time and their swimming speed time and their swimming speed time is very very similar despite can being so much lighter and moving through the water and James was similar similar sort of speed and his stroke rate was quite a bit less than both of those guys because they were finding the best way to move through the water rather than ripping and tearing and going for maximum force maximum force does not produce maximum speed in swimming there’s a big difference between max effort and top end

yeah the thing that I see with elite athletes in any sport and I’m a big fan of surfing I love to watch surfing and sort of study those guys you’ll see that the best service in the world are moving a lot less they’re much more efficient with their movements and those that are pretty new to it you’ll see someone who’s new to swimming

sorry new to surfing and there’s something called like poo stance where it’s like feet are apart bum sticking out and like they’ve got their arms and their arms and hands out really wide and they’re doing like lots of movements and things are swinging around you look at a good surfer they’re very controlled with their movements they’re very efficient with them and the same thing goes for swimming you look at someone like a maybe a 12 year old kid who’s been asked to swim 50 meters as fast as he can his arms are going to be thrashing there’s so much movement happening but if you can become very efficient with the movements that you’re making and you’re only making the the necessary ones then you’re going to be be swimming well and yeah it takes a lot of time and practice to be able to move that way and get towards it but I think it’s important to keep that in the back of your mind as you’re as you’re looking to improve your swimming

is it’s not that for you to get faster it’s not that you’re necessarily going to have to do more or work any harder it’s probably you’re just going to have to get more efficient and and move better through the water I’ve been really really fortunate to see some very good swims in my time

and you listen to people’s reactions on those very good swims and very rarely do you hear anyone in the crowd and plan to say gee they made that look hard

because it’s always where look at look at look at Emma McKenna on 51 she makes that look easy they do not say it looks hard and it’s not and it’s not hard hard it’s hard to do but it’s not hard by force

yeah and I’ve talked about this a bit on the podcast before but often with when you ask someone after their best race ever you know what did it feel like it’s rare that it’s like well that was really really hard work it’s actually like well that felt felt pretty comfortable more times not that’s how that felt and for me personally as well the best swim races I’ve ever had are the ones where I’ve gotten to the end and gone like oh okay that felt felt good rather than being completely gassed at the end and that’s important I think the training too because

and you’re getting your heart rate up and you want to get your heart rate up and that’s great but if you’re swimming a certain speed and your heart rate is 20 beats lower you’re not hitting the same physiology but you’re hitting the same speed

at a much easier pace which means you’ve got more gears to go to but if you’re hitting at an easier speed it means it’s also repeatable and if it’s repeatable you’re actually probably at race pace you’re practicing the way you want to swim more efficiently but if you’re bashing away at a time and your heart rate is really high and sometimes that’s the goal it’s that there’s no doubt but I want to be at the lowest heart rate again with a time rather than the highest heart rate again with the same time because it just indicates that you’re going to be able to keep going for longer and your stroke is more efficient strike you head out in the first 50 and you’re gassed you can’t come home people talk about backing speed and for the guys I haven’t heard of the second half of the race all the time but backing speed’s really a lot about how much work you do on the way out and if you’re working too hard on the way out just to say you’re going out in 28

if you’re going hard on the way out to go 28 you’re going to struggle to come home under 30 if you’re going out comfortably at 28 you’ve got a better chance of coming back with the time that you want to come back at and that’s nothing to do well not as much to do with your fitness as it is to do with the control you’ve got at the front of your stroke it’s definitely to do with fitness but for the people that we’re about to see going to um going to trials if you see somebody going out very very hard but if somebody going out comfortable I’m backing the person that’s comfortable versus the person that’s using up all their energy and that only happens because they’ve trained either to use up their energy or they’ve trained to be efficient yes that that easy speed that gets talked about all the time isn’t it like if it it just it takes some some practice and it takes I think mentally just being willing to sometimes hold back a little bit

on that first first 50 and actually I was listening to a an interview with a guy Lionel Sanders so this guy is probably the most well known Ironman triathlete in the world and he’s just he’s a real character he’s he’s very hard trainer he works very hard but he’s always been known to blow up at the end of a of a race about 20 k’s into the marathon and in this interview so he got he just got second at the the world champs and this is his best result at a at a world champs and in this interview he was just explaining what he was going through through the race and he actually managed to hold himself back and not go with the pack on the bike and just go okay no that pace is too fast so he just let himself drop back and he was willing to do this individual time trial basically for the entire race and then he just started to pick people off as he was going through the run and he managed to run over the top of people rather than than dying

and it was just that that knowing what your body’s capable of doing and not letting the ego get in the way of just trying to stay with these different by packs and so on and it was like it was just his growth in him where he’s for the last couple of years just always going way too hard it’s his growth in the athlete that’s allowed him to actually do that and get such a good result we see that a lot especially with the sprint boys they want to go out and beat their chest and get out there hard and now a very good example is Kyle Chalmers this year he got second at at Olympics last year and then he came straight out and broke the world short course record and the difference between his swimming in the first 50 from one to the other is phenomenal and he came back flying home and that I mean we want to be able to maintain first of all we want to be able to maintain a similar velocity it looks like Kyle Chalmers is speeding up it looked like Maggie and Cam

were speeding up everyone was just dying but those guys aren’t speeding up at all their velocity isn’t any faster at the end of the race but it was at the beginning it’s actually quite a bit slower than the first 25 they are just maintaining speed better than everybody else at the end so I think it’s important as a swimmer that we know our best race we can’t let anybody else around us affect us because they’re just going to make us some worse if we’re trying to keep up with them I mean psychologically there’s obviously I want to keep up with that person but if that it’s dragging you away from your best race plan I think everyone has the best way to do whether it’s two or four or six or eight or 16 laps of freestyle or any stroke there’s the optimum way for you to swim

you can’t let any distraction take you away from that now that can be parents in the grandstand that can be trying to get a qualifying time that can be looking at the person next to you and thinking they’re going to beat you but if you’ve got your best plan and you stick to it what we’ll see next week is that probably at best four out of eight people are going to get their races right 50% so if you can get your race right and you know your plan and you can stick to it and you can train towards and absolutely know it you’re going to beat people that are more talented than you who get their races wrong or who are more fit or who are technically better swimmers or whatever because you know the way you want to swim and you’re not being distracted from it so I love that example we see that all the time we see plenty of our best swim is getting beaten and plenty of our best swim is winning like we did last year at Tokyo we saw some cracking races

Arnie versus Kay Ledecky and the two-in-the-pool freestyle none of just that swimmer technically and emotionally and control-wise

just to swim better race same as Zach in that turn of breaststroke just yeah so good yeah so good so good just so much control and trust yeah as well but Vince does a very good job with him and Zach is very controlled as well and just knows the best way to swim it’s four laps to be you know to get the best time you can you know what you want to be like on the first 50 know what you want to be like on the second 50 and you’ve got to be able to stick to that and trust that those guys may have gone out too fast or more too slow or whatever but you’ve got to be able to

be aware of them because you’re always going to be aware of them but if you put your focus on them rather than focus on yourself that distraction will take away from your race take away from your energy and your focus and it’s hard enough to get it right you know we’re without the distraction let alone taking your head outside your own lane yeah that’s exactly right Brian I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this chat I’d love to get you back on in the future and no doubt we will because we’ll be doing quite a bit of work together with the swim better which I’m really excited about and for me the reason that I was interested in working with it is that we film so many people every year and we see so much footage so much analysis and for me this was just putting the numbers and the data behind what I’m seeing and opening up my eyes to any

anything I’m missing that I can’t see with my eyes and obviously there’s quite a bit that you can’t see with your eyes so that’s what sort of really excites me about the product so yeah I’m looking forward to working together over the next couple of months and years and this has been great we could go for a lot longer I think but I think we could we’re question about a million things as well that we could probably dig into and go back to if you want to but I’m with you on the swim better I’m enjoying the learning I feel like I’m a novice again because there are things in there that I just don’t know we just don’t know about swimming that I’m learning and then taking that forward to putting that on top of what I already know making me rethink some things as well so yeah I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do with it but also looking forward to chatting again next time Brent that’ll be great yeah fantastic if you listen to this and you

want to learn more about the swim better I’ll put it in the show notes I’ll put the link there it’s by EO I think it’s EOLabs.com but I’ll put that all in the show notes if you’d like to find out more about the swim better thanks again Brent appreciate it thank you Bretton loved it cheers

The post What Amateurs Can Learn From The Mistakes Of Elite Swimmers with Brant Best appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Glad to have Dan Smith back in today’s podcast episode! Dan is a former Olympic swimmer and now the founder of Worldwide Speaking. Join us as he shares his journey in helping parents and athletes all over the world.

00:29 It’s A Fantastic Video

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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 someone who people may not recognise by voice or even face, but they would 100% recognise you by stroke. Dan Smith, welcome to the podcast again. Thank you for having me. That’s a nice statement. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m referring to the video that we posted a couple of years ago, and I just checked on YouTube how many views it’s had. It’s just cracked the million views where it was used to being at a 110 pace that looks like two-minute pace. And it’s the video which I’ve got the most comments on by just people out and about, you know, people I meet at the pool. And it’s just a fantastic video. And I think the reason it’s resonated with a lot of people is it just looks so

effortless. It looks so good. Thank you for, first of all, let me post that and film it because I’ve just, I’ve got a real kick out of seeing how much of a kick everyone else has got out of it. Yeah, I think hopefully it gives people a lot of hope of like how far you can really take your swimming ability. You know, talent can always be developed, and that’s why like it’s great to have programs and things like that to learn from people who have been where you want to go. And your brand says it all effortless swimming. And I was just really thankful when we crossed paths. I was actually in need of a person to help me with video and help me improve with my stroke. And that’s what we did. I didn’t really know that it was going to turn into being able to help a lot of people on YouTube and that kind of stuff. So it’s really cool to see how, how the YouTube video is developed. And that’s just the power of the online world, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s, that’s, that’s exactly right. No, remember, you know, looking at the video and then I looked at the time that you swam that, that 100 in, it’s like, oh my God, that was so, so fast. And I thought, okay, this would be a nice headline for it. I think this will go well. And then it just started to take off and it’s been really cool to, to see that. And I’ve had you on the podcast before. And this was actually before Tokyo 2020 was postponed. This is when you were training for it. So I’d like to just quickly catch up on, I guess what happened when it did get postponed and yeah, what happened from there? Yeah, so as, as your viewers know, and as a lot of people know, like a lot of, a lot goes into a high performance career. And for me, like I was coming to the elder or the older ages of my career, like I’m now 30. So at that time I was 28. And for me, like I was probably running on an oily rag with regards to my motivation

and we’re going through massive technical trainers, which is super straining on your mind and your, your focus. And so for me, leading into the Olympic trials, like I was swimming pretty well in training. I think as you get older, instead of being able to do maybe eight to nine world class sessions a week, I was probably getting about three. So that was quite hard mentally as well. So when I led into the trials, like I was about two months out and I was training in a bit smaller pool with Paul Jones, who that’s what you met as well, Brenton. We, like one of my friends at a time mentioned, he said to me, he said, oh, like he couldn’t travel overseas. And I was like, what do you mean? I don’t want the news. I wasn’t really on social media much. I was pretty dedicated to my career. And I was like, what do you mean? You can’t travel overseas. He’s like, oh, have you heard of COVID? And I was like, no, like, and he started explaining to me what it is.

And then within three days later, the NBA was canceled. The pools were shut. Schools were shut. So for me, like that part of my, I was literally doing 1650s max on 130, getting race pace ready two days before we were exited from the pool. So for me, like I was gearing, I was very fit swimming quite well, like I said, about three world class sessions a week. And then for me, when that was over, I was holding on by a thread with the hope to make the next Olympic game. So when COVID hit and then I was out of the pool, I just realized I don’t probably have the mental strength and the drive anymore to do another reset and another repreparation. So for me, I sat down with my family, my friends, and I made the decision to give the sport away. And I’ll actually tell you a funny story. There was this article that went out and it was like the winners of COVID and the losers of COVID. And I was in the loser’s side. So it was pretty brutal, but that’s that was a rowdy.

And then it was good to see a lot of other people really advanced forward from some rest and stuff in sport. And as in that was like an article that got published and it had an article that got published. Yeah, it was it wasn’t good for a tired athlete at that time. But that’s that’s just the reality of it. And looking back now, you know, year and a half from, I guess, when you had to make that decision, are you glad you made that decision? Oh, I think it’s human nature to hold on for too long. I think like you always want to do more on it. It would always be nice to finish your career or what you do on a high. But for me, the reality of that wasn’t my reality for sport. So for me, it was a really good decision to be able to give it away. And I think you’re always going to live with the the could of should ofs or would ofs in your in your mind. But I think for me, like there wasn’t a strong enough reason

to go back to sport, to high performance sport. And for me, it was a little bit bittersweet for a while. But now being two years, it’s been over two years now, the crazy thing since I’ve been in the water. You know, it’s my life’s changing a lot and my life is settling a lot. And I’m starting to be a lot more happy in my own skin away from sport. And yeah, the project or the business that you have just recently started is worldwide speaking. And I saw him look at some of the stuff that you’re you’re doing now. And it’s a lot around education for parents and athletes and making sure that they’re doing the right things on their journey to hopefully become elite, elite level swimmers or elite level competitors in different different sports. And I think you’re probably one of the people who is best first in that with with your history growing up as a as a swimmer. And is that how did all of this come about?

Like what what was the motivation or the drive to do something in the area? Yeah, thanks for those of you like who don’t know. But for me growing up, like I when I was 13 years old, like I was literally destined to be the next greatest swimmer coming through cells over 17 years ago. I broke in Thorps Australia into an a meter freestyle record. I won six gold to silver. I was training with Grand Hackett. So for me, I knew what it took like training with people like that. I knew what it took to be the fastest man in the world. And that was my dream at 14, I won eight gold to silver. But what I didn’t realize is like my family and I and even the people around me at that time, like we went through sport aimlessly. We didn’t have a proven sporting strategy that actually helps athletes and families. We stand the pressure of sport. And so for me, when I got a little bit older, that’s when my my strategy or the life that I was living, the strategy that we were pursuing failed me.

And I developed, we see it all over the news, athletes falling from the highs of sport. And for me, like only not even one percent of people make it into the elite. So there’s these 99 percent range that are trying to bridge the gap between where they are and into the elite. And for me, I didn’t realize that like there was so much more to my life than swimming. Everything was based around my whole identity and purpose was based around swimming. And so for me, I didn’t know who I was without it. And even if you look at the mental health stats back to what I was saying before, like one in three athletes battle a mental health condition. So that’s drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorder, shaming, burnout, anger issues, never feeling good enough. And so for me, when I retired, I thought, well, what am I going to do with my life now? And for me, I was able to put my mind together with now my wife. I’ve been married in the last year,

which is an exciting part. And we’re able to put our minds together and work out, well, what can what is something I can do? And so I’ve got 20 years experience in high performance sport. And so I thought about it, like, what are all the lessons? Everything I’ve learned. And so we put together a program for parents and up and coming athletes that realistically helps parents and athletes not unintentionally ruin their careers. And for me, that’s what we’ve been doing. That’s who we’ve been helping parents with. And we’ve been seeing some really amazing results with our program. What are some of those things that you do see on a fairly regular basis that that are harming the relationship or the potential of the athlete? I think like parents can put a lot of pressure unintentionally on the athlete. And I think the problem with that is like a most common thing we see without with parents is like, parents don’t have enough

time to add in another program. Like there’s so much to a parent’s life. You’ve got the training regime, the extra curriculum at school, the everything that goes into a sporting career. So to add something else like what we are into it. But what they don’t realize is it’s the sporting strategy that they are using that actually frees up their time. And so a lot of parents are going through the sporting career like unintentionally, not having a strong proven sporting strategy that we as athletes have used. And so I think parents are getting caught up in the sporting world and not having a really strong proven strategy that we provide. This podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Form Goggles. Form combines the world’s smartest goggles, real time metrics and guided workouts to make swimming fun. It’s the game changing membership that’s redefining swimming. Form Smart Swim Goggles feature a transparent display

that shows your time, distance and pace as you swim. And with the monthly or annual memberships, you get a huge library of guided workouts that give you workout instructions and tips as you swim for an incredible workout. The Form Goggles are very much like what a garment does, but it’s right in your goggles. So that display of time, pace and distance is something that I really love. So for the majority of the workouts that I do, I’ll wear my Form Goggles because that way I can hit the exact speed and pace that I want to hit. So every time I do a turn, it’ll tell me what my speed was for that turn and it will tell me my cumulative time. So if you’ve ever got any sets that we need to hit a certain pace or we need to progressively get quicker, then I know exactly whether I’m on track or falling behind. So that’s one of the main reasons that I love the Form Goggles and use them nearly every swim that I do. I have a lot of clients as well that use these in the open water

to tell them what their pace is, because it can be a really hard thing to gauge when you go open water, but the Form Swim Goggles will tell you what your pace is when you’re swimming open water, which is a really beneficial thing to do, especially if you find it difficult to not go out too fast or to sustain the same speed across a 1K or 2K swim. The other thing I really like about the Form Goggles is that the Form Swim app, it breaks down everything about your session. So for a lot of sessions, I’ll look back and see what was my stroke rate, what was my stroke count for certain parts of the main set. And with that feedback, you can see your progression over time. So as you get fitter, as your technique improves, you can see those things getting better. So I really like to have a detailed analysis of each swim that I’m doing, especially as we can see those improvements. And when you purchase your Form Swim Goggles,

you can save 15 US dollars off the purchase price by using our coupon code Effortless on checkout or go to formswim.com forward slash effortless. That’s formswim.com forward slash effortless. All right, back to the podcast. And what do you mean by by strategy is in like how time management strategy or is it like communication strategy? What sort of things are you talking about? Yeah, so we have like our own Olympic rules and stuff that parents can live by. So on a day to day basis, we also have like how a parent can actually avoid the most common sporting mistakes. We’ve got we’ve got over 50 plus training videos inside of our program that literally cover everything like how we as Olympians have found the best coach that supports the athlete and sets them up to be a happy athlete and a thriving athlete. And we’ve got all that we’ve got over 50 plus training videos. We’ve got over three courses for the parent and also the athlete.

And you can go through that together. But on the other side of that, like it’s not just me involved. Like we’ve got Taylor McEwan, Kaylee McEwan. We’ve got Brendan Smith and then we’ve got other national athletes. And we also have our nutritionist and she really helps parents as well get on top of the nutrition side of sport as well.

Yeah, fantastic. I saw that I saw Kaylee had a couple of videos in there. And those are listening. If you are from overseas, you may not know those swimmers, but they’re some of Australia’s best best Olympic swimmers at the moment.

And what sort of age group you’re sort of looking to to work with? Yeah, so we are actually currently dealing with a multi dimension of sport. So we’ve got Taekwondo with us at the moment. We’ve got swimming. We’ve got cycling and the age groups from around 10, starting at around 10. And then also the age group of about 18 as well. Like that’s one of our older athletes at the moment who’s trying to break into elite cycling. So we the purpose of the program is it’s multi dimensional. And we actually help the parent and the athlete build their sporting strategy that’s tailored to them. We’ve got exclusive access to a private Facebook group. So that means at any point in a parent’s career, if they have any questions, any problems or anything that they have issues with, we as Olympians are there to help and support them through every like every day or every time they need help throughout their life. All their sporting career.

We also run live Q&A calls. And it’s been really amazing to be on the other side. We just have one with Taylor McEwen and like a bunch of athletes and families and we were able to help them through so many different areas of sport. And it’s really powerful. And the results that we’re seeing are honestly insane. And it’s something that’s given me a lot of passion and purpose outside of sport. I know when I started coaching the first couple of years, it’s like started to start to figure out a lot of things because you get some very common questions. You get your head around some of those issues that people are dealing with and some strategies on how people can resolve them and fix them. Is there a couple of those things that come to mind just based on your work in the last couple of months where you feel like, OK, I sort of knew this going into it, but actually now I’m interacting with parents and athletes

and I’m starting to get a really good sense of what those things are. Yeah, so we just had this girl recently who was from Ireland and she was a swimmer and she actually just was battling with COVID and trying to get better after COVID and she kept getting sick and kept getting like really battling with sickness. And she came to us within like, honestly, like five, ten minutes on the Q&A call. She came to us with this problem and we said, oh, like we instantly broke it down. Like, what is what’s your training program like at the moment? And she started telling me some of the stuff that her coach was doing. And unfortunately, her coach was more coaching her out of where you’re not instead of where you’re not now versus how do we build you into a stronger athlete again from being sick? And she had a reoccurring sickness, so she couldn’t put in the work, couldn’t put in the intensity. And unfortunately, her happiness was really down in sport.

And she she used to love swimming. And within one call with her, we were able to help get a strategy in place that really projected her back into sport. She’s now been in the sport for over a month now, back into swimming. She’s now not sick and she’s able to build her intensity and also her volume back in a really healthy matter. And it’s honestly amazing like to see how happy she now is just from that one call. And for us, like, we were able to help her instantly on one of our Q&A calls. Yeah, that’s that’s really cool. It must be nice to just, you know, as you’re starting, starting out like getting those wins on the board and being able to help those help those swimmers or athletes of any sport. And if you what’s the difference between when you’re swimming, you’re trying to make the Olympic team. It’s it can feel quite selfish, I would imagine. And then this is obviously quite a different, different approach.

So how’s that how’s that comparison for you? Oh, I think it’s not so much a different approach. I think like the thing for us is like, we don’t want to see athletes for like just get temporary results. And like, if you look at age group sport in general, like there’s a lot of young athletes that come through and they don’t break into that next level. And for me, I was one of them. And so I know it all too well. So like we’re really helping parents get on top of their strategy to make sure they got every aspect of sport. And they’re also realizing that like the investment and the development the parent puts towards the athlete directly translates their lifelong happiness and their future career. Like you can take the lessons from sport and it will set you up for the rest of your life. And this is the this is the problem. Like we we see time and time again athletes falling young up and coming athletes not knowing what to do, not knowing the exact pathway to take.

And it’s honestly so powerful. Like if you want to be you’re going to be the same person like Jim Rohn says it. You’re going to be the same as the five people close to you. Like what would your career look like if you had five of like elite experts in your family’s corner? Like what could your career possibly look like? And and that’s honestly like that blows my mind. If I think if I would have had that at a young age, like I would love to like I would like to have seen if it would have helped me, boy, a lot of wasted time, pain and energy that I put towards my own career.

When my dad was my coach growing up and he was a he was a really good coach. And part of that was it was more about developing the as people not necessarily as as a swimmer and got some great results with with some going on to make Olympic teams and so on. But it was more about the the people skills that people developed and just their their manners and what they turned into as as adults. That I think coming at being a parent to me, I’d be much I’d put so much more on that that I want my kids to be good people than them making an Olympic team. It’s like that to me as a parent, that would be much more important or that would be the first thing that I’d want to have have in place rather than them achieve great success. But you know, but turn out to be terrible people. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think parents parents want their kids to one, succeed and to be happy. And I think like for me, I was had really high levels of success,

but I really struggled with my happiness. And I think for me, like in especially in the last five years to come from drug addiction to like from drug addiction with from sport to then getting back on track and getting to Olympics, like parents can and people listening can take two things from my story. One is like no one’s exempt from issues like just because I had sport like I was pursuing sport didn’t mean that I wasn’t exempt from that. And so one I was able to overcome. But then the other side is like if I can come from the street and drug addiction to the Olympics and like how much big of a possibility is that open for your up and coming athletes and families to get on top of the exact sporting strategy we used, the exact expert advice like it would honestly blow my mind to start seeing families really break into the elite and having a way more holistic, well rounded view. It’s honestly insane. And are you going forward?

Do you you’ve got the the online side of it? Are you looking to go out and do talks in person to to clubs or groups? Like what’s the what’s the plan going forwards? Yeah, so we we do talks and that for clubs and businesses and that kind of stuff. So at the moment, like we we’re just we’re talking a lot. But we have some great clients that we’re working with. So we’re quite busy and we do have limited spots available for our course. So I guess, like, if that that leads me to our last thing, like if anyone’s interested in in our course, like you can literally just DM our our Instagram page. And we as Olympians will personally get back to. And the page is worldwide speaking. That’s that’s what our page is called. Yeah, cool. We’ll we’ll put that in our show notes and take it on Instagram when we post some stuff for this podcast. So yeah, that’s what are you most excited about looking looking ahead with the business and, you know, a couple years down the track?

Sort of where do you where do you see it? Oh, I think, like, we just had we just had another testimony of a lady come into our our program, who unfortunately was micro managing their kid and it came at a detriment. Like the kid was unmotivated, lost their happiness for the sport. The there was constant tension in the family and she came into our program and went through one of our training videos, which literally helps parents get on top of that. And unfortunately, parents do that unintentionally as well. And she was able to get on top of that. And in our program, like our main program is called the ultimate parent manager. That’s our parent program that we have. And that’s our parent course. And she was able to get on top with our strategy that we use to get on top of that and how to diagnose it. And now her athlete is more motivated than ever. They they’ve been going to training. She’s been going to training more and and and personally, like

to hear the mum tell me that she’s no longer like watching her her daughter and being critical of her is honestly insane. Like just that one thing is just makes it to me so much more passion and like hearing her daughter on the Q&A course, how happy she is and how well she’s going in training. And the mum doesn’t talk to her about swimming as much. So it’s honestly like it’s really powerful. Some of the results we’re seeing. And then it can make such a difference. Like and I say it from the parent’s point of view, too. Like she probably well, she’s probably just one of the best for a kid. And she didn’t have another strategy to to help her to try and push her in the right direction. So sometimes it just it takes a strategy or knowing the right thing to to do. Like when I was a kid, we would never really talk about swimming. We’d never talk about results at the kitchen table. It was like it was left at the pool and that was it.

And that’s why I think I still love swimming today. It’s like I was never pushed into it. I was never never forced at all. And it was never I was never chastised for a bad swim or anything like that. It was just like, OK, that’s what it is bad luck right on to the next one. And I think with her just really good. I think it was like a Jordan Peterson video. And it was talking about the little things that you do day to day actually the most the most important. So, for example, if your kids aren’t eating their dinner and you’re fighting them for two hours every night, trying to get them to eat their dinner or eat their vegetables. Good chance you’re probably going to be quite unhappy for those couple of hours. The kids won’t be enjoying it. So if you if you can have a different strategy where you can, you know, where they they’ll eat it or it’s a compromise of some sort. You know, if that’s a daily thing that’s happening,

well, that is that’s really going to make a big difference. So it is those like those small things, those small habits or small routines that that really do start to to add up.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think like the first say, you know, teenage years and and junior years of anyone’s life is the most important. And so like if you if you want to get good at something, you want to leverage the people who have been where you want to go. And that’s like why people, you know, get into your swimming, your swimming course and stuff. Because like having people involved, one, it makes it effortless. Exactly what you’re having the expert experts involved makes it effortless. It makes it like you can avoid what they’ve done. And two, you can fast track your own success and and well-being in life long. And so really, that’s why we’ve gone into the course creation world and also public speaking as well. And both things we’ve been having a lot of breakthrough with with people, we’ve been able to help a lot of people so far. And to me, like swimming has now become a vehicle to set me up

to be able to do all of this stuff and be able to help so many people. And like, although my career had so many highs and so many lows and probably more lows and highs, it’s really been great to be able to use those lower times to be able to help others and help people not go through what I did and what a lot of a lot of other athletes do. So it’s really been a great time, a great time in my life. Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s really exciting, too. I was really looking forward to having you on the podcast to talk about this because to see what you’ve gone through over the last 30, 30 years and then making the decision to say, OK, well, actually, I haven’t got the motivation there to continue on and try and make the Olympic team. But then to turn it around and do what you’re doing, it’s really exciting. So I wish you all the best going forwards and I think this stuff is so so important for any parent or for any athlete.

You know, if you’re an athlete listening to this and you’re like, you know, I wish I wish Mum and Dad might, you know, maybe talks me a little bit differently about my sport and I’d enjoy it more. Well, maybe you could steer them towards towards the stuff that you’re doing. So then I really appreciate you being on the podcast and we’ll put all those links in the show notes. And yeah, it’s been great catching up. Thank you. We’ll have to maybe try and shoot another freestyle video with two years off and see how it goes. See if I can hit the two year aftermark, one, one, one, 10 pace, 100 effortless swimming for you. Look, I’ll drag I’ll drag you to the pool if I have to to get another one. It might be the easiest one, one 15 pace you’ve ever seen. One 15 pace. Yeah. But I’m sure I think I think when you retire, you always feel better than what what the clock says. I think that’s why I haven’t jumped back in the pool too much

because I still watch the clock too much. Yeah, well, you find it’s normally when you take time off that first hundred actually feels like, wow, this is amazing. And then as soon as that first hundred is done, it drops away. So save it up for this for this recording and you might be all right. Yeah, maybe the next time we’ll have to do another another freestyle recording for the viewers. Yeah, yeah, I’ll hold you to it. Don’t worry. Thanks, mate. It’s been great to have you on. Thank you. Thanks for having us. 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 The Easiest 1:10/100m Ever with Dan Smith appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s episode, I wanted to get Scott Harpham from New Zealand to share his swimming improvements over the last couple of years. We talked about going back to fundamentals, consistency, and more.

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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 Scott Harpham over from New Zealand. Welcome, Scott. Thanks very much for having me, Brenton. It’s awesome. Awesome to be here. You emailed me recently and told me about the improvement that you’ve made over the last couple of years with your swimming. So I wanted to get you on to talk about that because I think there’s a lot takeaways for anyone listening to this podcast who might be wanting to improve their own swimming, which I’m sure they are if they’re listening to the podcast. So I thought it’d be good to get you on to talk about your story and what you’ve done over the last two years to become a pretty handy swimmer by the by the look of things. So you send your email that you started swimming around about two years ago. How did that all come about for you? Yeah, cool. So I made probably like a lot of people made one of those, I won’t say a midlife crisis, but

wanted to set myself a bit of a challenge and decided to sign up for an Ironman. I’d always wanted to do an Ironman at some point in my life and thought, Jesus, I might as well dive in and have a crack. So I signed up for the New Zealand Ironman in March 2021. And I did that in January 2020. And so went to start swimming and then COVID suddenly hit and New Zealand went into lockdown. So that put the swimming on the back burner. And once we finally got out of that and pool started opening up, I thought, Jesus, I’ve only got eight months to go and, you know, swimming a couple of lengths, I’ll start and get really puffed. So I had to start putting a bit of work in and it was probably about June. I think June 2020 was when I was able to basically get back into the pool for more than once a week, essentially. And you were around the two minute mark per 100 when you first started swimming. Did you swim as a kid or

as a teenager? Did you have any background in it? No, no, not at all. So I’m a country boy in New Zealand. So I mean, we, we learned how to swim to survive basically. So we can go and play in a creek or play in the neighbor’s pool. And then the odd little bits and pieces around generic school swimming lessons. So local country school had a very small short pool. And you learn how to breathe and blow bubbles and swim one length of that. The closest I got to anything decent in terms of swimming was probably eight. I think there was an eight week or nine week swim squad I joined up with, probably when I was 10 years old. And that was twice, twice a week. Otherwise, other than that, nothing good. I’ve been a been a rugby player in my life up until the last couple of years. So it was lifting lakes and running, not not swimming. And when you first got into it two years ago, and then you started training more and more, what was the

progression like for you in terms of your pace and how far you could swim without getting tired, just from that consistency of swimming regularly? Yeah, so that was a took that sort of first month was, was fairly slow and hard going just because you start

while I certainly found you just freak out in the water as soon as you start getting tired, you get even more sloppy than you already are. And you just find it hard and uncomfortable. But I made the call to sort of connect with a local swim coach here and try and get at least a cup you know, two sessions in and around work a week where he was sort of looking over my shoulder. And just that regularity meant you started I started to feel a little bit more comfortable in the water. I wouldn’t say technique or anything like that improved, but just comfort and general fitness got me down to probably around the sort of 145 150 mark reasonably quickly over that first sort of two or three months. And then the progression started getting sort of slower and slower after after that. But the comfort in the water started to improve. And it was a case of you could, you know, I could, I could go in and was happy enough

to just plot away for a K nonstop type thing. And anything more than that was tough. Yeah, gotcha. And was there any anything in particular that you were thinking about with your technique? Or was it just you’re just working off that muscle memory that you got swimming as a kid? Was there was there anything technically that you had sort of looked at on on YouTube or from the coaches? Or was it all just getting there and swim? I was pretty well getting there and swims at that time. I was still obviously still building what the rest of my training for the Ironman. And I was sort of putting the complete trust in the coaches hands for the swimming and just saying, okay, we’ll just get in the pool and whatever he prescribed us as what I’ll do. There was small elements of technique, but I guess I wasn’t at the stage of being comfortable enough in the water to actually be able to think about it and try and figure out what I was doing with my hands or feet

or it was more a case of get to the other length without swallowing a whole lot of water and and repeat, basically. So it probably wasn’t until

good five or six months, probably coming up to that sort of Christmas period where I actually started to feel confident enough to go right. There is a few little technique things that I can start to think of. And then I started looking for YouTube videos and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, I think it’s good because you can’t steer a parked car. So if you weren’t swimming at all, and you, you know, you’re trying to work on your technique, or maybe you’re not comfortable enough, you haven’t got enough sort of swim fitness to be able to, you know, do enough laps to be able to sort of think about it. So yes, technique can certainly help in the beginning, but yeah, it’s good to just get that consistency and get that swim fitness up. Because as you’re doing a couple sessions a week, then you can really start to begin to think about technique. How’d you first come across effortless swimming? I was, what was it? I’d probably, I’d got to about

November. So what are we, where that’s five, five months worth of swimming with a coach. And then

I took three months off work, basically that particular point to sort of start to lead into the Ironman. And so at that point in time, I was like, okay, I’m not doing these five o’clock starts to go and swim with 13 and 14 year old kids at a kick in my ass all the time. I’ll, I’ll be able to do that, you know, later in the day

and do some things that I want to do. And so it was about then that I was like, okay, I’m starting to feel fit enough, comfortable enough in the water. And I feel like the biggest bang for my, for my buck at the time of, you know, three swims a week, was to start incorporating a little bit of technique work in. So I literally went to YouTube and started looking at, I went straight to the elite level swimmers. And that’s great to know what, you know, perfect looks like, but then trying to replicate that was near on impossible. And I had no idea of drills or anything like that. So started looking around and, and there was plenty of effortless swimming videos and little snippets that keep popping up. And the way you’ve, I guess, constructed the whole effortless swimming setup and those little videos was just awesome to be able to go, okay, here’s something worth your catch, you know, one, one or two little drills, your YMCA drill, or even

things as simple as even sort of blown bubbles properly or being able to breathe into your diaphragm or thinking about reaching for the wall to get your sort of line and length. All of that sort of stuff was, was brilliant. So once I found it, started to put it into practice, I was hooked, basically. What were some of those things that, yeah, started with initially in terms of changing your, your stroke? What did you, what was one of the first things you implemented and you felt, okay, that made a difference? I, and hindsight’s awesome. I should have started with the, and once I actually joined the membership, you’ve got that eight week faster freestyle, which is, which is perfect. But I went straight to all the stuff around the catch. So a couple of the drills were, I think the very first one I started to do was just your doggy paddle drill or the YMCA drill or, I think, do you call it as a kick catch where you

just have one arm in that sort of catch position? Yeah, catch kick drill where you just basically kick you on your side with your arm in a catch position. That’s right. Yep. Yeah. So it was, it was pretty all on around the catch because part of what I continued to hear you say was, you know, the, the most proportional, the main phase of the, the swim is that, that catch through, through your pool phase. So if you can get that sort of sorted, then away you go. So I spent a lot of time leading into the Ironman, focusing purely on, on that without thinking too much about it. And then I’ve progressed since then, obviously, that was more than a year ago. Yeah. Yeah, nice. And, and since then, what’s your swimming feel like now compared to six or 12 months ago? Oh, it is, it’s talking to you in terms of difference. I think the, how relaxed I feel in the water, how buoyant I feel, how a lot more sort of streamlined and

just overall confidence really. And then that as you swim, as my swim fitness has just continued to build,

that just breeds more and more confidence, right? And then you can relax more and more because you’re not having to fight the whole time. I wish I’d got enough footage from right when I start or any footage from when I first started to, to now, just to see the difference. It’s, it’s, it’s huge, right? I mean, starting off at two minutes per 100 and getting down to being able to do a fairly decent 100 max or a decent 400 time now is, I mean, that sort of shows that the confidence and the ability to actually swim is progressing quite well. Yeah. Well, I mean, you said in your email that you were 540 for your 400 in January, down to 520 now. This is 400 meters. And your best 100 push time is, is a 110. So that’s, that’s quick. That’s really quick, especially without much of a swimming background at all. So obviously doing, doing something right there, if you’re, if you’re swimming those times, I think most people would be pretty, be pretty

happy to have, have those times. What, with that eight week course, was there, what did you take away from the, the course that you’ve implemented into your swimming, any sort of philosophies or anything, any cues that have stuck with you going forward? This podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Form Goggles. Form combines the world’s smartest goggles, real-time metrics and guided workouts to make swimming fun. It’s the game-changing membership that’s redefining swimming. Form Smart Swim Goggles feature a transparent display that shows your time, distance and pace as you swim. And with the monthly or annual memberships, you get a huge library of guided workouts that give you workout instructions and tips as you swim for an incredible workout. The Form Goggles are very much like what a Garmin does, but it’s right in your goggles. So that display of time, pace and distance is something that I really love. So for the majority of the workouts

that I do, I’ll wear my Form Goggles because that way I can hit the exact speed and pace that I want to hit. So every time I do a turn it’ll tell me what my speed was for that turn and it’ll tell me my cumulative time. So if you’ve ever got any sets that we need to hit a certain pace or we need to progressively get quicker then I know exactly whether I’m on track or falling behind. So that’s one of the main reasons that I love the Form Goggles and use them nearly every swim that I do. I have a lot of clients as well that use these in the open water to tell them what their pace is because it can be a really hard thing to gauge when you go open water but the Form Swim Goggles will tell you what your pace is when you’re swimming open water which is a really beneficial thing to do, especially if you find it difficult to not go out too fast or to sustain the same speed across a 1k or 2k swim. The other thing I really like about the Form Goggles is

that the Form Swim app it breaks down everything about your session. So for a lot of sessions I’ll look back and see what was my stroke rate, what was my stroke count for certain parts of the main set and with that feedback you can see your progression over time. So as you get fitter, as your technique improves you can see those things getting better. So I really like to have a detailed analysis of each swim that I’m doing especially as we can see those improvements. And when you purchase your Form Swim Goggles you can save 15 US dollars off the purchase price by using our coupon code Effortless on checkout or go to formswim.com forward slash effortless that’s formswim.com forward slash effortless. Alright back to the podcast Yeah the a couple and it’s a combination of the course and something that my my old swim coach kept drilling into me and I’ve heard you mentioned it plenty of times but that constant reinforcement to

to relax is a big one for me because I find the more I relax the the better I float the better my position is and the more I actually stop thinking too much. So I guess that’s sort of relaxation and there’s a time and place to focus on the technical aspect of your swim but then there’s a time and place just to forget about it and just do the work and let your body fall into its natural sort of cadence or stroke rate or rhythm and trust the process that any of the technique work that you do is just quietly in the background reinforcing the right motor pattern and that when you then just go and swim over time those start to quietly bed in and that’s what gets you faster over time like there’s no I’m not a massive I’m not a believer at all in any sort of overnight success you know it’s I like the saying you know an overnight success 30 years in the making type type thing it’s just so yeah relaxation was the big one and then there’s a time and place

the technique and you can you focus in on that and then there’s a time and place just to forget about it and then it’s just about swimming it’s just about getting miles under the belt yeah that’s a great approach the with what I talk about is this so it’s a lot of technical stuff and there is so many different things to think about in swimming so it’s very easy to fall into that trap of overthinking or being too caught up in your head for an entire session that’s why I think it’s good just in a warm-up to have some technical focus and then keep it in the back of your mind when you’re going about the main set but as you said settle into that that rhythm and for me with when I’m training well if I’m having a really good session it’s usually in in the in the back of my mind yeah there’s some it might be thinking about my my catch or my timing but it’s more that I’m tuned into this rhythm of my kick and my hand entry and how that sounds

and how that that feels across my arms and then with the the rotation so it’s swimming is very much a feeling activity a feeling sport rather than a than a rather than intellectual one so it should be at least so if you can just let things go and then tune into it you will you’ll be able to relax a lot more with it rather than if you are thinking a lot about it yeah I agree I agree totally I think the one thing that I’m and it’s either a triathlete thing or it’s an athlete thing in general anyone trying to better themselves you I think we get too tied into to metrics so constantly looking at the clock constantly looking at how fast you’re going and I know if I’ve done a really good prep set with a bit of technique and a few drills that that are put in from the effortless swimming program and then I’ve done those I focused in as soon as I start to worry about how fast I’m actually swimming my swimming distance to custom because

I’m worried about effort rather than just relaxing and letting it flow it’s as and you just mentioned it it’s those sessions where you’re almost completely zoned out and you just you just quietly moving through the motion they’re the best swims and and you’re spot on around swimming is absolutely a feeling and more effort does not equal more speed it often is is the complete reverse and that that’s a big part of what I call the business effortless swimming is yes you have to apply effort obviously but when you’re swimming well it feels effortless you feel relaxed and many many of the best races when I’ve asked elite swimmers or professional triathletes what was your best race how did it feel most of the time it felt like it’s pretty easy you know so if you can if you can achieve that it’s likely you’re going to have a have a good race and I found a similar thing when I ever tried to swim with a swim watch a Garmin I’d be in the back

of my mind I’m thinking about oh man what’s my time what’s my what’s my pace here even if I could see it on the stop clock on the wall when I’m when I’m turning I’d still be worried about what pace I’m doing so I didn’t like it so that’s why I’ll never really swim with a watch I don’t mind the form goggles for it though because I can see it on my turns and I can just sort of see what was my 50 split okay that’s where I’m at I can just so I find it a little bit different with that because I I can just tell whether I’m on on track or not and I don’t feel like I’m racing against right yeah racing against the clock in a way so I do I really like that about the form goggles which is why yeah I’d use those over a over a swim watch that’s um yeah yeah it’s um yeah you’re exactly right it’s uh if we can just tune tune many of the things out and just enjoy that feeling of being in the water and being present there for me that’s when I have my my best

swings and and I enjoy it the most is as well yeah yeah that that enjoyment factor is is massive when you’re spot on there when when you can feel the water and you know you’re swimming well I mean every now and then glance at the clock and it’ll tell you that you’re swimming well just because you you’re feeling fantastic and that’s quite a motivating thing and the time just flies I mean you can peel off four or five k’s and it’s and you’re done but the the flip side is true too if you start worrying about things worrying about your watch worrying about the clock that four or five k’s will feel like forever and you’ll just you’ll swim poor and you just don’t get don’t get it out of the session but by all means you’re gonna have bad sessions and you’re gonna have phenomenal sessions and most of them are gonna fall somewhere in between and I think it’s important you just you just have to accept that and know that tomorrow’s

another day turn up go through the same process and over time over months weeks months and years you’ll get better and better at whatever you do if a person who is just starting to do triathons and they’re pretty new to the swim like you what advice would you have for them with their swimming um I I think my advice would be don’t be afraid at all or embarrassed or any of those sorts of negative feelings around starting from a complete scratch and when I say that I mean start from blowing bubbles and learning how to float and relax in the water like it might sound like that’s what you do when you’re a baby or when you’re five or six years old and you first learn to swim but if you’ve not come up from a swim background that’s the absolute fundamental to me because that teaches you to relax and as soon as you start to relax then you’re going to feel comfortable and confident and you’ll enjoy it and then you can start to work your way in so if I

could start all over again if I even went back to June 2020 when we got out of our lockdown over here and I get back in the pool uh that first month probably would have been spent blowing bubbles yeah it’s uh yeah in like our core principle number one where it’s breathe deep and relax some of those things are just hang floats where you’re sort of just hanging there in the water there’s sink downs where you’re just dropping down blowing at your bubbles and then coming back up and it might seem silly as an adult to to do that stuff or it might seem silly to hold on to the wall and and blow your bubbles and then turn to the side and get your breath and come back might seem like it’s beyond you but if you’re afraid of the water or there’s something in the back of your mind saying you know this is not a safe place to be you’re going to be tense and you’re going to be panicked and you’ll be short of short of breath and no matter how good your stroke is

there’s still going to be that element of I’m scared and and you’re going to swim that way you’re going to tire quite quickly so it’s yeah start with start with the fundamentals and the basics and you know people what I I can’t remember who said it to me but you know a lot of times we’re worried about how we’re perceived by others but everyone’s so concerned about themselves they’re rarely thinking about anyone else so no one really cares what you’re what you’re doing you know it’s um yeah it’s swimming probably even more so because they’re worried about getting the next in next breath yeah exactly right so uh yeah don’t worry what what other people are thinking and well I’ve got we’ve got a beginner course that it’s almost complete but I still got to put a few final touches on it some of the very first couple of things are just practicing your breathing holding on to the wall and a couple those sink downs and and stuff and um yeah yeah even if you

do spend a week or two on those well that might be the thing that will actually help you get to where you are in a in six or 12 months time so that’s um that’s great advice I think is uh yeah don’t be afraid to practice fundamentals absolutely and it’s one of those things like I’ve been thinking now and around when I do have some of those um you know there’s a slightly longer warm-up or a real a real focus on technique for a particular swim or particular warm-up I start to sort of go through my mind when I review that sort of session around okay where am I at what’s the next thing you know how do I get faster and better and I actually still keep coming back now to going I’m not relaxed enough or I’m not breathing quite deeply enough into the diaphragm so I’m I’m almost going actually instead of working on the next step of that eight-week faster freestyle course or focusing on trying to get um my catch and kick timing really well I might actually

be better just to go back and and re-go through for a couple it only might have to be a session or a couple of sessions do a few sink downs do a few deep breathing drills um do a few a few drills of just floating there just to re-emphasize and get that feeling back and sort of work my way through because I mean it helps like we’ve talked about relaxation the whole time so far and that gets your alignment better and you can get more streamlined and you don’t get just puffed and you just swim a hell of a lot better so it’s one of those things start with the fundamentals and don’t be afraid to keep going back over and over and over because you can’t you just can’t repeat it enough and the more I look at some of the analysis that you do with the lead swimmers and you just see how horizontal they are in the water and how relaxed and effortless they are I mean that’s a massive bang for your buck there you could have the best kick

catch timing in the world in the strongest the strongest catch but if you’re still at a 45 degree angle you ain’t gonna get that fast yeah that’s that’s it we see uh they they did a test so that the race club which is a coaching uh a company over in the states they did a test just with the toes pointed down to the bottom of the pool so if you’re not pointing your toes behind you they’re pointing straight down with both of them that’s 41 percent more frontal drag compared with your pointing your toes and that’s just your feet so if you’re talking about someone who’s swimming with really low hips and legs I don’t exactly what that might would be but it’s going to be a lot more than 41 percent you know more drag so it’s uh that’s getting that body position right is a is a massive one because that’s a person who’s going to do is we’ve got to got to reduce drag so um often people think it’s just the head position that impacts

that but that’s one factor but there’s a lot of other factors that that go into it it can be how you’re holding your your body that taught us through the the core squeezing your butt cheeks together a little bit tilting your hips a little bit as well can help keep it straight but it can also just be how you’re breathing are you lifting your head or are you uh have you’re not maybe front quadrant which might be causing it as well there’s a whole bunch of things and that’s why with the eight week course we we don’t we kind of cover it specifically with the balance but it’s more just like over time you can start to bring it up if you get all those other things uh right in the in the stroke yeah absolutely like i i still know i mean i’m leading into another iron man coming up in uh in a month or so time and it’s too cold over here in New Zealand and i don’t have a open water set up around me so i have to chuck the wetsuit on and sweat like hell in the

in the weighted swivel but um the thing that goes through my mind straight away when i jump in there is the difference and because the wetsuit obviously keeping your point the difference in hip position from that to just swimming in normal tolls um or speedos and so that straight away in my mind goes i’ve got a lot more to work on in terms of body position that’ll make me so much faster um with almost little effort because the difference between being horizontal on the water in a wetsuit and then the wetsuit coming off and just being a little bit lower is massive yeah yeah that’s right it’s a i mean it feels good in a wetsuit even with the floaty shorts on it’s uh it’s a massive difference so i see i try and miss some guys who wear them and under my breath i’m like god damn it’s like i just can’t like that extra little bit i just can’t it makes a difference so i can’t uh you know sometimes i just can’t quite uh keep

keep up with them and i blame that on the floaty shorts well that’s why that’s why it’s not your personal need yeah okay you go intact um yeah well that’s uh i think that’s that’s great advice about being we are willing to go back to the fundamentals and and take some time and do those at the pool forget whatever else else thinks and then just that consistency that you’ve you’ve had two three sessions a week over over a period of time will help you get there and got a podcast that will be out by the time people are listening to this but it’s on the book called atomic habits and i did a bit of a breakdown of some of the takeaways i learned from that book but a big part of it is if you set a goal it’s not necessarily about breaking down the goal like i want to be swing a five minute four hundred in six months time so in three months time i’ve got to be down to five ten a better approach to that is what are the habits or

the daily things or the weekly things that you’re going to do that will help you get there and so it’s maybe that is okay three times a week monday wednesday friday i’m going to be swimming and three nights a week i might do a bit of mobility work and along with that i’m focusing on one aspect of two aspects of my stroke in my warm-up so it’s just one of those yeah habits habits that will help help get me there and then just sticking to them that’s what’s going to get you to the the end goal yeah absolutely agree 100 on that consistency over time is is the key to to any sort of personal growth or personal development that you want to do and people underestimate just how important that is and there’s a couple of quotes that i quite like or a little phrase is one is short-term intensity sorry long-term consistency will always trump short-term intensity and then the other one’s not really a quote it’s more of a philosophy but it’s in and around

greatness is is sort of wrapped up in day-to-day workmen’s clothes like there’s nothing massively you know out there about greatness it’s just every day getting up doing the boring stuff over and over and over again that no one else wants wants to do so if you can commit three days a week to swimming commit three days a week to swimming focus on a couple of things but the important part is commit to three days a week and do it for 365 days the year or 52 weeks and i i’d guarantee that you’ll be a hell of a lot better than when you started and if you do that year two year three or four you’ll just you’ll naturally progress at a rate that is conducive to to you personally not everyone will go super fast not everyone to go super slow sometimes you spend five months making no improvement and then in one month you might go from a 540 400 down to a 520 but you wouldn’t do that without the five months worth of just chipping away

that’s uh that’s a great place to leave it i think scott i uh yeah appreciate you jumping on the podcast and sharing your journey over the last couple of years with your swimming and as i said you’re swimming really really well and looking forward to seeing what happens in the next six five months and onwards from there and you’ve got cans i’m and coming up in june and i’ll see you up at a nusa clinic as well there too which will be which will be great so uh yeah thanks again for jumping on the podcast and sharing your story is there any of your socials that people can follow you on and see how you go at uh at cans yeah cool thanks thanks brand it’s been uh it’s been awesome jumping on this and being part of the effortless swimming uh program too in terms of a few i want to follow along uh my instagram is just at scott harpham uh pretty boring and plain um that’s pretty well where i do that’s the only real social

media thing that i i post that’s linked through to a facebook page too but you best be it would be just that at scott harpham and every now and then you’ll get a a snapshot of uh of me swimming or biking or running and hopefully doing something right over in kens in a month or so is tough sounds good thanks very much got awesome thanks very much for that thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

The post [Case Study] 2:00/100m to 1:20/100m with Scott Harpham appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

So excited to have Eney Jones back again as our guest in today’s podcast episode. Eney is an open-water swim champion and a former triathlete. In this episode, we’ll talk about coaching, drills, split tempo, and ways to swim faster.

01:22 Online Analysis

Eney Buoy

Form Goggles:

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, I’ve got a guest who’s been on multiple times before. I’ve got my good friend, Eni Jones. Eni, welcome back to the podcast, it’s been a while. Thank you, yes it has. We were, I think we’re all set up to do the NUSA swim camp in 2020, you’re going to come along and that was going to be, I think, sort of middle of the year. And yeah, I was looking forward to having you there and obviously all of those things happened and yeah, that never quite went ahead but we were just talking before the podcast that you’ve moved up to the mountains since, you’ve moved from Boulder up to Christabute and you’re living a lovely life up there by the look of it. Yeah, it’s been really nice but I’ve always wanted to come to NUSA so I still

have it on my list. And actually I still have my ticket. Do you really? Yeah, well I know you’ve been off to Australia a couple of times and yeah, NUSA is a wonderful spot which I think you’d love, especially being an avid open water swimmer like you are. If you’re swimming in frozen creeks and river beds, you’ll enjoy the warm water up in NUSA, that’s for sure. Yeah, I think so. One of the things that you’ve done a little bit more over the last two years is a bit of online analysis and for those that are listening, if you haven’t heard any previous podcast, any incredibly good swimmer and incredibly good coach and I’ve learned a lot from you just different ways to teach some of the aspects of the stroke and you’re an out of the box thinker and so I’ve learned a lot from you over the last couple of years that we’ve gotten to know each other and you were saying that with the online analysis that you’ve been

doing recently, there’s four parts of the stroke that you tend to look at. Could you delve into what those four parts are? So what’s that process when someone sends you a video, how you look at it? So people, yeah, they’ll send me a video and I either like it from the front or the side, but I look at the catch, which is in the front of your stroke and people don’t realize your catch is dependent on A, your body type, B, the conditions, C, if you’re sprinting or doing distance because if you’re sprinting, you actually want more in the front of your stroke and less in the back. So I work on catch and activating catch. So if you’re an ITU swimmer, triathlete, you really need to have more in the front for that explosive power. The next phase I look at is the power phase, which is at the shoulder. And I call it happy family. The dad is the shoulder. The mom is the elbow and the kid is the wrist. Notoriously, people do not have their happy family in line.

And that being said, at the shoulder, you want the shoulder, elbow, and wrist together. But there is, we have talked about this before. There’s 41 degrees with you can work with here that makes almost that Superman logo. But a lot of people stray out to the side. So then they’re in their shoulder in that power phase. And once you’re there or once your hand, I call it the kid or the elbow, is in front of the wrist. Once the wrist is in front of the elbow, there’s no way to increase that power without stressing that shoulder. So at the power phase, there are so many things that people can do. And one is what you just got out of the water doing, surf paddling because you can’t surf paddle with your elbow leading the way. The last phase is the propulsion phase, which is pushing back. And that in a long distance event is usually pretty long. In a sprint, you probably don’t press back as much. And the last phase that I look at is called, people call it the recovery.

But I call it the return because you’re dealing with two different elements. You’re dealing with water that’s 800 times denser than air. So you can actually make up time through the return that people don’t think of. And I trademarked a term a while ago called split tempo because you’re dealing with water and air. So often, if you time elite swimmers, they have a different tempo underneath and a very different ratio through the air. And sometimes it’s different between right to left, which creates more of a gallopy stroke. So I’ve had fun through the years being in the lab, just going through hundreds of swimmers and just documenting and measuring and putting it together. Because there are so many different ways that people can do things. But those four things, the catch, the power phase, the propulsion phase. And then the return or the recovery are what I look at. So there’s different drills that people can do.

And a lot of it, the first step is creating awareness. And I think listening to other coaches, because I’ve learned a lot from you because as a teacher, researcher, there’s so many different ways you can teach and research and listen to how other people are saying things and then how someone is learning. Yeah, we’ve covered quite a bit there. I think like one of the things you talked about there was the power phase. And for those that are familiar with like our five day catch challenge or some of the terms that we look at, like you call it one happy family. When you’re looking from the side, you’ve got the shoulder by hand aligned all on top of each other. And we call that phase the power diamond and power diamond because as you said, that’s where you’re applying the most power. And I’m working with this device that’s going to be released in I think one or two months time where it actually measures the force of the hand.

So all the way through the stroke and over the top it measures the force. And you actually see it when you measure when you line it up with video that that peak in force is when the hand is directly underneath the shoulder, essentially. So it’s really interesting to see that spike in the force at that point. And through the catch, like, yeah, it comes up a little bit with that that force, but it’s it’s not that much compared to that that peak phase underneath. So when someone’s trying to muscle their way through the through the catch, it’s you just don’t see that with elite swimmers. And I actually see it with swimmers that aren’t quite as good. That that peak in force yet still under the shoulders. But sometimes it’s quite high through the catch because they’re putting a lot of pressure downwards or trying to just rip hard too early. So with a good with a good swimmer, you’ll see that it’s this kind of almost gradual build up through there in terms of the force.

And then it’s it’s less towards the end of the stroke, obviously. But yeah, it’s just very interesting to to to see that. And you also sort of you talked about the catch that it can that it will change depending on, say, someone’s like body body type. Could you talk a bit more about about that?

Well, so often with like move motion movement creates power and motion. But your catch is not just reaching straight forward. If you actually can hike your other hip and I call it salamander obliques, you can get more reach out of the catch. But that being said, someone that six six is going to be able to reach a little bit more and not, you know, than someone that’s five two. So the catch can’t be the same. But I always feel like it needs to be a cross connection cap and catch from the arm to the hip to the opposite leg. So it does really look like a superhero taking off and reaching through the whole body rather than a flat arm in front of you, which I think is beautiful and will work in flat water. But if you just place your arm and then set and then press, there’s not a lot of speed, but it’s very pretty. So I do think the catch changes on the condition and body type. And I think the more people have body

awareness and can engage some of their bigger muscles early work so that it’s not just a shoulder press down.

Yeah, one of the things that I know you sort of focus a lot on is making sure that people are using their lats and becoming becoming aware of that. And what I’ve found over the last couple of years with some of the ways that we’ve taught the catch and so on. A couple of things that have made a big difference with people who weren’t necessarily using their lats and those stronger muscles around the back and shoulders compared to those that that are. Is those that weren’t a lot of them are pulling very straight with their arm. There’s no bend in the elbow. So that’s the that’s the first thing and it’s quite a quite a clear one. The other one can often be if people are trying to get a high elbow catch or early vertical forearm, if they are rolling that shoulder forwards, you just can’t access your lats very well at all. So you’ve got to and the way you explain it, superhero posture, chest out, relax your shoulders back a bit.

So through that power phase, if you’ve got the right posture, then your lats can can be used. Whereas if you’re hunched over, you’re rounded, you just don’t have access to it. So that can be a big difference between someone who’s able to use those stronger muscles is just that the general absolutely. And also people don’t realize that scapula mobility is really important. And I think I told you this once, but when Michael Phelps first got on a program on the T box, he was stretching forward, back and so many swimmers just swing their arms forward. But to have that mobility through your scapula is really important. And you know, you’ve seen people, you know, swimmers can grab either arm back and get that mobility in their scapula. And also it opens their diaphragm and it creates a better posture anyway.

There’s so many references to say superheroes or Superman, like the the way the three that I can sort of see just immediately are when you finish reaching forwards and you’re on your side a bit, that’s that. It’s like Superman flying position. Then you’ve got that superhero posture with the chest out, which I know you’ve I think you’ve trademarked that that term superhero posture for swimming. And then you’ve got that like that Superman S logo, the power, power diamond. Yeah, there’s just so many references to it that I think it’s a good cue for people to to use for those really important parts of the stroke. Well, and the interesting thing is when they studied superhero posture, they found that if people stood with their chest inflated and their hands on their hips for two minutes, it actually increased their testosterone and lowered their cortisol. So to me, that’s so interesting that posture can affect hormones.

And and I’ve even had people go through the grocery store, because if you go through with bad posture, no one really talks to you. You know, and if you go through with good posture, everything opens up. And, you know, so it’s kind of interesting how it opens the whole world around you. And even when you take it to good posture and open water, if I lift my chest and open my chest, it actually lifts my shoulders and even keeping a neutral neck. It makes sighting easier because I’m higher in the water and it makes swimming easier because I’m higher in the water. And that doesn’t mean you can’t swim low, but it’s so much easier to skim across the surface than to swim, you know, really low in the water. I saw a video you posted this morning of a drill that I hadn’t seen before. I assume this is one that you made up because, you know, I think I’ve seen probably most drills that have been created. But this was a new one that looked like a lot of fun.

So if you can combine fun and something that’s useful, I think that’s that’s a sweet spot to be. And so can you talk a bit about this drill that you work with? Yeah, I will. I actually make up a lot of drills and it’s really fun for me sometimes to put them out there and then years later, see them being used. But this one is called office chair swivel and you sit on a kickboard. You fold your legs back and cross your ankles and squeeze the board. And then you lift your chest and you use your forearms pressing back, but you navel swivel side to side to get your hips out of the way and then just go down and back on the pool.

There’s a drill that I also love called

catch and release where you take a paddle without any straps on it. And you press down with your knuckles on the top and then you release your fingers underneath so that you have to press back and then you grab it. There’s one that I do called electric slide, where once again, you have a paddle with no straps and you press down and then you widely skim across the top of the water and then reset your catch. So it’s teaching people how much easier it is to be on top of the water. You know, and also if you’re not pressing back, you lose your paddle. But the office swivel drill is really kind of a fun drill because I couldn’t get people to actually kind of navel swivel. The buoy helps a little bit because you have to squeeze my buoy to get the hips out of the way. You can’t just pull like you’ve had an epidural. So it kind of engages your core. But this office swivel actually gets your navel to swivel. And I’ve even done it in an office chair with rocks in my hand.

And if you have a chair that can swivel, you can go all the way across, you know, your office floor. So did you post that on your Instagram? Was it both on Instagram and Facebook? Oh, I’ll repost it through our Instagram and check out Amy’s one, which is, I think, at Amy Jones. Is that right? Yeah. And I might repost on the one as well from from your page because, yeah, it’s a good one. And I think it like for you, some of the things that you focused on a lot is obviously that that catch and connecting it up with the hips, which is a really important thing to do. So it’s, yeah, I’d like people to give it a try. And what did the girl say who you had doing it afterwards? Well, she they thought I did a clinic early on this year with some girls and she people, it’s harder than it looks in a lot of ways. But you do kind of you’re able to get it going and move forward because it really engages balance as well, because you’re squeezing the board.

So it really is engaging your core. You’re not you can’t just sit flat on a kickboard. Without moving. But it’s corrected. One of the biggest things I see is people and especially living at 9000 feet, people either linger, breathe or they breathe way too late. And so the opposite arm where not the arm they’re pressing through, but the arm in the front, they never get that catch going because they drop their elbow and they’re almost looking back. And some of this stuff that I’ve been teaching has been it’s hard because it Red Cross teaches breathe back into the pocket, but they did that for safety. But then what happens is you’re in your shoulder and you can’t get in your lat. So you need to have a tight discipline breathe in the front. You know, and Red Cross, I mean, the Navy Seals teach press down because they say you don’t need to do that to lift your legs. But if you engage your core, it doesn’t matter where your chest is,

you can lift your legs. And so there’s so many things that I can relate it to, like swimming in Pilates mat where you’re using your lower lumbar, you’re stretching through your chest and you’re kicking and using your arms like that, where you’re using your whole body. So sometimes these drills help, at least for me, teach things that I have to undo a lot that’s in people’s head, you know, that they’ve learned this way or that way. And then now their shoulders hurt or they’re not getting any faster or it’s or they have to do so much yardage. And that’s what I realize with triathletes is, you know, the swim is so small, you don’t you can’t be in the back. I mean, you can in smaller races, but if you really want to perform, you need to be as fast as possible with the least amount of energy and the least amount of training time. This podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Form Goggles. Form combines the world’s smartest goggles, real-time metrics

and guided workouts to make swimming fun. It’s the game-changing membership that’s redefining swimming. Form Smart Swim Goggles feature a transparent display that shows your time, distance and pace as you swim. And with the monthly or annual memberships, you get a huge library of guided workouts that give you workout instructions and tips as you swim for an incredible workout. The Form Goggles are very much like what a garment does, but it’s right in your goggles. So that display of time, pace and distance is something that I really love. So for the majority of the workouts that I do, I’ll wear my form goggles because that way I can hit the exact speed and pace that I want to hit. So every time I do a turn, it’ll tell me what my speed was for that turn. And it’ll tell me my cumulative time. So if you’ve ever got any sets that we need to hit a certain pace or we need to progressively get quicker, then I know exactly whether I’m on track

or falling behind. So that’s one of the main reasons that I love the Form Goggles and use them nearly every swim that I do. I have a lot of clients as well that use these in the open water to tell them what their pace is, because it can be a really hard thing to gauge when you go open water. But the Form Swim Goggles will tell you what your pace is when you’re swimming open water, which is a really beneficial thing to do, especially if you find it difficult to not go out too fast or to sustain the same speed across a one K or two K swim. The other thing I really like about the Form Goggles is that the Form Swim app, it breaks down everything about your session. So for a lot of sessions, I’ll look back and see what was my stroke rate? What was my stroke count for certain parts of the main set? And with that feedback, you can see your progression over time. So as you get fitter, as your technique improves,

you can see those things getting better. So I really like to have a detailed analysis of each swim that I’m doing, especially as we can see those improvements. And when you purchase your Form Swim Goggles, you can save 15 US dollars off the purchase price by using our coupon code Effortless on checkout or go to formswim.com forward slash Effortless. That’s formswim.com forward slash Effortless. All right, back to the podcast. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. There’s there’s a lot of things that people will hear and then take them to the extreme. For example, one of those is with the reach. I think, you know, it’s it’s great to be long in the stroke, but too many people see overreach as well, where they’re reaching as far as they can, pushing as far back as they can. And the arm out the back is straight. So they’re almost locking their elbow out there. And then they lose that bit of balance where the shoulders will rotate too far and so will the hips.

And then we get that spray of the legs. So it’s like it’s like the the three bears approach for a lot of the things is like, you don’t want too much. You don’t want too little that somewhere in between is is good. Same with that pressing down at the chest and head position, where sometimes people with their head completely submerged in the water. There might be 10, 15 centimetres of water above the back of their head. And the only way that you can actually get a breath from there is you’ve either got to turn all the way and be looking to the sky, or you’ve got to eventually lift back up. So you’re much better just the top of the head above the water because then you can turn to the side, get the breath quickly, come straight back. And it’s if if you do that contrast swim of like, you know, all right, push your head down so it’s completely under the water and your chest is mostly under the water as well.

Do that and then swim with the head above just above the water. It you’ll feel so much better. And we had one or two summers this week ending in clinics who who made that switch. And the first thing they said was like, well, so much easier. It’s like, well, yeah, that’s yeah. So sometimes it’s a matter of just knowing the right things to to do. And it is easy to take some things a little too far, I think.

Yeah. And sometimes even the way

they’re interpreting it. And that’s where sometimes I think the videos of themselves are really good because people think they’re doing something. And it’s not until they see themselves that then you can diagram it out or point it out and and give them away. I try to give people a way to feel it, whether it’s, you know, with rocks or shells or weird drills. And and then they can actually feel one of the drills I like for catch is where you’re pressing one kickboard down and one is up so that you’re activating underneath your armpit. You’re not straight out, but then you can grab over the end of that front board.

And there’s some I’ll send you a great photo of almost the arc in Katie Ledecky’s catch. It’s just you can almost see that there’s a line through her whole body. It’s not just a straight arm, you know, reaching forward. One of the things you mentioned earlier was that the split tempo and saying that people can make up a lot of time above the water. Can you talk a little bit more about about that?

Yeah, so that was something I had a hard time teaching because so many once again, people kept reflux for years. People talked about distance per stroke and then you’re going, wait a minute, I’m looking at Janet Evans and she’s so tiny. And unless DPS, unless it’s golf, you know, and you’re not adding it in, you know, there is something to being deliberate under the water, but there’s no reason to be super deliberate above the water. And I wasn’t sure how to teach this and we were in the Bahamas and you’re not allowed to eat the little tiny conks.

But somebody had eaten out the little conks and I thought, oh, I can make something from them. And I was swimming back to the boat with the conks in my hand and they were filling up underneath the water but then draining through the air. So it was creating this tempo, this split tempo where I was faster through the air. And to me, that was kind of a breakthrough because I get so many cyclists and runners that are super deliberate on there. It’s almost like they’re a metronome above the water and below the water. So they’re just as slow above the water as underneath and to teach people to let go and re-engage was really hard. So using the shells was really good or sometimes I could use biscuit sand dollars and they’re the sand dollars that look like a biscuit, but they have a hole in the bottom, so they fill up and they drain. And so the other thing that it also teaches people to do is to use their forearms because proprioceptively we’re so connected to our hands,

but there’s more surface area in our forearms. So to actually get them feeling it without thinking about it has been really important. And then it’s been very fun to watch the Olympics and nationals and worlds, you know, with a stopwatch and actually, you know, because everything’s taped and you can tape what one arm is underneath and as opposed to the top and the ratio difference between sprinters and distance swimmers. It’s actually been really fun. What what is that? The between like on average, everyone’s different. But what is that for, say, a distance swimmer? What’s that ratio of time spent under water with a stroke compared to time above? You know, I don’t have the stuff in front of me, but it’s actually the, you know, the sprinters have a bigger ratio, do you know what I mean? They’re much faster through the air than distance. And, you know, that usually the longer the distance, a little more relaxed in the air.

But the nice thing that I think is that people never think about working when something’s easy, you know? And that to me, I just think, wow, that’s a great way to get your arm back up there, you know, without controlling it. And part of it is, you know, we teach a high elbow because you want the elbow higher underneath, but it really doesn’t have to be, you know, unless you’re in a super crowded Ironman swim and you only have this much space, you could really open your chest in and spread out. So, but that being said, it’s nice to not have a locked arm, you know, a straight arm because then you’re only accessing shoulders and traps and deltoid muscles. So, yeah, but I’ll get you some of the numbers because it actually is really fun, even with worlds coming up, to just sit with a stopwatch and measure. And then, you know, and then you also see sometimes, especially in open water, more of a gallopy stroke. So meaning, you know, horses gallop

because they get more reach without control. So with open water swimmers, sometimes you’ll see one arm almost straight and then the side they breathe on with a bent elbow, which almost gives them a little more time to breathe, but it creates like a loping kind of a gallopy stroke. And so that’s been actually really fun to watch. And then going into the resistance bands and the core, it’s been great at the Olympics to watch people actually change their kick and go from a four-beat crossover to a six-beat kick in the same event. And with bands on their ankles, just gives people more awareness and it’s more work, but it also teaches them where their legs are and what their legs are doing. So one of the things you mentioned there is that that loping, galloping stroke, something that I often need to coach people through is going from thinking they have to be symmetrical every stroke, the same catch, the same pull,

the same timing. It’s like, no, some people do some that way, especially those who breathe every three, that’s fairly common. But there’s a lot of swimmers and I’d say probably the majority of swimmers that I work with would be better with an asymmetrical stroke where they may be longer on one side or they’re just breathing to the one side. So it’s okay to not be completely balanced or even on each side. And like for me personally, that’s a much better swimming, breathing to the one side and I am longer on that side when I breathe. And to me, I can get a much better rhythm, especially in the open water for it. So yeah, that’s something that’s quite common as well. And I mean, you see it in adults if they’ve learned to swim through maybe some learned to swim classes where they’ll get taught breathe bilaterally, which I’ve got nothing wrong with breathing bilaterally, but they’re just taught everything has got to be exactly the same.

But once someone gets that certain level where they can swim comfortably for a kilometer or so, then you might start to look at ways to make them a bit faster where they can get into this rhythm that they find best for them.

Well, and I do think having access to the other side is important. But what I see that’s really common is when people are taught to breathe bilaterally, you’re naturally lower in the water and so you’re pushing more water. If you’re breathing one side, sometimes it’s easier to get up on top of the water. And the other thing with that is, I’ll teach people to density breathe a lot. So if they’re, say a wave’s hitting them, you can get hit by a wave and just breathe in the air because air and water are different density. You don’t need to swallow everything that’s there. And so people don’t really work on that, but I’ll have people put water in their mouth and then say, okay, just pull in the air. It’s really subtle, pull in the air. You can have water in your mouth and pull air in. You don’t need to breathe back in this back pocket. So that, I’m happy to hear you say it and I’ve watched you swim enough that I love how you swim.

And I think we teach perfection a lot, but I’ve always said there’s really no points for perfect. It’s not diving and people don’t go, oh, that is so beautiful because different things work for different people, but there are easier ways to do it, but you have to look at why things were taught the way they were with Red Cross. They’re thinking about safety and breathing back in this pocket back here. With the Navy SEALs, they’re trying to be low and flat in the water for 12 hours and not be seen or shot. So they’re trying to be super, super low. With the bilateral breathing, I think it’s just access and I don’t know, it seemed to me in the 70s and the 80s, it was like, okay, three, six, five, seven.

All of a sudden we were doing these breath-holding things and longer and I do think we’ve talked about this before. One of my favorite books from this two years ago and I have it to send you. It’s called, Breath, have you read that book?

Is it James Nesta? Yeah. Did you read the author? I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard a lot of people say that’s a good book.

Well, it talks about some of the things that we’ve talked about, like with breath, breathing in, counting, holding, exhaling and then having nothing and counting and really having your breath do more for you than you’ve actually just being more cognizant of it. And so to me, it’s helped me swim in icy streams and when I’m getting, I’ve swam in the water park in January where ice is shooting out of the water park but just to realize everything that your breath can do. So it’s not, we don’t really have to have this regimented thing but there is such a calming essence and a power essence that comes from breath and being aware of it. And so even, I sometimes tell people to,

I’ll look at, they’ll use a tempo trainer and we’ll try to connect it to music or something so that it’s almost like a breathing waltz, like a one, two, three, one, so that they’re not focusing on how they’re feeling, they’re just, it’s almost like teaching rhythm. And so sometimes you can teach the rhythm through the breath. But I like breathing on one side and I know that it’s not taught that way but I just think comfort is super important. And I think sometimes the more comfortable you are, the more speed you can have because you’re not controlling what you’re, you’re not limiting what you’re doing.

You mentioned earlier the resistance bands for kicking. So, I think it was last month or earlier this month, you sent me a box with a couple of Eni-Boys, which I, or Eni-Boys, which we call them here in Australia, my favorite poor boy to use, which you designed, created them there, kind of like two empty bottles, which can be filled up or kept empty, but it’s basically a poor boy that’s, to me, he’s got the best float, nice and narrow in the middle where you can keep your legs quite close together because there’s some poor boys that have got like a, I don’t know how I would call it, maybe like three inches, four inches wide and then your legs are sitting out, outside your body line, it just doesn’t feel good and you can’t connect your, like you can’t use your core very well or your hips very well with it, but yours is, if anyone asks about what poor boy to get, that’s the one, the Eni-Boys. So, you sent me a couple of those,

so thank you for that, but you also included some of these little resistance bands and you’ve been using them a bit to help people kick, so they’re not kicking like they’re running or cycling, so they’re bending their knees too much to help them kick like a swimmer. So, how long have you been using them for and what are you doing with people to help them to get them to use them and kick correctly?

Well, I’ve been using them, we’ve all used bands when we pull and I told you sometimes when people breathe, their legs spread out, so some of it’s been awareness, but we’ve started twisting them and using them for resistance, so it’s made kicking harder and it’s made a tighter kick because so many triathletes and runners that I work with are very knee drive oriented, they either look like they’re running or on their bike and so they are not kicking, their so ass is tight and they’re not kicking from their core at all and it’s not a tight kick, so they’re not super, they’re actually easy bands because I didn’t wanna make them too hard, but you can twist them, but then you can horizontal kick or even vertical kick with these bands so you’re not having this huge kick, you’re doing a tight, tight kick and then during a kick set, you can also, if you twist the band, teach a crossover kick or have people do a two-beat crossover

or a four-beat crossover or even a six-beat kick and then they get a tighter kick and then if they’re swimming with them, they have to use their core a little bit so that their legs don’t sink and people have taken bike tires for years, but to me it’s really helped get rid of that knee drive and teach people where a kick should come from. So whenever I would say tight kick, sometimes I would get a long like scuba kick rather than teaching a flutter kick. So to me, it makes it a little harder which just creates more awareness so then when you’re doing a kick set and you can tell them what kind of kick to do, it’s not just, you know, we’re kicking, it’s like, oh, okay, I’m doing this kind of kick. And what should they, let’s say someone has just got their band on, they’ve twisted it and they’re swimming, what should they be feeling for when they’re doing it correctly compared to when they’re not doing it correctly?

So when they’re doing it correctly, you would feel more in your core and thighs. If you’re spreading, if you’re spaying your legs when you breathe, you’d actually feel more tension like in your IT band. You know, because some people don’t even realize that they’re doing that at all. So it also can even, I always say, one of the most important kicks in swimming is an up kick. And we rarely work on an up kick. You know, I’ve never heard coach say up kick, up kick, but that up kick is really hard, especially for triathletes because their so muscles are tight, they’re sitting, we’re sitting a lot, they’re riding a bike or running. So to actually have that up kick. So this kind of just increases the awareness and makes you really feel that up kick in the back of your stroke, if that makes sense, does that? Yeah, I like it because there’s two things that I will see with a lot of up kicks. And so if you don’t know what an up kick is,

it’s basically just when the foot is moving upwards in that kick motion. So not the down kick but the upward motion. Two things that I see, one is that people, they will often have their toes pointed down throughout that entire up kick. So the surface of their foot is facing against that oncoming water. So it creates a lot of drag and that will drop their legs. So trying to get them to keep the toes somewhat pointed at least in that upward motion is beneficial. And then just having some of those upward kicks come from the hip, come from the glute rather than just bending at the knee. So being able to teach that, it sounds like that can cover it pretty well. Plus if you put some fins on, let’s say you’re using some DMC fins, which will encourage you to kick correctly, I think that could be a really good approach to fixing an up kick that’s not coming up in the right way.

Yeah, oh, definitely. What’s there on your, you’ve got those bands available on your website. They’re pretty fairly inexpensive from what I saw. What do you call them on there? I mean, what’s your website for people who are listening? Oh, it’s just on the enibooie.com website and they’re just called mermaid resistance bands. So the nice thing is you can use them for stretching, travel. You don’t have to use them in the water, but they’re really great with DMC fins. I found them really great, not only for pulling, but I was surprised how much I love them for kicking. And I like being able to twist them and make them harder or easier. So yeah, it’s been a nice way to kind of teach people

to use their hips and their glutes and their full leg and paint the back wall with their toes rather than have their feet straight down and their knees bent. It’s made out of this like, almost like theraband type material for the resistance bands. One of the things I don’t like about the traditional swimming bands, like if you cut up a tire tube, for example, some of them are quite a very small. And so if I’ve got one where my ankles and my feet are really close together and I can’t move them at all, I can’t quite get that movement through the legs and through the hips to be able to swim like I normally would. So my feet are just dropping really low if I’ve got a very tight band, but something with a little bit more give where you can actually move your feet slightly up and down and kind of coordinate your catching and kick better. To me, it makes a world of difference with being able to swim correctly with a band.

So I think any band that’s really tight, it can actually just, yeah, it can be good for strength, I get that, but I think it can be more harm than good in many ways if you’ve got the incorrect type of normal swimming band. Yeah, and then when you, so all your clinics are back happening now in person? Yeah, yeah, we are back running. So myself and the coach Mitch up in Sydney, he runs all of those ones. And we’re back up and running, which is great because while I enjoy the online coaching, I was like 18 months without any face-to-face stuff. I was going a little bit crazy, I think. I wasn’t coming up with many new ideas and I was just sort of a little bit, I think, stale because it’s when you’re actually working with people face-to-face where you can come up with new ideas and hear what people are saying and it’s been good to get back to it. So we’ve been running pretty much back to full capacity since November or December, which has been great.

And you were saying earlier that you, it’s almost sort of back there and pools are opening and all of that. Like, has it taken that long?

It’s taken a while and things are, I still feel like things are a little slow, but part of the stagnation could be me. Like I became very internal and not interacting as much. So it just feel like things are getting going, but it feels like we’re going right now, kind of from zero to 60 pretty fast. You’re like, wait, wait, there was part of the reflection and the slowness that I really liked. So it’s gonna be an interesting kind of adventure going forward. I know, I feel the same thing where there was, there was parts of it where I had, there was no responsibilities, essentially, apart from keeping the kids alive and all of that. But there was nothing that we could do for a while and looking back, there was parts of it there where life was very, very simple and there’s something certainly to that. But I think for me, I wanna be out there and doing stuff and being able to coach and actually be able to do what I love with coaching.

But it also, for me, meant that it’s, say yes to less things and just to the things that I really wanna do. Cause it just made me reflect on some of those things that I was doing that maybe I’d moved on or I just wasn’t, yeah, like I just wanted to just stick with the things that I really do love. And if I keep doing those, then I’m going to be better at the things that I’m actually doing and not spread too thin as well, which happens pretty easily. And it happened pretty quickly once we started with clinics. It’s like, oh my God, it’s like going from nothing for 18 months to then being fully booked with stuff is like, I mean, I’ve gotta dial it back and just simplify a bit. Yeah, no, absolutely. So yeah, it’s been, it’s been, it’s been interesting.

Any, I wanna thank you for being on the podcast again. So for those of you listening, we talked about a couple of things, but if you are listening and anything sparked an interest, check out Amy’s Instagram, which is at Amy Jones, which we’ll put in the show notes. And also if you’re looking for a good pool boy and you don’t have one of Amy’s yet, highly recommend it. Like everyone, I mean, I’d say most of the top pro triathletes have probably got one of your pool boys. And those that probably just don’t know about them yet, I’d say, oh, they’ve got a sponsor and they can’t deviate from their sponsored equipment. But I think the pool boy is great. And those bands, I think a lot of athletes would be able to get a lot from. So where’s the best place to get in touch and get in touch and find out more about you?

Yeah, so either at anyjones.com or inibooie.com. And then even if they don’t send, if people wanna send in a video, that’s fine. But yeah, I think social media or Facebook or Instagram is perfect. Sounds good, we’ll have to, I think next year I’ll likely have another NUSA camp. So can use that ticket then. Oh, good. And yeah, we can do another camp together, which I’m looking forward to. Cause we got to do the Hawaii one together, which was great. And I was looking forward to that NUSA one. But I think, yeah, next year I’ll probably start that back up and we’ll go from there.

Well, thank you. Thanks, Amy. 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 Unusual Ways To Swim Faster with Eney Jones appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s episode, I will dive into a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. I wanted to explain some of the concepts that I found incredibly helpful for achieving the goals that I set myself.

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Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to episode number 230 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. On today’s episode, I’m going to dive into a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. Now, you might be aware of the book, you might have read it yourself. I want to explain some of the concepts that I found incredibly helpful for achieving the goals that I set myself. It’s also helped me with my swimming coaching to help other people develop habits so that they actually change their technique and I’ll talk a bit about that. And it’s also helped with a lot of other areas of my life as well. So it’s called Atomic Habits by James Clear. Before we get into that, I want to let you know about our Maldives swim camp that we’ve just released this week. If you follow us on Instagram, you might have seen this, it’s at Effortless Swimming.

We’ve now opened our Maldives swim camp, which is a five-day swim camp that I’m hosting in the Maldives in September, September 5th to the 10th. Each day, we’re going to have a technique focus session where myself and a few other coaches, we’re going to be working with you on a one-on-one basis and as a group as well to improve your technique. We’re going to teach you some of the concepts that you will have heard on this podcast and in our YouTube videos and also some things where you wouldn’t have heard them before that reserved for just our in-person stuff. And we’ll also have an open water swim each day where you’ll get to enjoy the beautiful sea life, the coral reefs and just the incredible climate that the Maldives had to offer. The water is about 28 degrees, so it’s a little bit warmer than the pools that you probably swim in. And the sea life there is incredible. I visited the Maldives in 2019 and I thought this is going to be such a

good place to have a swim trip and manage to organize one for this year. So there’s not going to be many spots available. So if it is full by the time you do visit the website, then just add your name to the waiting list and we’ll let you know if anything does become available. So you can check that out at effortlesswimming.com forward slash Maldives or just through the links on our Instagram as well. So I’m really looking forward to that trip. It’s going to be a great trip for anyone who wants to improve their swimming, have a bit of a holiday and go to an incredible place for swimming and swim with a group of other athletes. So it’s going to be a really good fun camp. Now atomic habits, so this book helped me basically understand how habits are formed and what we can do to build long lasting chains of cues and cravings, responses and rewards to create systems that will help us achieve our goals. So the way that I would would often think of achieving a goal,

it’s like you set your goal and then kind of your work backwards from there. Okay, how many sessions do I need to do or how much will I need to improve each month to be able to swim at this speed? So I would sort of work backwards from there. Now this book takes a slightly different approach. So if we were to summarize the book in a few sentences, real change comes from the compound effects of hundreds of small decisions or habits that over time accumulate to produce remarkable results. And to achieve our goals, we need to first build systems made of single processes and habits that will take us to our goals. And habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. That’s the good and the bad things that we do each day and every day that compound over time to create real change. So it’s basically just goes to show that what we need to set up are the right systems and processes each day or each week to achieve

the things that we want to achieve. Now a few good quotes from the book are that success is the product of daily habits, not once in a lifetime transformations. And I think of the swimmers that I work with that have had remarkable results. They’ve stuck at this at these daily habits of swimming three, four, five times a week, doing a few drills within their warm-up and having the right technique focus. Maybe they’re doing some strength, correct strength training in there as well. And it’s just having these habits that develop over time and they’ve stuck with them for long enough to be able to see those results. Time magnifies the margin between success and failure and it will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally, bad habits make time your enemy. And the last quote is goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. So there are a couple of my favorite quotes.

There’s four laws of behavior change that we can use to create good habits and break bad ones. So like a single habit, if we think of a single habit, it’s made up of a cue, a craving, a response and a reward. So these components are formed according to the four laws of behavior change, which are this. So with our four laws of behavior change, we want to make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it immediately satisfying. So let’s dig into them. To make something obvious, the habit needs to be effortless for us and require no active thinking. So for example, at night, each day I want to take, I’ve got like a magnesium supplement and a zinc supplement that I want to take. I’ve got that right next to this packet of herbal tea that I’ll have each night before bed. So when I see the herbal tea packet, I’ll see the supplements. And so I see the two of those and now I’m in the habit of having those

supplements, whereas if I put them in the bottom drawer or I put them above the fridge in a cupboard that I would rarely open, well, I’m probably not going to have them. That we’ve got to make it obvious. So that’s it. It’s quite an easy one. The other thing that’s obvious is I’ve got two massage balls, my foam roller and my so-right, like a self-massage type thing. It’s next to the TV. So if I ever at night I sit down to watch television, well, I’ll often sit down, see the stretching and mobility equipment there and go, OK, get off my bum, get on the ground and just start to roll around on the massage ball or use the foam roller. So I’ll often do 10, 15 minutes of some mobility work at night. And that’s just because I’ve made those things that I want to do. I’ve made them obvious. The second one is to make it attractive. So if a habit is unattractive, we’re likely not going to have enough willpower to do it over and over again.

So therefore we’ve got to come up with some ways to make a habit attractive, even if it’s something that’s difficult, like going to the gym or studying for a long time. So one of the things that I did recently was I was watching Ozarks, which is a TV show, and I was watching the last season. But I also wanted to make sure that I would row on three or four times a week. So I’ve got like a Concept 2 rower and I wanted to make sure I did that three to four times a week. So what I did with the TV show was I said, OK, I can only watch this show when I’m rowing. And I was really looking forward to getting on the rower, putting in some headphones, putting my phone up on the rower and watching 30 to 40 minutes of this TV show because the rowing, which is a hard exercise, that was linked to this TV show that I wanted to watch. So that’s it. We can make something attractive by linking something more desirable to it.

This podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Form Goggles. Form combines the world’s smartest goggles, real-time metrics, and guided workouts to make swimming fun. It’s the game-changing membership that’s redefining swimming. Form Smart Swim Goggles feature a transparent display that shows your time, distance, and pace as you swim. And with the monthly or annual memberships, you get a huge library of guided workouts that give you workout instructions and tips as you swim for an incredible workout. The Form Goggles are very much like what a Garmin does, but it’s right in your goggles. So that display of time, pace, and distance is something that I really love. So for the majority of the workouts that I do, I’ll wear my Form Goggles because that way I can hit the exact speed and pace that I want to hit. So every time I do a turn, it’ll tell me what my speed was for that turn, and it’ll tell me my cumulative time.

So if you’ve ever got any sets that we need to hit a certain pace, or we need to progressively get quicker, then I know exactly whether I’m on track or falling behind. So that’s one of the main reasons that I love the Form Goggles and use them nearly every swim that I do. I have a lot of clients as well that use these in the open water to tell them what their pace is, because it can be a really hard thing to gauge when you go open water, but the Form Swim Goggles will tell you what your pace is when you’re swimming open water, which is a really beneficial thing to do, especially if you find it difficult to not go out too fast or to sustain the same speed across a 1K or 2K swim. The other thing I really like about the Form Goggles is that the Form Swim app, it breaks down everything about your session. So for a lot of sessions, I’ll look back and see what was my stroke rate, what was my stroke count for certain parts of the main set.

And with that feedback, you can see your progression over time. So as you get fitter, as your technique improves, you can see those things getting better. So I really like to have a detailed analysis of each swim that I’m doing, especially as we can see those improvements. And when you purchase your Form Swim Goggles, you can save $15 off the purchase price by using our coupon code Effortless on checkout or go to formswrim.com forward slash effortless. That’s formswrim.com forward slash effortless. All right, back to the podcast. The third one is we’ve got to make it easy. So the less friction there is between you and the habit, the greater the chances are that you’ll actually do it. And this applies to things like packing your swim bag the day before or preparing a meal or a healthy meal so that you don’t go and order something that’s unhealthy after swimming. What I do here is that I will pack my swim bag the night before.

I’ll make sure I’ve got my bathers, I’ve got my towel, got a drink bottle in my bag and that bag is right next to the front door and I’ve got my clothes out and my shoes out for that next day, which is basically right next to my bathroom. So I can get out of bed, still be half asleep and just get dressed and then I can walk out the door and there’s not much thought that has to go into it. So that makes that really easy to do. The other thing that I’ve done is there’s this type of bars called blue dinosaur bars and I think they’re really tasty, they’re good for you and there’s no rubbish in them. So what I’ve done there is I bought them in bulk, I bought a lot of them in bulk and I’ve put that in my swim bag or in my car to have after swim training each time that I go. And that way I’m making sure that I have something healthy and when I’m quite hungry and maybe fatigued as well, I’m not looking to stop off at a cafe

and get a croissant or get something that’s unhealthy. So if we can make those things easy, then we’re more likely to do them. The other thing is we’ve got to make something, we’ve got to make it immediately satisfying. So our Bramie Awards immediate returns. So it’s good to come up with something simple that brings us joy right after we do the habit. So for swimming, for example, that blue dinosaur bar, it’s immediately satisfying as well. So I’ll be looking forward to that health bar and also like a coffee afterwards. I’ll often link a coffee with going to the pool. So I’ll have that straight away. And I know a lot of people do this as well but it makes that immediately satisfying. So I’m really looking forward to doing the swim and then also looking forward to that bar or that coffee. So there’s a couple of things that we can do there to make sure we actually change the habit. So let’s say, for example, you wanted to make sure that you did a bit of mobility work

because you were really tight through the shoulders and you know that you’re restricted with that and it’s impacting your swimming. Well, making it obvious, maybe you’ve got to put your foam roller next to the TV. How can you make it attractive? Well, maybe you’re not allowed to watch TV without first doing that or without doing the foam roller at the same time. So you can link it to watching TV. You can make it easy, kind of just like we’ve talked about, it’s right there next to the TV. And to make it immediately satisfying, well, maybe you say, okay, after I have, after watching TV and being on the foam roller, well, then I can have this cup of tea afterwards or your dessert that you have. So there’s a few different things that we’ve got there to make sure that we actually change your habit. And it takes time to build a habit or to break a bad one. And that’s why most people quit halfway. So what I started to change with coaching, for example,

is that people are busy. They probably don’t have, they may not have time to add another swim session into their weekly routine. And so I wanted to make sure that they were actually doing the things that they need to do to change their technique. So what I started to recommend was to do a couple of specific drills for them as part of their warmup. So they don’t, they’re just changing a little bit of their warmup. And it only needs to be 200 to 400 meters of drill swim because it’s a small enough amount where, okay, you’re not going to get sick of it. You’re not really having to change a whole lot of what you’re doing. You might actually be doing some drills already. But if you do this small amount of drills each session, it’s the frequency of doing it that will actually get you the result. It’s not the amount of time spent doing it. It’s the frequency. And so that way, if people have only got a small amount of it to do

and they don’t really have to sort of change the existing, their existing schedule or routine, then they’re more likely to stick to it and not quit halfway. So that’s why we started to change what we recommended for people to do in order to improve their stroke. If you adopt the systems first approach instead of focusing on goals, that’s how you’re going to achieve it. So goals are about the results that you want to achieve, but it’s the systems, but the systems are about the processes that lead to those results. So what I did earlier this year, I sort of looked at what I want to do with my health and fitness. So what do I need to do on a daily basis? Well, that means on a daily basis, I need to either swim, run, surf, we’ll go to the gym, I need to do something. And so how am I going to fit that in? So I looked at my week and said, okay, Monday, Wednesday, Friday are the days that I’ll swim in the morning. On the other days,

I’ll make sure that I’m doing one of those other activities at a certain time. So I’ve developed this routine and that’s eventually become habit. So if we think about the system first, rather than focusing on just the goal. Same thing for, let’s say like the podcast, I wanted to make sure that I was producing a podcast each week and in order to do that, I’ve got this schedule and I look at that. We’ve got our schedule dates and I just make sure that I’ve got enough podcast interviews lined up in my calendar where we’re going to stick to that weekly schedule. So yeah, and just making sure that I’m contacting people about doing interviews and that sort of thing so that we actually stick to it. To form good habits, you’ve got to make them a part of your identity. And I’ve seen this in play over the last 20 years where I see myself as a swimmer. So if I go a week without swimming or even like two or three days without swimming,

I’m getting a little bit edgy. I need to get to the pool because I see myself as a swimmer. I’ve seen this in the last year or two as well since we’ve moved to the beach where I see myself as a surfer. So something that I want to do on a daily basis if it’s good at least or at least every second to third date, the latest would be go for a surf, get in the water because I see that as my identity. And if I don’t do that, then I feel like I’m letting myself down. So a few of the things that it says in the book is like the goal is not to become a reader book. The goal is to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon. The goal is to become a runner or the goal is not to learn an instrument. The goal is to become a musician. So we can almost trick ourselves by developing an identity that fits with the habit that we want to form. And obviously, yeah, I’ve seen that in play for the last 20 years as a swimmer where I would travel, when I traveled to the US

to do some clinics, I would be looking, the first thing I’d look at was where’s the closest pool in the city that I’m in because I want to make sure I’m trying to swim each day. And if I didn’t swim each day, then I would feel as though I was letting myself down and yeah, I was missing out on an important part of my identity there. One of the quotes from the book that’s quite good too is it says, over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self image gets in the way. This is why you can’t get to attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires unlearning and becoming the best version of yourself requires you to constantly edit your beliefs and to upgrade and expand your identity. And another one is that your identity emerges out of your habits and you’re not born with preset beliefs. Every belief, including those about yourself is learned and conditioned through experience.

And I see this a lot with people who will come to clinics. I’ll get a lot of swimmers from, particularly say from the UK where they don’t necessarily learn as kids and they’ll say, I am from, I grew up in England, so I’m not a swimmer. And one of the things we want to try and do there is just reset that belief where that doesn’t become part of your identity. I understand that’s maybe why you didn’t learn to swim as a kid, but if we want to start to forget that and your identity can be, I am a swimmer. And that happens all the time with people who have that habit of swimming and they learn how to do it, they get better and then their identity starts to change. So we see that quite a bit. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the podcast. If you do want to join us for the Maldives swim camp, go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash Maldives. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week with another episode. Thanks for listening.

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 Atomic Habits with Brenton Ford appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Today, my guest is Paul Mackinnon, a professional running technique coach who helped many runners and triathletes worldwide. We discussed running cues, how to improve your running skill, and more about coaching. I hope you enjoy this episode!

01:16 Coaching Athletes

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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 the man with the best haircut in the southern end of Australia here, Paul McKinnon, the Balanced Runner. Welcome to the podcast, Paul. Thanks, I knew he was going to come at some stuff. It’s going to be so early after the weekend. Might as well start off that way. If you’re listening to this podcast, Paul’s got what we call here in Australia a mullet, which is it’s almost it’s the national haircut, I think at the moment, 2022. I like to call mine a little bit more of a mane because it’s you know, it’s the same length the whole way through that middle. It’s not short at the front. Let’s know. There’s no business at the front. There’s a bit more of a mane. Yeah, it’s a very trendy, trendy mane. It

does look good. Paul, you, so I first heard of you through a friend, a mutual friend, Simon, heard and then I also heard that you’re on the triathlon Taran podcast, probably three years ago now and you got a huge response from that podcast because I think, I mean, from what I can see, you coach in a way that I really like and how I like to coach people where you explain things very, very well, very simply and you can relate to what people are doing, how they should feel and and you break things down in a way where it’s it’s just like, well, okay, well, that makes so much sense and I think that’s why you’ve got the the reputation that you you do now and you I mean, you’ve just come back from the States. You’ve done a lot of work with Nike and and the Nike athletes recently. So what was what was that all about? Well, firstly, thank you. Thanks for the commendation. It was really eye-opening in a few different ways. Like it

was awesome to work with them and like when they’ve got such a wealth of talent over there and even sort of like the the sublet they’re amazing athletes of similar to kind of like outlets like it’s it’s it’s incredible how many they have. I think the the working with so that in particular someone like Galen Rapp or Emily Infeld who are you know seasoned pros over there to to get over their work with them and understand that they haven’t had that opportunity to have that improvement in in the technique side of things was was really a bit eye-opening given that is kind of the mecca of distance running and or middle distance and distance running. So to get that kind of confidence bill to get the reception and the feedback from them in a positive such a positive manner was really really cool and then start to see how it can kind of influence and and be a part of a broader improvement of of running as a you know

worldwide sort of thing which was really really cool because they do have the other news to have to do that and to to get that out to a broader to a broader audience. One of the things that we spoke about in the last couple of weeks as we’ve been leading up to this is with so with Nike with their their latest shoes they found that you get more improvement with better technique from their latest shoes and and that’s a a part of why you’ve been I think doing some work with their their athletes there so do you want to talk a bit about about that and and why that is? Yeah so like the original contact I had over there was a guy by the name of Chris Cook who was a guy that I stayed with and you know spent a lot of time with over there now he’s a part of the designer development of the Nike Vaporfly the Nike Alpha Fly so he’s if he hasn’t been the actual designer he’s overseen at all. So that was kind of the introduction to him and he was really interested in

how I did what I did and why it was sort of getting those really good results because he was seeing it from a shoe design and shoe development side of things. He’s got a really inquisitive mind and his biomechanical kind of background but it was that side of things then subsequently so over the last 18 months they started to see a real pattern of athletes who moved in a particular manner or actually you know for one for a better term and odd is like with good mechanics and they were getting more efficiency economy improvement out of the shoe than those that didn’t so they did have improvements irrespective of the movement pattern that they showed improvements irrespective of the movement patterns that they were presenting however the ones that moved really well were getting more out of it so for him he was starting to click and go okay so I met Paul I can see the retraining which is essentially what I do is like the gate retraining

rather just like the biomechanical analysis historically that’s been a bit of a missing link and it’s highlighted now that the good movers getting more out of the shoe and I’ve got this guy who’s you know really delving into the retraining side of things so how can we kind of put it together and that was kind of the real the reason to go over there because he was he was just as inquisitive of going okay how’s it going to be received you know what can Paul do with a multiple different levels of athletes I was working with you know like one of the best distance runners us have had through to some high school athletes over there and everything in between just to see what would happen in the reception and he sat into all the sessions and for him it was like a bit of opening to say we can get these improvements at all these different ranges so that we can actually make the most of the shoes that he’s developing and that was kind of then okay how

we then put it into the design of the shoe how do we put into like the retraining or the training packages for each of these athletes from all these different levels so that was the main reason for it and then it’s kind of grown a little bit from there and one of the thing the one of the ways that you love to teach is to use cues and I mean for me the way I see a cue is it’s almost like all these different movements all these things that go into a certain movement if you’re thinking of every single step you know for swimming it’s like okay enter your hand in front of your head then reach forward and rotate your body and then your fingertips it’s too much for people to remember so a cue just brings it all together in this nice little package that you can just think of and it’s much easier to actually do the movement because you’re not overthinking things so for you like when did cues become a way that you like to teach things and how did

you come up with the cues that you use um I think there’s probably a couple parts to it so I think with running it’s always been about like foot up whereas I’m very much top down so everything that kind of influences the foot strike the foot movement the time on ground and the mechanics of the leg are influenced by you know the arm pattern the body position and I think that’s become one of the really key parts of the differences that what I do being you know it’s completely flipped and the way I see it is what should be most still or what is the foundation of the movement in this case being run in so what should be most still and it is the torso so trying to make that the best almost likely the first protocol and then kind of working off that rather than trying to aim at the foot which is what is moving most and trying to change that it’s kind of really flipped on its head and I sort of think about it in like you know

strengthening addition in terms you think so I’d you know a squat or a deadlift you’re thinking okay what is most still it’s the feet and make sure that they’re in the right position for the person and then you can kind of build up from that if the feet are in the wrong position or in a golf swing the feet are in the wrong position you start so kind of work up and then out to what’s moving most you know and go from there so if we’ve been running it’s actually flipped so you know for me it’s like torso and then work down from there so that part’s a really different part I think when I started to realize that was when I was running myself I was trying to actually influence my feet and I started by arms I was almost like for me it was intuitive to go okay well if they sound off beat if they don’t sound even then how about I just kind of swing my arms in a manner that even and see how that influences the feet and straight away start to change

and I think that for me started to go okay well what’s the influencer and if that’s the cue that I want to work on or if that’s something that’s going to influence always thinking about what is going to influence most and then work from there and that’s why I started to use cues so much more in a running sense but it’s also sort of the influence infiltrated in just other things like what cues can I use to kind of create a better moving pattern in a golf swing or this or this and I’m no you know golf pro but it just started to make me think about how they work and they just work so much better because it’s an influencer rather than a result based outcome focused yeah and that yeah that’s that’s really helped and and being able to as you said focus on one thing at a time and give it time to become habit because it’s such a repetitive movement both you know running in and swimming it’s just repeated movements open cycle open good keep going

just give it time to become habit so you don’t have to think about it again and then we can work on the next piece and the next piece and the next piece uh it’s really interesting that you said people would often think about the feet first trying to change that you went top down I heard this is a couple years ago I heard a coach say that a swim coach talk about he says he looks you know look at the feet and then and you can determine like look at that first and that’s determining what happens out the front of the body but for me it’s always been the other way it’s always been been top down and I don’t know why it’s been that way but similar thing I find like often the legs and the feet and the kick is more influenced by what’s happening out in front because the legs will typically be a counterbalance to what is happening out in front of the head so I’ve seen it really the same way in swimming so yeah to me that’s interesting because it just it never

really worked for me just looking at the the feet first because for me it’s always it’s more been what’s the head doing what what are you doing through your shoulders and your body because if your shoulders are going to 90 degrees which is too much rotation so I will of course the feet are going to kick out wide to stop your from continue to going continue going too far on your side so yeah I think that’s quite an interesting one just listening to you talk about that there well it’s almost like what we’re talking about just before we got on the call as well about the body position if you don’t have you know like and then coming down that that chain as you talked about you know like kind of top down if you don’t have your body shape and the neutral spinal position that you kind of talking about to then allow the roll and I mean your hips are down low and your feet are down lower anyway so you can try and get like in my head like without again

knowing much about the swimming side of if you’re trying to get the feet higher but you’ve got like a real you know extended thoracic spine and therefore kind of increased lumbar flexion or it’s kind of pulling it down you can’t have your feet up so it’s impossible to get a feet position where you want to be if you haven’t got the first you know the torso in the right position and you know everything kind of sinking off that for you

what a like cross the board you know what a maybe one or two of those really common mistakes you’ll see with with the average triathlete or average average runner

I guess the two if we start with the top down and you’re thinking about it so if you’re getting about like a footstrike or anything like that because that’s all influenced by what what you’re doing I think the two things is not understanding what arms are for and can do for you

would be one of the really important things it’s like they’re not they’re not just super force to the body when running they’re actually a really important part to the running mechanic however they do not give you force like no part of the arm or the top half of the torso is touching the ground so no amount of force that you’re trying to put through or tension that you’re trying to put through your body is actually implemented to propulsion so can’t actually work harder up top and get anything down bottom in fact it actually restricts the amount of movement you can get from the legs it’s it’s about trying to be as free and flowy and move as much movement as possible to allow the legs to move so I think it’s without understanding what the arms can do for you so I think the way that I explained it to people is like that for the arms are for tempo for balance and to create lift so if you don’t actually swing your arms up at any

point if it’s a flat movement if it’s a blocked movement if it’s a short movement and you’re not creating a vertical force up you are not creating any lift so we’re not creating any flats or floats or bounce if you’re not creating any up force it’s almost like trying to jump without throwing your arms up in the air just like having your hands in your pockets and trying to jump up like all you’re doing is just pushing yourself off the ground without any additional arm swing if they are not even you know even if they are really poor movements but at least if they were even that at least it’s sending the same message left and right down the body so often you just see two different movement patterns because it’s left to right dominate just it just a lack of awareness of what the arms are actually doing so at least they got to be even to create some semblance of balance and yeah that tempo that timing of movement sometimes it’s off beat

the rhythm is off left and right um is that pretty common is it like that people aren’t even with their their arm movements really yeah really common yeah um and it’s amazing it’s not amazing but it is amazing to a lot of people when they realize geez that is actually a lot different right and left and do you use video to show that or just usually you’re usually i’ll pick it up in a like in the first five meters but then the key or the really important part is actually me getting to getting the athlete to feel the difference rather than just tell them or show them because you could show someone they go oh geez that’s different but i don’t feel that but asking the right questions throughout the session to actually get them their own self-awareness of difference rather than me telling them and say okay feel right that’s what that’s doing feel left that’s what it’s doing it’s like giving them reference points and kind of asking questions to

get them to answer it rather than lead them as well yeah that becomes part of it or the trick of it is like knowing that it’s happening but not giving away and asking them the right questions for them to feel and give you the answer without you telling of it and that becomes the hard part as well because you’re like i can see it um and i can’t believe you can’t feel it but still going through that process of you know and just think of the funny bone in relation to the ribs what’s the right doing and then think about the left on the return what’s it doing is it more is it less is it different is it the same and trying to really tease it out until they get to feel the difference

well then they take they take ownership of the um well of that thing that they’re doing because they’re like okay i recognize this rather than you know i get we’ll get uh sometimes people get told like you’re you drop in your elbow or you’re crossing over this is like and especially with some junior kids it’s like they’ll get told they’re doing the wrong thing they know they’re doing the wrong thing but they just don’t like if you just told that it’s like well great how do i fix it or you never really quite take that on board to actually do anything to change it so that that art of coaching especially by asking the right questions and getting the person to uncover that themselves is um is great and one of the things we do when we’re in clinics is uh we’ll get we’ll play through the video of someone’s stroke and i’ll ask them uh after we play through it is there anything that you notice there that you might be doing doing wrong in the stroke or you

could do could do better and most of the time especially as we go through two or three or four people when they’ve had a chance to actually see what you know some of those things are they they recognize it straight away and after the sixth person i’m just thinking oh you don’t even need me here you can pick this stuff out yourself which is great because because they then they know what they’re looking for yeah yeah then you can see that in running as well i can you and i could be standing watching i think we talked about on the weekend standing watching two people run at the same pace and whether you have a really good knowledge of running or not if they’re at the same pace but one person moves really well one moves really poorly like it’s really natural for us to pick out which one is actually moving really well the next piece is someone might know why that is like why is that person moving better than the other person someone i don’t know i

know that one’s better i don’t know why and the next piece is okay what are the movements and the position they’re creating to notice that and then getting the person to feel it and then the fourth part is like okay what would you change or what call to change it you know and then that becomes back into your place so the person that sixth person go oh this this isn’t this and then you go what do you start with or what do how do i change it you know okay now comes back into law your area of expertise to go okay we’ll start with this then with this then with this yeah there’s a lot of uh that’s right there’s a lot of steps along the way one of the things i’ve found really um helpful with like i’ve put out a lot of youtube content we do the podcast and stuff is most people who come along they’ve got an understanding of what they should be doing just from seeing the videos and they visually they know what they should do

and then uh either like doing a video analysis or some clinics then they like then it’s kind of that that last step of right what am i what am i doing and then what how do i actually change my stroke in those those certain ways so there’s a lot of steps that um that go into it this podcast is brought to you by our sponsor form goggles form combines the world’s smartest goggles real-time metrics and guided workouts to make swimming fun it’s the game changing membership that’s redefining swimming form smart swim goggles feature a transparent display that shows your time distance and pace as you swim and with the monthly or annual memberships you get a huge library of guided workouts that give you workout instructions and tips as you swim for an incredible workout the form goggles are very much like what a garment does but it’s right in your goggles so that display of time pace and distance is something that i really love so for the

majority of the workouts that i do i’ll wear my form goggles because that way i can hit the exact speed and pace that i want to hit so every time i do a turn it’ll tell me what my speed was for that turn and it’ll tell me my cumulative time so if you’ve ever got any sets that we need to hit a certain pace or we need to progressively get quicker then i know exactly whether i’m on track or falling behind so that’s one of the main reasons that i love the form goggles and use them nearly every swim that i do i have a lot of clients as well that use these in the open water to tell them what their pace is because it can be a really hard thing to gauge when you go open water but the forms from goggles will tell you what your pace is when you’re swimming open water which is a really beneficial thing to do especially if you find it difficult to not go out too fast or to sustain the same speed across a 1k or 2k swim the other thing i really like

about the form goggles is that the form swim map it breaks down everything about your session so for a lot of sessions i’ll look back and see what was my stroke rate what was my stroke count for certain parts of the main set and with that feedback you can see your progression over time so as you get fitter as your technique improves you can see those things getting better so i really like to have a detailed analysis of each swim that i’m doing especially as we can see those improvements and when you purchase your form swim goggles you can save 15 us dollars off the purchase price by using our coupon code effortless on checkout or go to form swim dot com forward slash effortless that’s form swim dot com forward slash effortless all right back to the podcast the critical part of what i do in my collection which is like a real i mean streets don’t know what i’m um trying to teach and even on to the

online membership stuff is like the self awareness portion yeah in that understanding of current because the the skill acquisition model that i use is this this new way old way or old way new way yeah right you get that contrast and and the old way new way the first that the old way or current ways yeah breaking down the movement pattern so the first session you spend about half an hour actually just getting a feel of that current so they understand what old way feels like so they’ve really got this proprioception or kinesthetic awareness of what it feels like so then when we make a change they have their own internal contrast so that piece of you know as you’re saying you know feel this you’re doing this oh sorry you’re doing this and now i want you to do that if they go off by themselves if they don’t have their own internal awareness you know coaching tool to say okay this is what this feels like when i’m doing it

or this is what it feels like when i’m not and when i’m not it’s abc and d is happening and when i am abc and d is happening then they can actually create that awareness of okay when i’m doing it this is what it feels like when i’m not so i want to do it i want to do it and i want to create that repetition because most times i even remember like playing hockey when i was growing up and being taught a specific skill and i was pretty disciplined and i go off and do my own training like and you know i’ll be by myself i’d be you know flicking corners or whatever it is and thinking i’m doing it because you know like this is the position or this is the movement that are being coached but then coming back and not quite getting it or not getting it at all it’s like what are you doing i’ve been trying to know you weren’t doing what you were supposed to be doing you know okay well how about you teach me what i’m not supposed to be doing so it’s

almost unlearning the old version and knowing what that feels like so that i can create a repetition so i can create the habit and that becomes the real cornerstone of what i do and then the cues on top of it being a really the secondary important part it’s uh yeah that we do quite a few contrast drills and one of the things we’ve we’ve done in the this five day catch challenge that had a lot of people go through is is that you do the wrong thing first and the wrong thing might be what you are currently doing and for example when someone enters and they reach forwards some people will drift up and their fingers are pointing up and it slows them down and so we’re getting the kick in that position feel how slow it is what’s it like when you when you’re doing that and then when you change it you get to the right position how does that feel and and that builds up that awareness where that if they do if they do start swimming again and they

can feel i’ve got all this turbulence all this resistance on my hand out in front i’m probably in the wrong position so then they know know how to change it so it’s it is it’s that at that awareness especially most athletes are self-coached that you know that you and i probably probably work with and even ones in squad i mean i i know a lot of elite level swimmers who they won’t get much technique feedback at all within a session because the coach has got 30 swimmers in there so essentially technique wise they’re probably self-coached still so they need to have that awareness still yeah well that’s i mean that’s running to a tee you know because they don’t do technique so it’s literally yes your group run run more run faster and that’s how you get faster like that’s literally so if someone wants to technique it’s it’s what they’ve picked up as a kid it’s how they’ve done it’s how they’ve always done it or it’s you know oh

shoot i keep getting injured so i’ll try and do this myself or what am i doing wrong that’s like that is pretty much running one-on-one so the variation between good technique to bad is quite broad because it’s just you know throw some eggs at a wall and off you go

yeah it’s just an ideal that was with swimming it’s techniques so obviously it’s so obviously important do you come up against people who will say well there’s not much technique to running like you just you just run like what what would you say to those people well i think and i used swimming a lot to say like how important technique is and and obviously it’s a real understanding of it because if you i mean the consequences of not being able to swim are pretty dire you know but then when it gets into like performance sort of things like the the hydrodynamics that can hold you back becomes much more influential than say what aerodynamics in running the thing that’s really important in running though is the amount of shock and load that is going through the body upon each footstep so it’s actually not about performance it’s actually about injury prevention and injury and prevention and performance are on the same spectrum it’s just that you see

a lot more of the former rather than the latter because people just go out and run so yeah you hear it a bit and i think for a long period of time because i think technique hasn’t been done well it has just been oh well you just run how you run and and you just kind of manage it but i think the importance of understanding that retraining is possible done the right way is actually going to be really beneficial and i think that’s been the missing link for such a long time for running i mean of all the of all the people that come to clinics you i’d say a large part of them are triathletes and i get a lot of people actually who were runners distance runners ultramarathon runners who can’t run anymore and so they’ve started swimming because they still need they still want to keep fit and but their their needs have given out and lots of other things and so i think if people if people who love running if they could avoid

that that point at that ending point where they just can no longer physically do it probably because of bad technique along the way there somewhere it’s um yeah what a difference that their life uh that would how different their life would be as a result of uh just getting some technique help particularly if that’s something that they really really love and obviously they love an endurance based activity that’s why they’ve gone from running and they can’t do anymore so come to swimming or for some people cycling which is a similar kind of um pathway after running if it’s not possible anymore because i think that we can load different tissues within the body and we talk about you know specific loading within training programs being you know that five to ten percent increase and you know being really safe and and um conscious of not building up too much too soon which a lot of people still do wrong so there’s like one one

poor part of it even movement aside but if you’re not loading tissue that can adapt in that manner then it doesn’t matter how safe you are so if you’re moving in in a really poor manner and you’re hitting and loading bones and joints with muscles and tendons as an assister then it doesn’t matter how safe you are you’re going to hit a breaking point and then if you’re loading those you know bones and joints they’re going to break down and at one point enough they’re not going to recover whereas if you actually flip it and if you are moving in a manner that you load muscles and tendons over joints and bones as as the the supporters then all of a sudden you can build up resilience and conditioning because you’re actually loading a tissue that can adapt and adopt to a movement pattern but the movement patterns are really different it’s almost the difference between walking which is a leverage full leg bone system mechanic to running which

should be a little bit more upper upper leg and using muscles and tendons to create stored energy and almost like a springboard kind of return of energy that’s two different movements and is there much difference between between the different paces now i’m not talking about 100 meter sprint here i’m talking about something from like a an all-day steady pace with your running like a jog compared to where you’re starting to get into into that sort of 5k 10k sort of pace and effort is there much difference in the the technique or how you would teach someone or does that pretty much carry across the board no it should it should carry across the the whole board and even up into to sprinting for some into some regard because an efficient powerful movement isn’t efficient powerful movement irrespective if you’re going at you know six minute pace where you’re running it flat out if you’re getting it from the right area and

you’re doing it the right amount of times or more times or big range or whatever it may be like somewhere in that range it’s just a smaller or a bigger version of a powerful efficient movement so if you look at someone like you know someone who’s probably the flag bearer of technique at the moment because he’s phenomenal at running but also because of how he moves is is Elliot Kibchogi like he’s a phenomenal mover but he moves the same whether he’s running at you know he probably wouldn’t run much slower than five minute pace which is which is really disappointing really disappointing but then he runs it to 40 per kilometer pace it’s the same movement pattern done bigger and or more often doesn’t change so you can just see him as the same pattern and he goes faster or slower so even when you start to go faster so it doesn’t much it doesn’t look different it’s just a bigger or smaller version this podcast is also brought to you by

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with these things that you teach you’ve got quite a few cues you mentioned your online membership like there’s the number of cues there

how long do you do you see it taking for people to notice a difference with their running and then how do you how do you recommend that they implement this stuff because when we do our clinics we talk about doing couple of drills in every session in your warm-up to set yourself up and then just go about your main set because it’s about the frequency of doing things it’s not about how long you do them for because it’s changing that muscle memory and the technique in so we harp on about frequency and just doing a little bit of it in the beginning what’s your approach

the way I work is very much you know like one cue at a time and allowing someone you know a good four to six weeks of actually just focusing on that one thing easy pace, session, speed work whatever it is it’s like this is your this is your cue to work on for the next could be three to six weeks now depending on the cue depending on the individual depending how often they run you know how quick they adapt it just depends you know there’s a varying range of how quick someone can adapt and implement it into their their habitual movement pattern and that becomes into each individual so the stuff that you talk about on the online stuff it’s you know all the cues are set out but it’s also set out in a manner that

gives the athlete the knowledge to understand when they’d implement it how long they’d hold it for and then what to go to next so it’s all kind of set out in that in that regard and it is very much give yourself time thinking about one thing don’t think about anything else be aware what it’s doing for you and what it feels like when you’re doing it be aware what it feels like when you’re not doing it and there’ll come a time where it becomes a natural movement pattern and then that’s the time where you can actually move on to the next cue yeah yeah most most people don’t give give the things that they’re practicing enough time for it to kick in and and make a difference and I had had someone on the podcast probably 12 months ago now and she she said she came to a clinic she was was practicing things for I think it was like 10 weeks she was practicing those things for 10 weeks time stayed exactly the same and then all of a sudden something

clicked and it came together and then right away she was down like 10 or 15 seconds per 100 when it all just started to come together and and it’s that’s when it becomes the the habit that you don’t need to think about it it becomes subconscious and you can just go you can go out there you can focus on your pacing in your effort and you don’t need necessarily need to think that much about the the stroke you because it’s just that new new habit that you’ve formed so yeah it takes it takes time some people are a lot quicker obviously you know four to six weeks some people it takes a little bit a little bit longer yeah yeah yeah for sure and I mean that just becomes absolutely individual some it’s like similar to like you’d coach different individuals differently just because of their their language patterns their the experiences previously like you need to kind of you know

and I work not because everyone’s different which they are it’s more about allowing that individual the best possibility of understanding and therefore implementing it but I think the thing about running is that because it is such a you know like heavily heavy impact or body impact sport I mean if you’re doing something better and you have that new old way awareness if it doesn’t feel better immediately it probably isn’t it might be hard to continually implement it because it’s not your habit and that becomes a really strong cue like that that brain is aware it’s like geez that actually feels better I’ve got to concentrate on it and I do have to make sure that I’m continually doing it but I can feel when I’m not doing it because it doesn’t feel as light as free as you know explode your whatever it is depending on that cue so you get that real kinesthetic awareness of better and go shit I’m chasing that all the time until it becomes habitual

but if you’ve got like you mentioned like if you’ve got

two or three or five things like it become really critical of like

running in particular like programs or you know two hour long

sessions and seminars where people are running in a big group for starters and then being given like five or six different things to go home for and practice now they might be the right thing so like I’ve not been critical of you know the information given it’s like they go home and if you’re focusing on one thing there’s five things that aren’t being focused on and then you okay well focus on the second thing and then there’s still five things that aren’t getting focused on and all of a sudden three or four or five weeks down the track you’ve been thinking about these four or five or six different things none of them are habit and straight away someone will just go I stuff it like it hasn’t changed anything I forget it I’m just thinking of all these different things and none of them are becoming habit because it doesn’t have time

and it doesn’t have focus and so it doesn’t become habit yeah yeah that’s that’s what I say to people at the end of a clinic is will often give them three things sometimes two to the the big rocks that are going to help them move forward but then I’ll normally say it will spend the next four weeks or so on this thing or maybe two things together if they’re sort of related you can you can do the two but yeah that’s it don’t try and do them all at once don’t even got three things don’t try and do them all at once just just pick one maybe two and then you can move on to the next thing and there’s an order of things you should work through we’ve got our five core principles that follow that follow that order you’ve got your cues on the on the membership there you’ve got you’ve got the order there working sort of top down so yeah and like it’s it requires patience it requires people to know what to expect going forwards in in how they will

how they will react to it and to and to not be looking for those speed gains straight away necessarily because it just it takes time but with that long-term focused person they’re the ones that six months 12 months down the track they’re gonna be the ones that are running better because they’re being willing to just just commit to it and take the time to practice there’s a there’s a blessing and curse we’re running in regards to how many steps take in a minute so how many how many strokes per minute like is a gauge or a rough you know between easy pace and you know when they’re going harder but where is that range sitting for swimming yeah you say most people would average like 50 strokes a minute just if they’re swimming comfortably and that might go to between 60 to 70 for for your average person when they’re going fast you do have like a little bit of time per stroke to probably work on you know two or three different things because once you do a catch

and then a pool then you’ve got the other side or let’s just say for those if I might have no idea because I’m horrible

but you’ve got maybe you know one second or maybe slightly more slightly less per stroke in running you’ve got three steps two to three steps in each second so it’s like it’s happening really almost impossible to think about you know one or two things I’m sorry two or more things each step or each movement pattern because there’s going to be two and a half to three per second yeah just happening so it’s like it’s almost impossible whereas I can’t fully understand because you’ve got like a bit over a second people are pretty good to kind of go bang bang and then next bang bang and then next whatever it means and then until it becomes have it where’s he ever running I mean you just it’s a blessing that you can get so many repetitions in one run but it’s also a curse because you can’t think of anything more than one thing yeah yeah that’s that’s exactly right I didn’t think about didn’t think about it that way but that that is one of the good things

about swimming is you know they can do too if it’s head position and maybe your alignment you can focus on those too could because yeah you’ve got that a little bit more more time but yeah running happens very very quickly

and so for someone listening to this they and as I said we’ve got a lot of triathletes who listen and people who run for general fitness where can they find out more about some of these cues that you’re talking about and and where to find you so there’s a there’s a fair bit of information about the the membership program on tbrunner.com

so the balanced runner that is tbrunner.com

information about the program what it looks like how to be sitting up so there’s that sort of stuff and then in regards to what I do how I do it there’s a fair bit of information on Instagram about

something new and old some of the success stories so they’re probably the two best ways to kind of look at it so Instagram is at the balanced runner or one word they’re probably the two best ways but yeah

membership specific on the on the website what I do on Instagram that’s probably the two best ways yeah fantastic and those that are listening to this if you do want to become a member to to Paul’s membership there and improve your running use the code effortless on checkout and we’ve set up a discount there for the for the first month so Paul appreciate you coming on and when I when I sort of first saw what you you were doing with your coaching I thought though this is like the this is the effortless swimming for for running I really like your approach there and I appreciate you coming on sharing some of those some of those things and we got to catch up on the weekend it’s just yeah I mean it’s I think we’re in a pretty similar similar place in terms of our coaching and who we like to work with how we like to to do it and I mean I’m learning all the time and I like learning from people in different sports and even just some of the cues that you use

and how you approach it like working top down it’s good to see how you how you do it because there’s just so much you can learn from from different sports so I’m yeah I’m going through your membership at the moment and even just I was watching one then you’re talking about like the how you hold your hands so it’s like hands sort of up near like your your pecs almost and got the elbows bent you’re talking about this triangle if you’re looking front on from the elbows to the hands we talk about a power diamond in a similar position when you’re under the water so oh my god there’s so many so many correlations here that it’s yeah it’s quite funny seeing seeing that so yeah I mean enjoying watching that well and I appreciate you being on the podcast no it’s like on the the similarities like you’re talking about we’re all similarly shaped body so there’s going to be like similar angles like we’re all coming from the the same bit of plasticine

and then it’s like the movement’s different and what angles are we going to use from there so that’s why it becomes probably cool in regards to like where we’re using a similar plasticine model to start with but then we’re

I look really appreciate

you having me on the podcast and but also I think for some of the listeners like Brent’s been really influential in helping me get to the point where I’m at with it with the membership program like you’re really influential saying well you know you’ve got people who want to actually get better at running but don’t want to do one on one and you know you’re not really providing them opportunities so you’ve probably given these guys more opportunity as a result just in the running sense you know which has been really cool and and like I’m very appreciative of that that side of things too so keep my ass into gear a little bit and but also provide a different perspective to it which has been really I appreciate it but like I remember chatting those couple of years ago where you had a like it’s a little bit of a hang up on like I want to make sure people are doing these things correctly so I’m only doing one-on-ones and and I had a similar thing

when I first started it’s like I want to make sure that people are doing this 100% so I’m just I’m not going to put put stuff out there but the thing is like there’s people that want to improve their running and if you don’t if you don’t teach them the stuff that you would teach in person then you’re going to be limiting it to probably 1% of those people who could learn that stuff and improve and the amount of people who have just watched my youtube videos and they’ve emailed me and said like I’ve gone from this time to this time and and I love swimming it’s like well that wouldn’t have happened if I if I was just too caught up in just like only doing one-on-ones and so I’m glad you took that step and and put that together in a in a program online where people can wherever they are in the world they can go through it on their own time and they can learn those those things that you do do teach in person but I think as a coach you know we are perfectionists

and we want to make sure that everyone gets a good result it’s it is hard to sometimes just let that go but yeah yeah well it’s it’s kind of yeah it was a bit of letting go and not you know I mean the quality is my number one value for what what we’re kind of doing so but you can still create quality in that format and understanding that you know it’s it’s not the same format so whilst it’s still yeah it’s not it’s it’s still creating that quality that I pride myself on just in a different way and I think that became really important for my mindset as well I wasn’t trying to you know scale a business I wasn’t trying to create anything more in regards to a financial side of things it was creating another option of quality and then that that really flipped my thinking as well I was like no okay so now and then it’s I spent nine ten months just of creating the quality so it took ages to kind of put it down I wasn’t just like you know record go back

it was literally okay make sure that I’m explaining it in a manner that will give the best opportunity to get the outcome from this format

yeah it’s it’s good I’m kind of going to that moment with our beginner freestyle course I was hoping to have it done by like January or February and I’m just not yeah there’s still a bit more work I need to need to do and but that’s yeah that’s that’s right you know you you want to keep the quality up there because that’s what your reputation is is built on is the quality and and it’s it’s really important so yeah and you’ve certainly done that with the with the membership so yeah thanks again for being I don’t know and I’ll get you back on down down the track as well once I’m once to get a chance to implement some cues into my own running and

be sub three minute pace for the 10k yeah well look if you can do that and I’ll hang my hat on that put me on the front page of your website buddy oh maybe I need to start the I’ll do similar and start to get in the pool a little bit although coming in coming into winter is the it’s the wrong time of you getting in the pool I see yeah yeah using your Friday catch thing thanks mate I appreciate you being on no thanks mate thanks 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 The Effortless Swimming Of Running with Paul McKinnon (The Balanced Runner) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

I’ve got another guest on today’s podcast. He is someone who I started working with recently to help improve his swimming, and he’s gone from around 205 pace per 100 and down to the low 140s. I hope you enjoy it!

01:31 Swimming Background

Check out the Effortless Swimming membership for online coaching options.

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

Welcome back to another episode of the Effortless Swimming podcast. I’ve got another guest on today, someone who started working with fairly recently, to help improve his swimming, and he’s gone from around 205 paces per 100, and down to the low 140s. And he sent me an email last week, and I said, I’d love to get you on to a podcast, chat about what you’ve changed over the last couple of months to see where that improvement has come from. Because I know a lot of the swimmers and the triathletes that listen to this podcast, that watch our YouTube channel, they are round about that two minute pace when they first start. And I think breaking that two minute barrier is one of the first things that a lot of people look to do. So Felipe, welcome to the podcast. Oh, thank you, Brenton. It’s a very nice pleasure to be here. And I was so happy to have our improvements. I had to email you and congratulate you. And that’s why I’m here. I’m here to tell

good things because the program is incredible. And I want more people to hear about it. I appreciate that very much. And I mean, all the all the coaching in the world doesn’t do anything unless the swimmer themselves actually does the work. So put that right right back on you because you’ve obviously done some things very well to make such a good improvement in a short amount of time. So when you first started, I guess when you first came across effortless swimming and stuff that we do, what were you what was your your swimming like before you started with this? So I always been an athlete, actually, I love to run my father’s ultra marathoner. He runs 100 ks 160 ks he loves it. And he still does. Yeah, he’s 63 was his birthday yesterday actually. Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah. And he loves to do this stuff. And I start to run because of him. So all my life I’ve been running, I’ve been playing American football,

soccer, wrestling, I love to do sports, but I never been a swimmer. So during the pandemics, like most people happened to most people, I got very fat. I gained a lot of weight. I gained almost 35 kilos. I was with 103 kilos. So I wanted to lose that weight. And I had a knee problem. I couldn’t run too much. I love to run but I couldn’t run too much. And because of my weight, I couldn’t run even like five minutes because my knee would start to hurt. So I had to start doing another things to start to get back on running. So I started biking. And it was very nice. And I really appreciated the time that I biked and I lost some weight. But I felt that I needed more. And right next to my house, there was a gym that had a swimming. So my wife, she used to be a very good swimmer and she stopped because of all the our business and the pandemic. And she said, Oh, why don’t we go back to swimming? So you can start

swimming. I love to swim. You can swim with me. You get motivated. We lose weight together. I said, Okay, good. And I tell you, I didn’t like swimming. I hated swimming. Because swimming lacks something that other sports don’t. It’s not natural for most people. It’s different than running. Because when you run, you, you say, I want to get faster, just move your leg faster, you know, you want to bike faster, you just move your, you just put my power in your legs. But if you say, I want to swim faster, sometimes you, you swing your arms very fast, and you go nowhere, you actually swing slower. So I was getting very frustrated. But I still I still went with her and I started to do triathlons because I kind of I was losing weight, I could go back to running. But swimming was also something that I have to swim. I have to swim because triathlons have to swimming. But I wasn’t seeing much improvement. So we hired a coach here to do private

lessons because me and my wife live in a small city here in Brazil, very small city. And we didn’t have coaches right on the side of the pool. And we hired a coach was very expensive. And we thought, oh, okay, so she will help me get faster, she will improve my technique. And what I saw was that the coach didn’t help much. She was she she fixed some of my technique. She had some drills on training. But it was very superficial. And so I started to look at videos on YouTube to see how I could improve my swimming because I wasn’t really happy. And I realized that there was a lot of things that could have done that was much easier than what was being taught to me that would improve my swim. So I came across your channel. And I started to learn about the catch and how to position myself in the water. And this changed a lot. It was much easier to me to understand how to swim. And that thing that I said earlier,

because swimming doesn’t have and it’s not natural, started to feel natural, because I understand how to swim, how to move my arms under the water, something that most of the coaches, they don’t do. They just tell you, oh, you have to swing like that and do like that. But they never tell you what to do, and what to fix and how to fix or why you do this, why you do that. And when I start to practice what you said, it was like night and day. And so I had to fire this coach and we start to work out just with the lessons, with the videos and also the workouts that my coach, my triathlon coach used to send me. But the improvement wasn’t that great. Also, I was swimming like 205 to 200 meters. So my wife said, oh, look, this guy is Brenton, he has this five day catch challenge. I said, I don’t know, man, five day, what, what, what will help? I don’t believe much because I’ve been swimming for like four months,

five months, and I’ve been trying nothing helps, how, how comes, how come my five day challenge, a five day catch challenge will help me. But I mean, it’s not something that I would waste a lot of time or money, it was just five days. And it was, I don’t even remember the price was so cheap. So I said, okay, let’s try. And it was really, really cool because the first lesson you taught something really, really nice, that is the entry. Because that’s something that I had, I had a lot of, lots of problems before, because I never knew how to do the proper entry. And they was, they were like, always telling me, oh, you have to do it like this, have to do like this. Okay, well, what is this? How do I do this? So you talk, no, you have to do with the tip of your fingers and push forward. And you hear a noise when you hear the noise. That’s when you see that is you’re doing the right. And you see the bubbles come

out. So it was very easy to understand what should I do? And how should I not do? And what was I had to do, right? And it was, it was incredible. This first day that we practice, I could see that my time was a little faster. Of course, it’s not easy to see like one, two seconds, but I could see that was streaming faster. So I got really excited because it was so easy to put the lesson on on the swimming or in practice. So okay, let’s finish this. And right after the five days, I could see that my times have dropped for like 510 seconds per 100 meters. So it was really nice. And then I went to the membership, where you do the video analysis. And then and I thought to myself, wow, I don’t know if this will change much. I cannot believe that one video analysis will change a lot. And I was swimming 150, 150 during this time. And then you do the analysis and right after the analysis, something you told me, and I was swimming 145 right

in the next session. So it was really incredible. Can you remember what that was? Yes, because my head was like this. I was swimming like this. Too deep. Too deep. Yeah, and my shoulders was rotating a lot. So this was creating a drag and just it was incredible to see. I’m telling you, because right after I put my head up, I could see that I was swimming so much faster. I mean, I could feel I was swimming so much faster. And and also my shoulder. So it was really an easy adjustment that if you didn’t tell me I would do this for months and months and months and months without somebody to tell me, oh, this was is wrong. And how much time would I waste how much said, would I waste trying to train properly and do the workouts and don’t see the easy results because this is easy results. It’s results that you can change like this, you know, of course, you have to someone to tell you to do the analysis. But how much time

would I waste if I didn’t have this proper analysis? So I was really happy to have you seen my video and taught me how to do well and to put in practices and it working. That’s great to hear. And I mean, what you’re talking about there is safe. There’s sort of two levels of membership is we’ve got the stroke analysis membership where people send videos every week or two. And I work with them one on one. And then we’ve got just we’ve got our general video membership, which is what you’re a part of. And each month I do a member’s call where people will send in their videos and I’ll I’ll analyze them and I’ll give them one or two things just to focus on like what you had there with with head position. And I had a swimmer on the weekend who was he had trouble with his hips and legs sinking. And so the queue that he thought was well head it’s all about head position. So he was swimming with his head about 30 centimetres

underneath the water. So he was really, really deep and was basically swimming underwater. And then we got him to change it said look, you don’t need to go that far down with your head to bring your legs up. It’s one factor. But there’s a lot of other things that contribute to good body position. And so then we just got him to change it. So the top of his head was still out of the water. He was looking slightly forwards, not straight down slightly forwards. And his body position was exactly the same. He was still horizontal there. But it’s a much easier position to be in rather than trying to swim underneath the water. So sometimes there’s queues that people will pick up from coaches or videos and they can take it a little bit too far. So without that guidance, they’re like, you know, they might be doing the thing that they’re told to do, but they might be doing it too much or might not be completely there. So I

think that’s why it’s good to be able to get that sort of feedback from someone who knows whether or not you’re doing the right thing. Because there’s just so much to think about in swimming, but it’s very easy to either not know what you’re doing wrong or not know what the right thing to do is just like your entry. Because there’s a bit going on when you come over the top of the water. But as you mentioned, if you enter fingertips first, your elbow is up and then you just reach out in front and straighten the arm, you’ll often hear the elbow slap down a little bit. And if you are in a very quiet place, you listen to a good swimmer, you’ll hear that elbow just slapping down. Now it doesn’t mean you need to have this big splash every time. You don’t want that, but you will hear that elbow slap. So it’s a good queue that you’ve actually entered in the right position. So you mentioned with the first coach you started working with that the changes were

superficial. So by that, do you mean as in more like visually, it might make your stroke look better, but it didn’t lead to faster times? Is that what got that right? What happened is that I move a lot by feedback and I understand that your coaching

teaches how to listen to your body properly or feel the water properly. So what usually she would tell me was, oh, don’t cross your arm like that. Don’t cross your arm in front of your head. I said, okay, I won’t cross my arm. So I was trying to swim and I was crossing my arm. And this was like for weeks. And she went, oh, you’re crossing your arm. You’re crossing your arm. You’re crossing your arm. And I said, okay, how can I improve that? And you told me something that really clicked on me. And he said, oh, think that you are swimming on rails, that you’re moving through rails. So I said, oh, that’s really nice. That’s really easy to understand and to memorize and to put in practice because you said, oh, don’t swing your arm. So okay, so should I go here? Should I go here? Should I go here? When you said, oh, swing like you’re swimming on rails, it’s easy to understand. And you say, oh, listen to the water splashing. It’s something that you

can understand. And you see, oh, I’m doing wrong. I’m doing right or am I doing wrong? And also with the other drills because sometimes the coaches tell you oh, your head is too deep or it’s too close to your body or anything just like me. And sometimes you don’t know, okay, so what should I do? Oh, just move your head upwards. But how upwards? How much? So because you can see in your videos that you show the proper position and what to look for when you do these kinds of things. It’s much easier to understand and to put in practice, you know. When you say, oh, so let’s prepare for the catch, this phase of the catch. Okay, so you do the drill where you feel the water hitting your hands and how you should feel about the water hitting your arms. So this prepares you. You feel the feedback from your body and can put that in practice. It’s different than said, oh, just do like this with your arms. And because the coach sometimes

is not inside the pool, he won’t tell you, oh, you’re doing it this right or you’re doing it this wrong. And this is what happened with my wife because she’s been a swimmer for like five years and she never heard of the catch property. She never done the catch property because all the coaches were told, oh, you have to put your elbow upwards. You have to swing your elbow upwards. Okay, so what else? Okay, just put your elbow upwards and that that will help. But it’s not that it’s not just that it’s a lot of things that come before and come after. And so this helped a lot to understand why, to understand how and to, and the better thing is to see how your body or the water responds to what you’re doing. So this changes everything. It’s much easier to put in practice than just oh, don’t cross your arms, you know. Yeah, that’s the, and I’ve, yeah, I’ve experienced that too. And I had, again, some swimmers on the weekend at some

clinics were running. And one of the swimmers was saying, a coach would say, you drop in your elbow. You’re dropping your elbow. It’s like, I don’t even know what that means. Like, I don’t know what it’s really talking about and what I should be doing instead. So it’s all well and good to point out what someone’s doing wrong in their stroke. But if you don’t give them the way to fix it, you don’t explain it properly on what they actually need to do, and then how they can start to retrain that movement. So like, well, there’s no point really sort of pointing it out. So yeah, then that’s something that I’ve tried to do with the coaching and explain it in a way where you can actually understand why you do it, what you should actually do, and then how it should feel. Because swing is very much a feeling sort of sport. There’s a lot going on. And if you know how it should feel and know that when you do make some changes that it won’t

necessarily feel better straight away, because it might be different than what you’ve done. And sometimes different feels awkward and uncomfortable, which is often the case. Then you’ll be willing to put up with that awkward feeling for a couple of weeks until it starts to become natural. So yeah, I think that’s a really important part that sometimes gets missed when people are being coached. This podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Form Goggles. Form combines the world’s smartest goggles, real-time metrics and guided workouts to make swimming fun. It’s the game-changing membership that’s redefining swimming. Form Smart Swim Goggles feature a transparent display that shows your time, distance and pace as you swim. And with the monthly or annual memberships you get a huge library of guided workouts that give you workout instructions and tips as you swim for an incredible workout. The Form Goggles are very much like what a Garmin does, but

it’s right in your goggles. So that display of time, pace and distance is something that I really love. So for the majority of the workouts that I do, I’ll wear my Form Goggles because that way I can hit the exact speed and pace that I want to hit. So every time I do a turn, it’ll tell me what my speed was for that turn and it’ll tell me my cumulative time. So if you’ve ever got any sets that we need to hit a certain pace or we need to progressively get quicker, then I know exactly whether I’m on track or falling behind. So that’s one of the main reasons that I love the Form Goggles and use them nearly every swim that I do. I have a lot of clients as well that use these in the open water to tell them what their pace is, because it can be a really hard thing to gauge when you go open water, but the Form Goggles will tell you what your pace is when you’re swimming open water, which is a really beneficial thing to do, especially if you find it

difficult to not go out too fast or to sustain the same speed across a 1k or 2k swim. The other thing I really like about the Form Goggles is that the form swim map, it breaks down everything about your session. So for a lot of sessions I’ll look back and see what was my stroke rate, what was my stroke count for certain parts of the main set, and with that feedback you can see your progression over time. So as you get fitter, as your technique improves, you can see those things getting better. So I really like to have a detailed analysis of each swim that I’m doing, especially as we can see those improvements. And when you purchase your Form Swim Goggles, you can save $15 US off the purchase price by using our coupon code effortless on checkout or go to formswim.com forward slash effortless. That’s formswim.com forward slash effortless. All right, back to the podcast. So now you had a race on the weekend and you said you, I think

was that your first, your first win in your age group for triathlon? Yes, this was my first, first, first place in my age group. So I had a PR on, this is me because people don’t see, I had a PR on the swim for a spring triathlon. My, my best time was 16 minutes. So I could reach 12, 12 minutes in 15 seconds design. So I was really happy and this 16 minutes was like four months ago. So it’s a really big improvement. Yeah. And, and this changed just right after I started to do the lessons and start to practice what you, you teach. And I mean the evolution is incredible. I was, I was telling my wife before the race, I was on the Coral with the others competitors. And that was a guy that used to run with me and he was very, very fast. And, and, and I always, always the time that was running with him I was very scared when he was doing with me because I knew that I would have to put a lot of work to catch him. And I knew that he

was a very good triathlete and a very good swimmer. So, and I said, okay, here we go again. I would suffer to catch this guy either on the bike or the run because I know that I won’t be able to catch him on the swim because I’ve been swimming for so little time and I don’t know if I’m a good swimmer. I don’t know how much I have improved. So, we went to the swim and it was an open water swing on the ocean. It was really nice. But then you don’t see much during the water, during the open water swim. It’s everybody and the waves and the sun. You cannot see much. But when we were getting up to, to take off our wetsuits and run for the transition, I saw the guy right on my side and I said, wow, I really have improved a lot because it’s not usual. This guy you used to swim when he was a kid, he was a child. So, for me it was really impressive because all I hear from people that other triathletes, oh, when you start to swim, when you’re old, it’s much

harder. Oh, you won’t be able to catch people that have been swimming since they were kids or these guys, you have to swim for many years to be in the front of the pack. But I mean, I don’t think that’s true. I think that people sometimes they don’t have the right coaching or the right teaching or they sometimes focus on things that are not like time, they won’t improve your time so much in the space. So, I was very happy to see my improvement. I was very happy to see this guy. And also, something that I always focus on is to spend as little time on my training and do these little hacks. Of course, they are not hacks but some things to pick up speed very easily. Like, if you can use a triathlon bike, a time trial bike, to bike your triathlon, it’s easier than using a road bike. If you have carbon shoes for your running, you should use your carbon shoes. So, I can tell you that your coaching was like carbon shoes for the swimming

because so much has improved. Carbon shoes for your swimming. Yeah, it’s really, it was really something that was amazing. I could not believe it. That’s fantastic. And speaking before the call, you also mentioned that you, you hadn’t really done one before but you, you did just recently like an all-out 100 just to see what you could get down to and you said you were down to a 122. Yes, I did. Right before the call, I wanted to see how much have I have improved because my fastest time was like 130 to something like two months ago and I don’t practice too much 100 sets. But this last Friday, my coach sent me 100 sets, five 100 sets and my last one was 122. So, I was very, very, very, very happy. That’s great. It’s funny that we had another guest on Matthew Tones and similar sort of progression to you. I think when he started from Emma, he might have been about a 210 and then he did a, he did an all-out 100 just to see where he’s at and he

was also 122. So, maybe your Matthew can be in competition with each other across the world. Yeah, that’s terrific and a huge improvement. So, before we finish up,

what does your swimming feel like now compared to four or five months ago? What do you feel in the water? Oh, the first thing is, I feel like I’m not hating swimming anymore. So, that’s a big win? Yeah, that’s like the huge win because I was riding so much to go to swim because, I mean, it’s hard. When you progress in the running, when you start running, like you start to run one kilometer, the next week you’re running two, the next week you’re running three and swimming is not like that. Actually, it wasn’t like that because now I can see that I can improve a lot. I can, my technique is so, has improved a lot that my body can perform much better and I can improve my times just by improving my stamina, my endurance. So, this changed a lot. I feel like confident that I am doing the right thing inside the water, not something that, oh, I think it’s right. I think that’s how you do it. Now I know that, okay, for me to swim

fast I have to have a good entry and then do the catch and pull and leave the water. And I know how to position my body. I know how to see if my breathing is right, how should I breathe. So, these kinds of things, they help a lot because you don’t feel like you’re just there in the water doing something that sometimes you don’t know if it’s the right thing or if it’s improving or if it’s getting worse because that’s how I felt in the beginning. Okay, is my stroke right? How do I know that my body position is okay? So, this helps a lot and it helps to see that I’m improving. And I feel that that’s something that rewards you. It’s very nice to go out in the pool and see that you improve at least one second. So, this was the thing that I liked the most of this program. We’ve got another member’s call coming up today where you’ve sent in another video. So, I’ll have a look and see what would the next one or two things

be for you to improve. And I think a great aim would be looking to get under or around you. That 130 mark would be a huge, a really big result. And I think you’ve got a half Ironman coming up in September from memory. September, yes. My goal was to swim 140 but I’m swimming 142 now. Maybe I can move up my goal. Let’s see. Yeah, let’s see. That’d be a good challenge. Well, I think come September after race, it’d be great to have you on the podcast and see how you’ve gone. So, no pressure leading into September but it’d be yeah, great to see how you’ve gone. It would be a pleasure, of course. To continue to follow the story. So, Felipe, I appreciate you being on the podcast and thanks very much for putting your trust in myself and the coaching to make you a better swimmer. And it’s awesome to see that you’ve been able to do that because I just love working with people who are open to changing and they get those results. So, thanks very much and

yeah, appreciate you being on the podcast. Thank you, Brenton. Just like I told you, I love to give people back what they deserve and you deserve a lot. I feel that there’s a lot of people that may be watching this podcast that are on the fence. How should I try his technique, his coaching, should I try this, should I try that and say, man, you just try it because the lessons are so short and they have so much improvement, they help you a lot and you feel much better. If you hate swimming just like I did if you are struggling to catch people on the water, I mean, I was that triathlete four or five months ago and now I cannot believe how the results I’m getting. So, that’s why I sent you an email just to send my best emotions to thank you because it really is incredible. I was hearing people said, oh, you never gonna be a good swimmer if you don’t swim four times a week, four kilometers every session and doing for three years and no, it’s not

like that. Of course it’s health but there’s something that you can do that will help you much more. Yeah, technique is a big one. Well, I think a good aim would be to beat your running friend out of the water and trying to catch on the bike. It’s a good aim. So, thanks again for your power. Appreciate you being on the podcast. Thank you, Renton. 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 [Case Study] 2:05 to 1:40/100m in 4 months with Felipe Telles appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Today, my guest is Katherine Starr, a former Olympian, and Commonwealth Games athlete. Katherine advocates for a safe and abused-free environment for athletes. Join us as she shares her incredible and inspiring story.

00:55 Becoming an Olympic Athlete

Get in Touch with Katherine:

Rescue Me: A Powerful Memoir by an Olympian:

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 Catherine Starr, who’s a former Olympian and Commonwealth Games athlete. Catherine, welcome to the podcast. Oh, thank you for having me on. I’m so excited to be here. So we got introduced by Julie McDonald, who was on my podcast a couple of months ago, talking about her experience at the elite, at the elite level of swimming competition and her journey through that. And she she introduced me to you and said, you should speak to Catherine. She’s got an amazing story, which has directed the what you’re doing now with your with your work with other athletes. So would you like to talk a bit about your your history as a swimmer and and what happened and what you’re doing now with your work? So, so what I’m doing now is, well, the history of my swimming. So I started swimming at three years old. And I had that fire fire in my belly, and I was going to be a swimmer.

And my first chapter of my book, which is called Rescue Me a Powerful Memoir by an Olympian. And the first chapter is called Pure Passion, which you can read it on, read it on my website. And I just talk about just that

when you when you’re just like that pure joy, the pure joy of doing something and in this energy inside of me, that this force inside of me was, I was going to learn how to swim like I was convinced I knew how to swim. I’d never had a lesson in my life. But I was convinced that I, I could swim. And here I am as three years old, you know, screaming my head off, swearing that I’m going to get in that pool and swim. And, and I did. And it was, you know, and then the dynamics of everything changed for me. Like I, like I was good. I was good at something. Like I felt like that feeling of what it is to be good in my whole world changed around me. And that became my drive. And so fast forward to eight years old, I’m the best swimmer in the state I have broken every state record. I’m, you know, I’m just as this young elite prodigy at eight years old and the 76 Olympics come on and I am aging myself. But the 76 Olympics come on and, and I just saw like one that how

proud my dad was. And so, and this is where so my I was on the British Olympic team. And this is where as some of you are going to be like, but she doesn’t sound British, both my parents are British and they immigrated to the States. And I went back to swim in England when I was 11 years old. And when my father was rooting for the Olympians, we had an Olympian up the road, his name was Jim Montgomery. And I was like so excited to see like my neighbor swim, like I knew an Olympian, it’s like, it’s kind of like finding a four leaf clover, like to, to, to like meet an Olympian. And this guy was a gold medalist, right? And he had won gold five gold medals. But at the same time, you had David Wilkie, who was who just won a gold for Britain. And I saw like my father who was who swam on the British team. And he didn’t go to the Olympics. He was in medical school at the time. And then the Cold War came and they only took a few

athletes, things like eight people on, you know, when he could have gone. So, so it was always like a thorn in his side. But to see the glory that came to him when he watched David Wilkie, you know, get the gold, like I felt this, like this kinship with my father about this love for swimming, you know, and so and it gave me like, first place in the family of four, you know, so it changed the dynamic, it changed, you know, that this this structure in my family. And then it created this bond with my father, like I became my daddy’s little girl. And and then this drive that I had to be an Olympian, it was this force of energy, this force, this single pointed force that nothing was going to get in the way of that. You know, and so here I saw like how my dad loved me. It was so primal. It was so like just the the everything that you just want, like this pure love from your dad, and in the swimming that gave me that joy. And

it was this cycleness dynamic that was created. And so as my career went on, it started to be more and more evident that I was going to be an Olympian. So my parents moved me over into over to Britain. So I because they felt that if I was going to be an Olympian, they, you know, I was going to follow on my dad’s footsteps, I needed to be in the system. This wasn’t like just show up at, you know, three months before, you know, trials and then, you know, represent a country so you can be an Olympian. This was like, no, you’re like, you know, so so that was like, you know, packed up my bags, I went over to, I went over to England and I trained actually with Sharon Davis. So any of your British swimmers, she’s a very well known British swimmer and commentator currently, you know, for the BBC over the years. So I went and she was the best she had a silver slash gold medal in 80. So she was behind one of the East Germans. And so she was a very

prominent, you know, athlete. So here I was going to train with this, you know, world class British, you know, swimmer and the best in the country. And so to be around that, like just to be around that and then to receive the accolades that I started to receive around me, they sort of bounced from like sort of the progression went from when I was a small child to identifying as a swimmer. So that was like my first identity change. And then my next identity change was that I was going to be an Olympian. And so then that became my pursuit. And during these times of like this goal, this end goal, was when I started to like my relationship with my dad, like winning no longer just became a thing. It now became, you know, faster times and, and, you know, higher rankings. And like the awards and what I needed to accomplish in the pool, seemed to in my little young mind, was directly related to how much love I was going to get

from my father, like how much attention he was going to give me. And that was then giving me this, it was like the cycle that I was in. So and it created the silence around me. It created this, you know, the the if I swim fast, then I can get this from my dad. But then at the same time, I’m getting the, you know, you have to do this for the coach. So like in the relationship with your coach is so intimate, it’s so personal, it’s so driven. And here’s this person who’s coaching you to so you can receive what you’re seeking. In my case, it’s like just seeking, you know, to for my to continue to be daddy’s little girl. And you know, there’s in the I have two of brothers and younger sisters. So so there’s like, you know, there’s vying for this, this role in this relationship, if you will. And so it was like this, this cycle, and it’s not that I was mentally aware of this at all that, you know, when I was going, you know, going through this, I just

knew the force that was behind me to be an Olympian. And that force really blinded me to really avoid like it really created a silence my voice. And so that’s a lot of the work I do is about giving an athlete a voice and really recognizing how you are silenced. Like, what is it that’s that’s causing you to

not speak up, not take that action, not, you know, like there’s a lot of reasons that we can come up with that all make sense to us about why we don’t do something or do something or not have something. And, and so I started to like, when I went back to like, write my story and write this journey, I start I evaluated all these relationships, my started to evaluate, you know, the dynamics that were created, like, how did this, how did this happen? I can point to, you know, the the institutions and the lack of people to go and speak to I can talk to the lack of action that was taken against someone in, and I should add in what I’m talking about here, which is so so I basically walked right into being abused by the head Olympic coach for the British Olympic team. And so I ended up after I trained with Sharon, I moved to Coventry where he moved from Norwich to Coventry and I moved from from Devon to Coventry didn’t know who he

was. And here I am training he had I trained with five guys and, and of those five guys, three of them are Olympic medalists, and then me. And so it was this elite group of kids and he only had one female athlete around at a time in this in his like, top level group. And so I was in like I was getting what I needed as far as like the training, but at the same time, I’m living this secret, because I’m having this, this at this, I’m being my character started to be assassinated, my character started, people started to refer to me in, you know, like if my training was disrupted, or if I wasn’t performing as well, or if I was a loudmouth American or whatever, despite the fact I actually didn’t speak with an American accent growing up, I actually had a British accent, and you did not know that I actually was from the, you know, had was born in the US to two bridge parents. You know, so I had that chameleon, the

chameleon voice and me. But then so, so but when I started walking into just this, this, the system, the system of, if I do this for the coach, then I will get this from my dad. And it was like, and not everybody has that dynamic. But what the dynamic was, what like this pursuit for the Olympics blinders on to whatever happens along the way, I’m not going to stop for it. And so there’s this this vulnerability. And you could point to a whole bunch of reasons why but I feel that a lot of the reasons why are because I was athletes in general, and this is the new platform, and I can probably get you give you a word and edgeways here since I’ve had this long run of a share. But athletes in general are not

they’re underdeveloped with their voice, they’re underdeveloped to communicate. So it’s like you give me a workout. That’s what I’m going to do. Like I understand that command. I do not know how to say, you know what my shoulders hurting, or I think my shoulders, like, you know, starting to get overtired, or I feel like my stroke is wrong, and it’s affecting, you know, this other part of my body. I spend more time trying to adjust my stroke and trying to fix it myself or try to do things within myself. Or I’m just going to push through that that practice, in order to like just get it over with not knowing how I’m sort of carrying my pain and compounding it. And so and so we learn how to adjust within our training. And part of that, but we aren’t learning how to articulate it, we aren’t looking how to speak it. So as and so part of when I talk about integrity is, if you aren’t speaking that in itself, so it’s omission, right, it’s an

omission of communication that in itself is being out of integrity. So most of us walk around out of integrity. And so and we’re just not, you know, just by having the omission of it. So with that being said, I didn’t speak. I was just there to do workouts. I was just there to train and then have this influence with this relationship and this dynamic with this person you call your coach. And there’s like ownership associated with that. So I was in this battle between I don’t want to follow your direction with I have to follow your direction with I love swimming with now I don’t love swimming. And it was this constant back and forth, trying to find my way through it all. So and that’s really a long winded question. So I’ll have a little break and I’ll turn it back over to you and see if you have any thoughts on that. It’s a good, good introduction to some of the some of the things that you sort of talk about in the book. And I guess

internally for you after being such a being such a young driven swimmer that loves loves swimming loves the water. And then you’ve got this internal conflict of everything that’s going on. Did what did that lead to in terms of your swimming? What did it mean? Did you start skipping sessions? Did you start to do things outside the pool that you wouldn’t normally do? Like what what effect did that have on on you outside the pool?

So I started I certainly started skipping sessions. So weirdly, the training changed my so there was a year of the abuse when the abuse started with Paul and then I had a whole nother year of training with him as a club coach. Never mind that he was also the Olympic head coach. So I had that one on one with him. So for for too long. So during that period of time, I started missing practice. I started it boys became of interest. You know, I just I was not a drug user, but I would drink I definitely was, you know, started drinking more and more. I just would say I started drinking, you know, that seemed to have been and drinking would be drink, you know, drinking to be drunk. It was not, you know, there was nothing sophisticated about it. And I would hang out with the older summer. So I blended in with so you have a 14 year old on a team with, you know, 22, 23, 24, 25 year olds, that’s a big age difference.

But they’re legally allowed to drink, right? So I have a young person who’s who’s like, well, I’m just going to hang out with the older people because we’re in the same environment, you know, so so the environment itself, lended itself to be able to make choices that were harmful for the development of myself as an athlete. Is it something that you can spot or identify when you are talking to a group of swimmers and you might have some one on one chat with with those swimmers? Can you can you recognize that not necessarily having gone through what you’ve gone through, but you can see some of those things start to to play out in younger athletes that you speak with? So well, yeah, definitely. So let me just give you a little story. So I don’t know if you’re familiar with the gymnastics community in the Larry Nasser situation that happened in the United States. So I’m actually ground zero on that situation. So I actually had one of the Olympic

gymnasts come to me and have a conversation. And it was out of that conversation that I knew that there was abuse that happened in that person’s life, because they actually came to talk to me about something else. And so, and that’s the part where and it was her and I and I took her to the lawyer and then the lawyer took it from there. And that’s really where the athlete A is. And she’s one of the athletes in athlete A. And so and that’s really where this this started from. So I have a sixth sense as in, you know, sixth sense, I have a sixth sense to be able to have a conversation because here’s what I’ve learned about athletes. In general, I have now since I’ve started the nonprofit organization, I started with, say, for athletes. And so during that process, during, you know, in over the past 10 years, I have a place on the field.

Particularly what’s going on. You’re not going to find it, you know, straight up, this happened. Will you do something about it? Like it just, it’s just, it’s just not there. So it sort of like leads itself in that direction. You kind of, you know, I just kind of know when people talk about something that there’s something over here in left field. And I know how to go and pick it up and find it and be like, Hey, something like this going on. And then the other thing, and so as a result of that, right, so as a result of like speaking with athletes for 10 years, what I started to realize was, is that athletes need to have like, need to sort of understanding what integrity was. And so now I refer to it as athlete integrity coaching. And this is where Julie and I have come together to really work with athletes. So they learn how to win from within with integrity. So what, what do I mean by that? They, we learn

how to be driven from within, like we’re not driven by an external outcome. We learn how to speak from within. So you’re really connected like with your truth, and the decisions you’re making with pride. And that’s where I had lost my way. Like I was like, there was a lot of shame. And there was a secret, like I’m carrying a secret. And when you carry a secret, you start making choices to keep that secret covered up. And it can be very small and inconsequential. But it becomes a major issue. And it’s a pattern that gets developed within you. If you if you choose to hide, if you choose to not express yourself. And so somebody knows all of you. And in, you know, and, and that’s what I do now. So I work with athletes now, to really uncover their path, their truth. And, and what’s really part of how I work with athletes is I need to know what you’re going to do the very next day after you’re retired. And so instead of life coming at

you, it’s going with you. You know, instead of like, well, this happened, or that happened, we don’t talk about what’s happened. It becomes a purpose driven process with athletes. So, so that’s where like when I the direction I’m going in. So when you’re in that, if you learn how to do that, you can’t, you can’t hide, you can’t talk and just athletes speak, and you learn skills that actually will help you when you leave your athletic career to move on into your, into your professional life and your personal life. One of the quotes that I’ve heard before that I quite like is conflict delayed is conflict multiplied, meaning the longer you put off saying something, the longer you keep it inside, the more the more it’s going to, to get at you or the more it’s going to maybe fester a relationship between you and another person where it’s going to be going down the wrong track. And, and I think teaching this stuff to, to

athletes in their teenage years is a, is a very valuable skill for them to, to learn and also coming from, from someone like yourself with that, that experience in, in exposing these things and talking about these things tend to give them to the confidence if they were to be in the same sort of situation. And it doesn’t even necessarily need to be that situation. There’s, I’m sure there’s many other things there as well, which, which athletes should and need to, to speak up about even just the basic stuff. Like you were saying if they’re carrying a bit of an injury, they might not say it to their coach, and then they’ll just make that injury worse. So those sorts of things knows the relationship with your coach where you can be back and forth, you’re on an even playing field. And it’s not that, that hierarchy necessarily where it’s, you do exactly what I say. Now it’s that more even, even playing field. It’s, it’s a much better relationship that

I think people these days want to be a, be a part of that. And I see that in, you know, see that in, in swimming with a lot of the good coaches coming through, I see it in Australian rules football as well. It’s like, yeah, that those, those relationships that the players enjoy a lot more.

Oh, I, I totally agree. And so I talk about like, you know, when we talk about this imbalance of power, like, what is the power? Like where, where is the power going? Right. And so it like you are the power. So and when you, when you understand that in its first place, right, then you’re, we, we’re not putting ourselves in a situation where it’s like our coach directed, did this, our coach does this, our coach does that, right? Giving us that direction. Because what I found is like and in my adult life, like there’s like a laziness, right? Because I’m like, oh, someone’s just going to tell me what to do. And then outcomes, an outcome that I like, and I’ve rewarded for it. So therefore, why do I need to figure out what I need to do? So you’re not having the self reflection. And you’re really, it’s like you’ve, you’ve given somebody or talents, and you said, you nurture them and I’ll reap the awards. And it’s like, no, let the, let

the rewards be secondary. You nurture them in a way that’s meaningful and have, and that’s where I think the balance of the power is when you’re now able to articulate those things. You know, in some days, it’s like, you know, I, you know, I have certainly no swimming and training. And it’s like, you know, in taking 15 minute off a workout because you were feeling like something most slared up in your shoulder, you know, a 15 minute that prevents you from, you know, a 90 to six months, you know, being out of, out of swimming. If you had that ability and that, and that trust that you get to build in the system. And that to me is like where you’re driving from purpose and from where you’re at, like, you know you. And when you can create the, you, you and trust within yourself to trust yourself with this communication, like I can develop the tools and I can help you, you know, unleash this power, this within you. And we just give it away or

it’s an underdeveloped muscle is really with the way I see it. And it’s this dormant muscle that is just going to make athletes that much more powerful and have that much more of a fruitful afterlife versus, and it doesn’t matter your results. And I think we spend so much time on the idea of the gold medal and so versus the idea of building what everything in sport, like the value of sport, there’s so much value in sport, but how many times have you heard about someone’s wrecked career? Right. And so all that value goes out the door. So how do you keep the value to last afterwards? Because that’s where the, that’s where the gold is. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It’s like those, if you haven’t got not anything to fall back on, if you, if you, if the sport is the only thing you’ve got and you haven’t got there, you haven’t got the character, you haven’t got the plans on what to what to do afterwards. And you can’t see what

your life could be looking like in the next five, 10 years. It’s a very daunting path that you’re looking at when you retire. And I think it’s really important to develop something alongside if you are swimming or doing triathlon at an elite level, you need to have something else there in your life or else it’s going to be a very empty thing that that you’re going for. And one of the things you, one of the terms you mentioned earlier was athlete speak. And I mean, I see that you see it in interviews all the time, right? Like there’s, there’s terms, there’s ways of speaking when you’re getting interviewed, maybe after a race, you might be after a loss or a win. They’ll, they’ll say, they’ll say a whole lot of words that won’t mean a whole lot necessarily. And, but I mean, that’s understandable at the media level. You know, you get training in that and sometimes you have to be that way. But in terms of athlete speak, are you more

referring to on a personal level or with your interpersonal relationships, that sort of thing?

Yeah, when you’re, when I hear people come talk to me about like coach abuse, for example, or verbal abuse, emotional abuse, especially around emotional abuse, right? The way that it’s described or the way that they’re having this experience, like before it’s sort of even rising to the surface, there’s a way, there’s like just a pattern in a way that I’ve seen across athletes that they, they talk about it.

They don’t say, oh, it’s emotional abuse. Like they’ll talk about like, you know, various things in workout or what happened here, what happened here? And you start to hear the bigger story that they’re not putting together. And, you know, sort of see these patterns within that environment. I mean, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been just involved with many athletes where I’ve had conversations where I’m like, you know, something else is going on. And so based on, it’ll just be an off the cuff comment that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody other than it doesn’t fit with like that environment per se, do you know what I mean? And it’s hard for me to give like clear examples

because I mean, one, there’s a confidentiality associated with it because I’m speaking in a general way, but, you know, it’s just kind of like, oh, I had to, you know, do such and such on a balance beam. And it’s something that it’s out of the ordinary. And I’ve learned about every sport as a result in doing this. So I would hear things that were like, well, that’s inconsistent. Like that’s just inconsistent coaching. Like what value does that have? So I start kind of poking in this area of what they’re really saying. And it’s like, oh yeah, no, nobody ever does something like that. And, you know, you start, when you start asking and you start knowing. And so, so I have been a huge advocate of athletes who, and, you know, and over time I want to develop a team of athletes who really understand one their sport and two athletes speak. Because one, it cuts to the chase of where the issues are. And then two, it creates,

it just creates a voice, a stronger voice when we know like how you speak and we can undo these patterns in a meaningful way.

It’s like there’s a loose thread there that you identify and you just start pulling the thread and then it all starts to come apart by the sounds of it. Yes, pretty much. Yes.

And with this work, how do you sort of deliver it at the moment? Like are you going in and working with teams? Do you have people approach you? Like what’s the, how’s it currently work?

So, so I’ll tell you two things. So Safe For Athletes is on the prevention, abuse side of things. So we have policies on that. And that’s a nonprofit organization and you can request our policies at safeforathletes.org. And then, so that kind of runs itself over there. And so, but from team athlete integrity, we go into teams and we work with teams to set, teach what integrity is, teach the culture. Like it’s a culture change within that environment. And we just kind of, how do you, how do you be an integrity with yourself and just kind of walk through

and set the tone for the, for that team. And then we assign a team advocate to the team for the season. So to maintain and keep the new tools and the new, the new voice of engagement that’s available to them to deal with any issue that would come up as simple question or some issue that’s happened within their program of teammate, a coach or anything.

And so then we walk the, if it’s a 15 minute conversation, we can help them, they go on their way, but we help sort of kind of diagnose what issues, if they’re well within that program. And then we offer, some issues are more complex. And so then we recommend and we move athletes over into coaching. And so then we, it’s our athlete integrity coaching. The whole team, single athlete, single issue, multiple issues, we can coach them through that. But we highly recommend our athletes go through the whole program because part of the program is to have a purpose driven outside of your career. And then we also offer mediation training, like mediation for situations, but it’s more relationship based mediation.

As versus contract, we don’t get involved on a sort of illegal contract side of things. But we do offer mediation, kind of like couples counseling, right? Because there’s a lot of unspoken stuff that goes through that. So the idea behind what we’re doing is setting a tone and then having a way for any issue to move through the system. So nothing gets stuck, nothing gets faster than inside of you. There’s always a way to work through it. And so we work with retired athletes, we work with current athletes, and we work with teams, and we work with coaches. And so we have sort of a variety of like, if you’re a retired athlete, we want to go look at the patterns that were created for you as an athlete. And then we want to undo those and then redirect your ship in a meaningful way, that’s purpose driven. And in a way that like you know how to be coached, let us coach you, and then let you sail off into a new direction

if you so desire. But essentially it’s a combination of coaching teams.

And we just want to help the whole athletic community because we know there’s a huge need for this. And if you’re a coach listening to this, what would the benefits be to a coach to get you into work with their team? What would the benefits be in terms of the general team culture and then the athletes that you’re working with? What upside would you see there from a coach’s perspective?

So the outcome is going to be, first of all we’re going to teach everybody to win from within, right? So you can’t be in discord and in harmony at the same time. And so if you have a perfectly run program, everybody’s in harmony, you win every year, you have no injuries, everybody communicates, and the structure is perfect. What do you get out of the end of it? Well that is what you get out of the end of the night. Yeah. So and if you have a team that, where you have like for example, some teams have a very high profile or high performing player or a swimmer in their club or their program and the dynamics of that club are built around one person. How do you create an environment for everybody to thrive and win from within? Like how do you balance out the power with everybody, with integrity? But ultimately, everybody is going to walk away with being able to speak their truth without harming another, but be able to speak their truth.

And so and that’s like the gift of what every athlete’s going to do. So they’re going to be purpose driven. So from a team, you’re not going to have, like swimming, everybody has to learn how to swim. So you get a lot of people that don’t want to swim, for example. Not everybody needs to learn how to like do archery, because it’s not like a life or death situation, whether you’re an archer or not. But it kind of is if you’re a swimmer. That’s what essentially you’re in. Yeah. You know, so you get a lot of disgruntled people in swimming, for example, right? That’s not, they’re out of integrity just by being there and they’re being forced to be in that position, right? You know, like my brothers, they hated it, but they were there because I was a swimmer. You know, so and so how do you help the parents be integrity in those situations? You know, it’s like, so what we do is we’re going to infuse that. And so any team or any coach

that wants to change the dynamic in a meaningful way, whether it’s to bring the culture of winning and we win it through pride. That’s how you win, right? Pride, like you can go from like in my book at the opening part, I talk about, I was on a team. We never won one single summit. And on that team, we had five Olympians

and we didn’t win once. And you know what, there’s pride in that, right? You know, because it was like we were a tiny team and we just didn’t have the numbers, but still there was something about it like, but you know, our team didn’t win, but all the athletes performed. And there’s many situations where you’re in that situation. So from a coach’s perspective, I think you can give the gift to an athlete to give them a voice and give them the ability to articulate with purpose and with truth. And it develops young leaders and who can turn down a young leader?

I was talking to a family member last week, actually, and we’re talking about like year 12 here in Australia, that’s the final year of schooling. And when I was in year 12, they brought in a guy called Jim Steins who was like a legendary Australian rules footy player. And he would do these talks to groups of year 12 students. And so the whole year level’s 100 and something kids. And he did this talk, it was sort of a two-day camp it was. And to basically towards the end of the camp, he created the environment where people were open to sharing things that happened to them. And basically like everyone at the end knew exactly what everyone else had been through. And then at the end of that two days, that entire school year level was just bonded together as one. The two rival, not gangs, but the two rival groups within the year level came together and were friends for the entire year. And my family member, she was saying that

at a school that she works at, they had a similar thing where they had two days together. And there was this girl who was considered quite weird, quite unusual, didn’t really have many friends there. Turned out she was abused by her brother. And that’s why she was sort of the way she was. And then after that, everyone was just much more open to her and they understood. And then from that, just everyone sort of came around her. So those sorts of things, when you get, when you can create that environment where people are open to sharing, you develop those bonds and those friendships that you probably wouldn’t have, that if you didn’t go through that experience.

Yeah, well, we make a lot of judgments from like, I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at somebody and made a judgment, made and created a whole story about that situation in your head. And then the problem is, is that we believe it to be true. So now I’ve just lied to myself. And then the other thing is that on this sort of subject line is I’ll look at, I’ll make a judgment, for example, with my coach, right? Oh, he’s in a bad mood. I’ve made the judgment. I’ve decided that that’s what it is. And now I’m reacting to what I’ve determined to what it was. And so I’ve just lied about the situation. Now I’m reacting to the lie. So when you start learning how you do that within yourself, then that just changes everything. Like that just changes your relationships with others. It changes your relationships with you. And you get to hear yourself in just the way that we manipulate our own selves. Nevermind somebody else doing it.

And so when you can do that with a group of athletes who’ve been like, oh, wait a minute, I said that I looked at my coach this way or I did that. And one of the things we work on is this area about time. Like what’s your relationship to it? And I had this conversation with Julie about it. So I’ll just make it a public conversation in the sense that

like I have a friend of mine for over a decade. We at out in Malibu, it’s on the PCH in Los Angeles. And my friend has a beach access private beach. She lives in this private beach section. And you have to walk down this long trail. And so it’s pain and it’s just a pain to wait for somebody who’s always late. And so we have this, we’re like, well, we can be friends. Like I drive 35 minutes and I can count on my hand how many times I was late. And my friend doesn’t have a cell phone just to kind of put things in perspective in today’s time. So you can’t even call and say, oh, I’m going to be late. Like there is no calling, right? So it’s like this relationship based on like we know we’re both going to be on time. Like we can be friends with somebody on time. And we have this thing like I can’t be friends with somebody who’s not an on time person and swimmers predominantly are on time people. Like you got to be at your block at a certain time, right?

But then when you, if you’ve ever been around somebody who’s late, like it makes, for me, like I’m anxious, I’m irritated, I don’t feel respected, da, da, da. And it’s like, well, what is it? Why do I respond that way to somebody else being late? Like really, like, does it really matter? Like why am I, like why is that my reaction to that situation? Like why am I anxious? And it took me to figure out that the reason that I react that way is after training for two decades,

you win by what, a hundredth of a second. You can, can you even click that? I don’t know. Like when you’re swimming, remember you’re like on the stopwatch, you’d see how fast you could like start and stop this stopwatch. 0.09, I remember that. Yeah, it’s as fast as I can do it.

Okay, I beat you. I was like 0.07, just so you know. And I’m a middle-distance swimmer. You know, so it’s like, but even like so, but then you swim two decades to even go faster than that, like the difference of time. Like, and so there’s like so much lined up in that grief that you have with yourself at that, like you don’t want to feel the disappointment. Like in so constantly, you’re like, well, I’m not, you know, I’m just going to be frustrated at this person being late. It’s like, well, maybe your frustration is because of like not accomplishing something. Like it’s so driven by time. Like there’s just such a core to it, especially as swimmers, right? Two decades later, less than a tenth of a second decides victory and not decides what you believe is to be happiness and what’s not, right? And so, and it’s changing like that, like you change your perception in your relationship to things around you. I think that’s a huge value.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m great with it all the time, but I recognize that. Like it’s, I was up in a place called Nusa, which is sort of up in Queensland here in Australia, and sort of along the coast there, you’ve got all the people who travel around in their van and live out of it. And up at the National Car Park there, there’s not many spots, and there’s only a few sort of real prime positions to park there, to watch the sunset and to surf there and stuff. And it’s always these what called van lifers who will back up their things and they’ll be cooking their breakfast there and enjoying the sunset. And I’m thinking these bloody van lifers taking up all the good spots and taking all the good positions and just why can’t just everyone else sort of enjoy them? And I’m thinking, right, do I really care? Like what they’re doing there? They’re enjoying their life. They’re having a good time. I’m thinking, well, yeah, okay.

The issue I’ve got here is that they’re having, like they’ve probably got a lot of freedom there. They’re enjoying themselves. They’re relaxing. I’m like, okay, maybe I’m just a little too uptight today. So it’s like, most of the issues actually come down to issues where other people come down to issues with ourselves sometimes, I think. Yeah, all the time. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t even think it’s sometimes. It’s like all the time. And that’s really why I wrote my book. It’s like, here I’ve written this like really,

you know, it’s like, oh, I don’t want to read a book about sexual abuse. It’s actually not even, I mean, I certainly talk about it. But I actually get to, I really talk about when you get to the other side of it is how I was in the system, how I was stuck in the system. And like, it was me. Like there was, you know, my choices. Like it was me that, you know, what was I pursuing? What was I hiding? What was I manipulating? What did I want? Like there was a lot of like, it wasn’t,

the harm happened in its happened and its painful and all that. So I’m not discounting anybody getting abused because I certainly have had it and lived with it. But then the issue when someone asked me and they said, okay, how come you took so long? Like to even say something, right? So it’s like, what was in the value of me not saying something for as long as I did? Like there’s value in that. I got something from somebody else because of it. And so, and that is, it’s not the, like this person is a monster. There’s no question about it. Like I was in a situation that like from where I was going, what I was, the world I was in and the choices I was going to make, I was glued. There was like a magnet that was going to come together with that harm that was going to happen. But when I started looking at my choices after that, like those I need to take accountability for. And that’s the stuff was like, what did I get?

I got to walk around being a victim. I got to walk around saying, this happened to me. I got to walk around with that. And ultimately, I mean, my book is at, it’s rescue me. Like the name of the book, rescue me. And it’s me, right? It’s me, but there’s a lot more. It’s really, if you’re a surfer, and you know any of these big legend surfers, you might actually know part of the book, which is, I’ll give you a name of a surfer. And I apologize when I say his name incorrectly, but the book is dedicated to him, which is Eddie Aika. Do you know who he is? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, and so my book is dedicated to my dad,

Mary, who got the gold medal in my event. And it’s about, you know, our encounter in that relationship is in there, and Eddie Aika. And you’re just going to have to read the book to find out why I would dedicate my book to him. I like it. I like that cliffhanger there. That’s good. I mean, I love the, is it a 20 for 20? I think it’s a 20 for 20 ESPN docker on Eddie Aika. And I’ve watched it twice, maybe three times. And it’s, yeah, he’s just a legend in, I guess, the water community from, yeah, all aspects. So yeah, those are the listening. We’ll put the book on our show notes and Katherine, where else can people grab the book and find out more about what you’re doing and get in touch if they’d like to?

We certainly can get in touch on Katherinestar.com. So that’s Katherine with a K, K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E, last name, star, S-T-A-R-R. And the book is also available at Amazon in Australia. So you should be able to just get it there, as well as pretty much any bookstore. And it’s Rescue Me, a powerful memoir by an Olympian. And you should be able to find it online.

And I hope you enjoy it and be inspired. And it’s a real, it’s a journey. It’s a journey. And I’ll take you on, it’s interesting. And I hope you feel inspired at the end of it. Well, I’m glad that Julie introduced us, because I’ve really enjoyed this chat and learned a lot. And by the sounds of it, the work that you’re doing is hugely important and hugely valuable for swimmers and coaches. So yeah, I think it’s just a great thing that you’re doing. So I appreciate you jumping on the podcast and sharing. Some of your story, and I highly recommend going grab the book of Catherine’s there. So Catherine, thank you for being on the podcast. Oh, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. And I appreciate you having me on. 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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