Effortless Swimming

My guest is Olympian Tristan Hollard. I wanted to get him into the podcast to talk about his experience in qualifying, his training and racing at the Olympics.

01:42 Holy Hollard!!
05:36 Reaching The Potential
04:01 Developing Discipline And Routine
07:56 It’s Not Easy
09:43 It Changed My Life Completely
11:51 Is This What’s Best For Me?
14:14 Changing The Attitude Towards The Program
18:45 Changing Your Headspace
20:37 Making It To Team
24:33 After Qualifying For The Olympics
28:38 Lessons From The Olympics
30:00 Expectations
32:44 Having The Best Swimmers In The World Around You
38:51 Mentally Reflective/Overthinking
40:58 Future Plans

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You think it’s all going to be, you know, glory and fun and ease and I think as a kid you romanticize it a lot. You think it’s going to be really, wow, I went to the Olympics, like his life is complete, you know, like he’s, he’s happy. He gets everything, you know, I don’t know, you just have a very mixed, from my perspective, like maybe it’s not true for everyone, but I feel like it’s easy to have a really misconstrued opinion of people because you look at them from the perspective of them having done it. You never look at someone who’s on the ladder. You look at the people at the top of the ladder and you think like, wow, it must be cool to be them, but you don’t see the 95% of grind below them. 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, this is episode number 205 and my guest today is Olympian Tristan Hollad.

Tristan, welcome to the podcast. Hey, hey, Brenton, nice to see you. You’re right, you can’t listen in hotel quarantine, which on the back end of now, which I’m sure you’re excited about, but I wanted to get on the podcast today to talk about the Olympics, which is amazing thing to not only qualify for and go through that whole experience of racing there, but also the backstory to that as well, because as you were mentioning before the podcast, you only took up swimming seriously five years ago, roughly, and then to become national champion in the 100 and 200 backstroke and to make the Olympic teams a pretty big deal. So how’d that all come about for you in 2016?

I swam a lot through high school. Like I went to Knox Grammar School on scholarship and the expectation was that I would swim there and I had all right results for what I did, but I didn’t really swim that much. Like I swam two or three times a week and I was known as Holy Hollad because if I got out of bed and went to training in the morning, I’d be like, Holy Hollad’s here. Like it’s, you know, I was, Steve was a co-chair at that time. I think he still is down at Knox, Knox, Knox Pimble. But I really, to be honest with you, like I hated it. Like I hate a strong word that I really, I didn’t do well with the early mornings and the discipline in myself was one of the hardest things. So when I went to boarding school, where you had to go under your own steam rather than your parents driving you in the morning, like it became a whole different story of I just didn’t want to do it at all. So the second I left high school, I quit, quit and gladly went on to other things and went to uni and, you know,

I enjoyed the life of not being a six, seven session a week swimmer at all or that sort of stuff and having a social life. And yeah, spent two years around college and yeah, that was really, really good. I enjoyed that, but it kind of got to a point where I felt a little bit flat in what I was doing. Cause once you’ve been swimming fit, I feel like if you’re assuming you can understand that you don’t feel that same fitness again in other things, you can run on the treadmill, go and row, row a couple of days a day on the rower, but you never feel like the, the cardio vascular fitness. I think you did as a peak swimmer. So that’s what you missed, is it? And then that’s something that you missed when you went to uni and weren’t training at all. Absolutely. I always felt like, even though I was in good shape and I was going to the gym regularly and I was doing other activities, but I never really felt fit in the way that I’d really like, have classified it.

So when I, in 2016, we had this like, we would go down to breakfast in the morning cause I was at college at the time, you go down to breakfast and there’d be the big projectors on the morning showing the Olympics. And so I’d be watching the Olympics in the morning at breakfast and it’d make me want to run down to the pool because I’d see these guys swimming. I was like, oh, I remember swimming. Like, look at these guys go. That was really fun. Like it was a little bit nostalgic. So I went down and I got in there. Yeah. So we had the, the Olympics showing and like at breakfast every morning. And so I went down and did some sessions in the public lands and got in preferably the fast lane by myself and did some laps and very quickly after that I joined the squad there and did, did a couple sessions with Bruce. I forget his last name. Bruce was the head of the, the UNSW swim squad at the time. And the way I got into it was probably like two or three weeks after I first got in the water on the public lands.

I said, oh, I want to race again, but I’ve got no time. So they put me as the first swimmer in all the, the relays at the state champs that year. And I went in and just let off a hundred free. It was short court, short court state champs. And I let off the, the hundred free and the hundred back in the medley relay. And I did, and the 50 we did a four by 50 as well. And I did massive Peabes compared to what I’d done when I was finishing up in school because of the two years of just growth and becoming a bigger human. Cause I grew quite late. I think I still haven’t even only this year really reached my peak height and that sort of stuff. So I came in and did all these massive Peabes just off of the fact that I was a much bigger human. And instantly I remember I called my coach from my childhood back in Newcastle where I grew up. My coach from my childhood, he’s named Adam Beisler. He now runs swim league in New South Wales.

If you, if you’ve been around any of that, but he, I called him and I said, I’m going to go to the next Olympics. Then he was like, all right, call me when you do. And I said, all right, I’ll say I told you so and hung up and I got the privilege of doing that earlier this year. Yeah. That’s crazy. And what, what made you think that you’d be able to, that you had it in you to, to qualify? Like, did you just feel from those swims like, okay, maybe there’s something here or like, what was it? Cause that, that seems like that’s a lot of confidence to have after one swim mate. It might sound a bit cocky. I’m sorry if it sounds a bit cocky, but it was more to the tune of I knew, I knew I’d never reached my potential as a kid. I’d never put in the hours or time necessarily to reach the potential of what I thought I could do. And so I always felt like there was a lot of headroom for what I could do. And I felt my results were quite good considering the work I’d done.

I was never, never winning state or anything like that. But I was always right up there on the, on the podium or right below it and always right next to those guys who were training eight, nine sessions a week super seriously. And I felt like I could have done that if I had have put in the time. But I’m sure there’s a lot of people that felt that way. But it was kind of the click of, all right, I’m going to give it the proper shot. And if I’m going to give it the proper shot, I’m going to give it the proper attitude of I’m going to do it all or nothing. And so, and so I remember after that meet state, I called around a couple of squads on the Gold Coast. And I called the guy Glenn Baker as my coach at the moment at Southport swimming. And I said, Hey, I want to join the squad because when I was younger, my elder brother, he trained with Thomas Fraser Homes. And Thomas Fraser Homes is probably the only other swimming Olympian that I knew from Newcastle growing up.

And he, he’s journey in my mind. And I only had a vague idea of his journey. But his journey always went to the Gold Coast was the place to go because he’d gone there and found all the success in his swimming. So in my mind, it was just like, the Gold Coast is where you got to go. If you’re going to do it, you got to go there because that’s where all the swimmers are. And so I called Glenn Baker and he said, what do you want to do? And he’s like, be honest about it. I said, well, I want to make the Olympics. And yeah, and it always makes me a bit emotional. But yeah, we went through from literally from I was training twice three times a week to I went up there and instantly onto the professional program. It took six or seven months just for me to get the fitness to be able to keep up with the program. And I was having shoulder issues and sleep issues. And there was days he couldn’t even walk up the stairs because he was so crook.

But you know, and it was really hard to start to develop the discipline and the routine was probably the biggest issue I had was wavering in and out of that. Oh, I want to do it. I’m not going to do it. I want to do it. I’m not going to do it. Like it’s really hard to develop that because that in itself is a skill. And then it all came together really in the end of 2018. And then 2019 we had a near miss 2020 is what it was. And then 2021 finally happened. Wow. And and think yourself today, say the last two to three years where you said that that discipline and that routine. It’s like it’s a part of you now because, you know, some you can look at people as though maybe as a teenager. It’s like, hey, do one thing is how you do everything. You might be one foot in one foot out, but then to develop that that dedication and that ability to commit yourself to some thing as big as you have. Yeah, that’s a huge change.

And did you looking back at if you were a teenager now, would you see yourself in five years or maybe more than that seven years where you think you could that would be you swimming and training that much and doing what you were doing? Absolutely not like I never would have dreamed that it would get to the point where it got to it. You know, like you always have images of how those people would feel or how it’s easy for people to get out of bed in the morning and do what they do because they love it. Of course they do, but no, it’s not easy and you know, you got to push through it. But the happiness you get out of or the satisfaction is a better way to put it. The get out of doing that stuff that’s really hard to do has this made it feels like it’s made my life at least ten times better just on the fact of having a good routine and being fit and content and that sort of stuff is really made my life much, much better than what I would have

viewed it as when I was back at college in 2016 and just really, you know, when I was just kind of living for the pleasure of things and doing uni and like I was just enjoying myself in my free time. It wasn’t as much about having a big striving goal and I think it’s changed my life completely. And so my view of what it was like back then to what it actually is like has been completely different, but it’s also been much, much better than what I could have thought it would be. How’s it different to what you expected from your first job? You think it’s all going to be, you know, glory and fun and ease and I think as a kid you romanticize it a lot. You think it’s going to be really, wow, I went to the Olympics. It’s like his life is complete, you know, like he’s he’s happy. He gets everything. You know, I don’t know. You just have a very mixed from my perspective. Like maybe it’s not true for everyone, but I feel like it’s easy to have a really misconstrued opinion of people because you look at them from the perspective of them having done it.

You never look at someone who’s on the ladder. You look at the people at the top of the ladder and you think like, wow, it must be cool to be there. But you don’t see the 95% of grind below them. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There was three years that where I couldn’t get support. I was working at the RSL to pay for what I was doing and, you know, no one really believed I was going to do what I did. And like, yeah, it was a bit, the only support I had was, you know, out of my parents. But then once you do it, like the change of the messages you get in Instagram, even all things from old school friends coming towards you and picking on the past. It’s like, hey, we saw you on the paper today. That’s incredible. I did that. But they never saw like the four years leading into it or reached out in that time. It’s, you know, it’s the idea of as though you cross this threshold, you become a different person. I’m exactly the same as I was four years ago.

I’ve just been through stuff to change my opinion of what it’s like. Yeah. Yeah, that’s. And I, I mean, the, it is, it is a grind to be an elite level swimmer like yourself. A friend of mine, Sam Ashby, who coaches Geelong now, but he was up with Glenn Baker a number of years ago up on the Gold Coast. And he would tell me about some of the sets that they would do. And he was a butterfly. Some of them were like, it was like 50, 50s of fly all at like 200 pace. And just, and I went and trained up there for one session when I stayed with him. And it was, I think it was 3100s on 115. And I wasn’t making that. So it’s like just, just some hard training. And when you, that fatigue every day, like you, were there times where you were questioning your decision up there or where you were like, oh yeah, am I doing the right thing? Yeah. Not in terms of the overarching, like, am I doing the right thing for swimming as much as like, there were absolutely times when I questioned, is this what’s best for me?

Like, is, is my body doing good here? Because I’m always so, because Glenn, he’s, he’s coaching is, I think it’s what I needed as well, because my issue was discipline. And Glenn’s very, he’s still quite old school in, in his style of coaching. He’s like the old days of Dennis Cottrell of like more is more, I feel relative to some other programs, but everyone has their own way that they focus at work. But Glenn’s is like, more work is more work. That’s going to get you done. And it always worked for me to, if I could get up on the blocks and feel like I’ve done more work than the guys around me, rather than not that they don’t necessarily do work. But if I’m confident in the work that I’ve done, then I think I race reflective of that. And so, I don’t know, but I got to a point at the start of this, this year, like in, in March, no joke where I had to have a sit down and chat with them because I was struggling so much mentally to keep up with the program.

Because we’ll just go in every single day, we’ll go in really hard in every session. It just got to a point where I don’t know, I’ve never, I didn’t break completely, but I’ve never gotten that close to breaking before. Like it was really, it was really rough. And it was strange because leading into that, I had like two, two weeks of getting gloomier and gloomier and just sort of like miserable about everything. Like I was in some sort of, some sort of torturous cycle. And then off the back of that things really changed and sparked. So it was, you know, a big moment to kind of come through. But like, I think the work does really well for me, but there’s people that have come into the squad and said, this isn’t for me. And then they moved to another program they’ve done really well in. So it’s about finding, I think what’s good for you. And I think the stuff at Southport has been really good for me specifically because I think I need a bit more of a heavy handed approach in my training has done really well to, to mold the discipline that I liked earlier.

Yeah, almost as forced. Yeah, you’ve got to be disciplined if you’re going to swim in this squad sort of thing. It’s absolutely. Yeah. And it’s a lot, but like I’m thankful for it in hindsight, you know, at the time it seems like a lot or it might be too much, but then you get past it. And you’re like, oh, you know, I survived. It was okay. Yeah. Looking back on it, it’s difficult in the time. And when you were saying that those two weeks or so where like things are getting gloomier and gloomier, was it the chat with Glenn and just reflecting on things? Is that what helped you come out the other end of it? Or was it just, it was just like just timing and just one of those natural things that eventually went back up for you? It was absolutely the chat. I think that changed things because it got to a point where I said, this is like, I can’t do it. I can’t keep this up. Like this is too much. And it got to a point where like that was the first time I questioned what I was doing and it didn’t shift the program.

Like we didn’t change things. It just shifted the attitude towards it. Like we had a really big open discussion about why we were doing the things we were doing and how I felt about them and being more honest about the things I felt rather than just internalizing and just growing in through it. It became a lot more of an open discussion. And I think that made it a lot easier to get through what we’re getting through. Because you know on days, there were days where I think I’m one of the most volatile trainers you might ever meet because I’ll have a day where I swim. Absolutely out of my mind, good. Like I think I’m swimming better than my PB. I’m going to turn around and do a huge massive swim on a weekend or whatever. And then the next session I’ll be swimming. No, I won’t even be making like 130 days. So I’ll be struggling. Like I’ll be getting beaten by the breaststroke is it’s, you know, and it’s just reflective of the stages my body goes through and trying to

maintain consistency was one of the hardest things in just recovery, like trying to try to get good recovery. And so we spent copious amount of times in the ice baths and in massages and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, it was the change of the attitude towards it after we’d had that discussion that really brightened the year. And then we didn’t have that much. We only had like three, four more weeks of grind after that talk before we kind of led into racing season where the workload tapers off. And it becomes more about your racing practice. And because because not long after that you had national champs, but was that three or four weeks after or maybe a few more weeks after that. But yeah, that’s when and you and you won the hundred and the 200 back there. And yeah, well, you know, we both know Mitch went faster in the heat in both of those events like he did in spectacular swims. But you know, obviously he didn’t final.

So yeah, but still never want to let facts get in the way of a good story. But it’s like still, I mean, it’s still a still a great thing to be able to do. And I think just the reason I was asking about the quick note from our sponsor. This episode of the podcast is sponsored by form swim goggles with these goggles. You don’t have to look at the pace clock anymore or be one of those swimmers in the pool always grabbing for their watch with form smart swim goggles. You can see all of your key metrics while you’re swimming distance, pace, stroke rate. They’ve got it all. And the swim data is displayed on the Google lens and you can customize the display to see the metrics that you want to. And I was worried that it was going to be distracting, but you can literally see through the display. The metrics are always there, but you have to choose to focus on them. It’s really impressive. And it makes hitting intervals or any kind of specific training much more manageable and achievable.

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And while the goggles connect to the form swim app on your smartphone too, they all sync with the form app and then you can review all of the details of your swim. And you can see what other swimmers are up to in the form swim community as well. I’m a big fan of these goggles. I was really impressed when I used them and I use them for a vast majority of the sessions that I’m currently doing. To find out more about the form swim goggles, go to formswim.com and you can use our coupon code, effortless, at checkout and save $15 off your order. Back to the podcast. That chat with Glenn, whether that helped, because I think for a lot of swimmers, they, and I would say myself as well, not just with swimming, but perhaps with other things as well. Like I’m very much going through these thoughts in my head, but never, you never talk about them. You never, as soon as they’re out in the open and you maybe bounce a few ideas or even you just get off your chest.

It’s like, that’s all I needed. It’s like, okay, maybe I’ve just done this earlier. I just sat down and talked about it because then it’s, yeah, it just lightens the load mentally, I think, for people. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you look at the change of attitude as well from pre, because I hadn’t raced since March of 2020, since we’d been to Sydney and done that meet and then come back and everything went into lockdown. Australian Championship was the first race I had because we’d had a back injury at the end of 2020. I hadn’t been able to race properly at any of the meets there. So in early 2021 at Australian Champs, it was like the first time I got to race after having done the big block and see what came of it. And so then you see, like I did a massive PB and I won the final by quite a bit. And it was this sort of boost of like, wow, okay, well, all right. Well, let’s see how far we can push it.

And it changed everything in my head. It went from, oh man, can I get through this? It went to like, what can we get out of this? How much faster can I go before we get to trials? And I was pretty disappointed really to never push further than that time. Because we did that. No shaving went in and no taper really. Like we had a two day taper and went in and in an outdoor pool, even though it wasn’t my pool, it’s still an outdoor pool. And I think it’s slower to go into a massive PB. It was like, oh, like I can do it again. But it was pretty disappointing to not beat that time again that year. But like, it’ll come. And then come Olympic trials. So did, was it, for you, was it just about the racing more than anything? Just to make the team or were you, would you have, well, you prefer to go faster, obviously? Because I think 104 or slower than the Nationals in that 200. Yeah, it was like right on. Yeah. But it’s really just about the racing there, right?

Just to make the team. Absolutely. Like the goal was just to make the team. Like the time didn’t matter. If we made the team, I was happy. I didn’t care if it took a 157 or a 154. Like I just making the team was what mattered and we went in. But the way I did that was not going out of this. Oh, I need to beat the guy on my left or right. It was, if I go this time, I think I’ll beat the guy on my left or right. So let’s do the race practice to go this time. So it was almost like it came full circle back to just do the time. Yeah. There wasn’t about doing the PB. It was about a break. The qualification was 157-2 or 157-4. I believe maybe two because Ty Hardwell just missed it. I think he went 157-3. But yeah, it came back to the easiest thing was having done it already earlier in the year. Like I really felt like I was going to do a lot better. I thought I was going to do a lot better. I thought I was a 155 swimmer.

But, you know, it just came out the way it did. And I think I just raced it as well as I could with the race plan I had at that time. And it worked out really well kind of to come back over the top in the last 50 was my whole plan. And it worked out well. And we did it. And, yeah, defining moment of my life so far. Absolutely. Yeah. I remember watching it and just, yeah, because it’s, because as a spectator, you’re on edge. You’ve got the qualifying times, which they’re not slow, like they’re fast qualifying times to make it. And we didn’t have people in every event make those qualifying, those qualifying times. So it’s, yeah, it’s fast. And just watching you swim. Yeah, I was nervous for you. And that last, yeah, you brought home so well and then to get the time and to qualify. It was exciting. So what were those emotions like for you afterwards? Because I remember seeing that post-race interview and you were quite emotional there just thinking back about the past few years, I imagine.

So what was going through your head there? I never expected to get emotional. I thought I would always be really cool, calm and collected. I had a bit of pride that I could be cool, calm and collected on an interview, but then I kind of lost it. But like, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s just more that it went a different direction than I expected. But I got out of the water and I don’t know, it didn’t hit me until I started talking about it. Because the whole thing was, let’s make the Olympics. And it doesn’t feel very real given the year of preparation we had. I think it’s going to be this five year grind that ends in a massive kind of moment. But it was really, it was like a four or five month grind. Because we had such a big break in 2020 and then an injury. And so we came out of it and then it happened all really quickly across the course of like four or five months. But then talking about it, like I look up in the stands and my whole family was there.

And it was a very cool moment to kind of take it in. And I’ve never had a big moment like that in my swimming before. Like I had missed quite a lot of teams as my first team. And it was like the first time I’d really had a victory that I felt like with mine. And like I don’t sit and I come out of the water and yeah. And I don’t know something about, because in the interview I mentioned, I mentioned that first phone call that I had with Glenn back when he asked what I wanted to do. And I don’t know something about the moment of thinking about that in a moment. This really broke me. Yeah. Well, and it’s a bit of a realization of, oh shit, I’ve done it. Yeah. Well, it’s so good to hear a genuine interview. Yeah. A lot of sports people are, yeah, it’s all about the media training and make sure you say the right thing. But then to get a genuine moment like that for me, watching is like, it’s great to see. And even now, just sort of sharing what you actually went through in the ups and the downs.

It’s, that’s what people like to hear, not just the stock standard. And after that, so you qualified. What was it, what was that in between part like for you? Was it you’re highly motivated and just like you wanted to grind it out for the Olympics? Because I imagine just it’s because it’s only a couple of weeks of hard training left to go. And you’re just like, all right, now I can really go for it. It was, we had, I would say about five days out of the water after that. Like, I’m not swimming down after that race. I went backstage and hugged everybody and went to celebrate it. And we went out and had dinner together and they’d had this big dessert of congratulations. And, you know, we sat down and had some drinks together with the coaches until like 2am that morning. Like it was an amazing time. But when we get back, it was kind of, it was really hard to hit the ground running. I think for me specifically, because the big goal had been done.

And so we sat down and had a chat of, all right, we’ve done this. Let’s reset what comes from here. And so the natural progression was to say, well, we’ve made the Olympics. Let’s try and make the final, you know, let’s get in the top eight in the world. Because that tends to be quite a big, a categorization in Australia. Like the top rankings in Australia are always based off of what the top eight are doing. So to be in the top eight is kind of like a recognition that you’re in the top of your field. And so let’s make the top eight. We knew roughly what that would entail and what that needed. And I didn’t really think it would need much more of an improvement from where I was. And I still felt like I had things to improve from my race. So it wasn’t like, let’s go and do a massive block and train really, really hard and have six weeks to get fit. It was like, let’s just work on the things that we didn’t do so well.

And I think that was the way I took it out because I had a great trigger. We’d worked for a few months on the trigger of hit the third wall and then everything just comes home. Like it all comes at home as a freight train. Like it’s not hold on to what you can. It’s just let it loose because our big plan was to kind of be a bit more reserved and then come back over the top. And that worked really well in the back half, but we needed something better for the front half. So working hard to try and get, what was it, was go out in like 56 low or something like that. I can’t remember the exact time. It was about how easy can we go out in this really fast first hundred split. So yeah, it was like 56 mid, I think of 56 high. But that’s where we worked on was like the front half this time. And I don’t know, it just didn’t, it didn’t come together to the games as I would like. But, you know, like it was really hard to find that reset button.

And I think in hindsight, it would have done better if I turned it into a block that focused not on trials, but on the Olympics, but it was kind of putting that tail extension into it. It was really hard for me. But we only got, I only got like five days back home on the Gold Coast before we went to Cairns because there was like one case in Brisbane or something. They are up the road and suddenly they said, all right, everyone in two hours, you got to get on a plane, we’re going to Cairns. But that made it really easy because then I spent the best part of five weeks in Cairns with the whole team training together. And that was the environment I wanted to be in because back on the Gold Coast, all the people you were training with, they were having their break. And I was there alone trying to do 200 backstroke training. It’s not the most ideal. So we went into training and I was under Chris Mooney with Kaylee.

And Kaylee was the only one really doing my session. So it was like Kaylee and myself and Glenn was there as well. But we were doing sessions together and that made it a lot easier to get back on the grind and do the work you needed to do. Yeah, I can imagine. And I mean, it must be challenging to think of it being an extra block. You know, in hindsight, it’s easy to look at it that way. But when you haven’t qualified for the Olympics before or at that level, it’s like, you know, really the goal is to qualify for the Olympics, right? And then you don’t want to go in training for the Olympic swim. Initially, if you haven’t been there before. So it’s, yeah, hindsight’s wonderful sometimes, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah. So what have you taken from that experience up to the Olympics that you might do differently next time or some of those things that you’ve learned from it? I think the big thing is the way the taper,

because I tapered for three weeks in the trials. Glenn loves a big three-week drop-down taper across a long period of time. And it works really well for me. You feel a bit invincible in that first hundred when you’ve tapered for so long. You just have some sort of really light energy. I feel like I’m bouncing on top of the water. It’s super easy. But then something happens after the meet. The second you have even two days off or three days off, your body crashes and you feel like you’ve lost six weeks of training. You’ve lost a lot of bulk and you’ve lost a lot of strength and easiness. And then the second you get back in the water, you’re a sack of potatoes. I think the biggest thing would be structuring our approach into trials differently. If it became the focus to do the big meet, if the world championships became the focus, trials wouldn’t be. It would just be not to be like overconfident, but you’d go into trials thinking like,

well, I’ve done the work to do the time I need to do, which I believe I can do with a drop. Because we’d already shown that with a drop taper, I can do a good time during training, like with the April time. So I think it would be more about just changing the finish line. A bit of mental thing. It’s understated how much of it’s just mental. Yeah, especially in 200s for me. And what about the Olympics for you? What was the same, like the whole experience I’m talking about, what was the same as what you had expected and what was different?

And none of it was really how I expected to be honest with you. Like the whole atmosphere was unique to anything because I’d never made a major team before, so I had nothing to relate it to. And I’d come from a position of never having made youth teams or anything like that either. That was like my serious first overseas team, beyond I’d done a couple World Cups and things like that, but they’re a bit unique. The only thing I could relate it to really was like school camp. When you get given your team at school camp, whatever, you gotta go do activities and beat every other team in your activities and you’ll get a gold medal at the end for it. Like it was really weirdly bubbled into this area and you don’t, it’s hard to think about the fact it’s being televised worldwide. Like it’s obviously there and at the forefront of the picture but because you’re not in everyday life and you’re not around the media and you’re not around people talking about it,

you’re actually in the event itself. It doesn’t seem like it’s such a big thing. At least that was my interpretation of it, like I’m sure, because I went in with no pressure, like I went in with a hole. No, I got to the Olympics. That’s like the idea was just to get to the Olympics and absolutely I hope to make it final, because there are people there that are hoping to get a gold medal and I’m sure the pressure that they’re feeling on themselves is a different experience to what I had but it was every bit as much fun as I hoped it would be but it wasn’t as I expected it would be. Like it was crazy. Are you going in? You feel so small. Everyone’s so big. Every single athlete from every country is like seven foot tall and huge and they’re all like massive rowers and there was some Chinese ex NBA player. I don’t know his name. People follow the basketball dude but he was literally seven foot tall and stomping around

and I don’t know, you feel really like there’s a whole world of athletes out there that you never really thought of. That’s so funny coming from you as well. Like you’re big, you’re strong. How tall are you? Six-two. Okay, and you’re six-two as well. So it’s like when you put the fittest, the fastest athletes in the world from all the different sports, I imagine it’s easy to feel small but you’re not small yourself. You’re taller than your average guy out there and you’re a bit of a unit in terms of physique. Then all of a sudden everyone’s like so tall. That’s crazy.

They were like volleyball player tall. Yeah, that’s cool. And then with all the other swimmers as well, what was that like having the best swimmers in the world around and obviously people that you knew of, you got Dressel and you’ve got all the other famous swimmers there too. Was that strange to see them in person or was that just, that was fairly, yeah? I was okay with actually seeing them and meeting a few guys because I trained with a lot of big names before and I’d done ISL in the World Cup and been around some of the real big money makers in the names of the sport and made friends with quite a few of them already. It wasn’t foreign to speak to one or get to meet one, but it was more the racing, the full field because I’ve, like I’ve raced Juja U before. I’d raced Mitch many times because he’s in Australia obviously and I’ve never come across the whole field together sort of thing. I’ve never come across all of them in the one race

and I’d trained with Luke Greenbank for a couple of weeks when they came out to the Gold Coast so they weren’t foreign as individuals but once they all got put together I remember being really, really nervous and the heat’s kind of sitting around these guys like next to me was like Erie, I can’t remember, is it Rookacell or however you say his last name but Erie was there and he’s like a massive name. I’d never met him before and he’s like a massive name and all of a sudden like they’re all in the race it was a bit overwhelming for the heats but I thought it was really cool coming out of it to be like, ah, like I got to race those guys and I had a chat to Ryan Murphy afterwards. I said, ah, your stroke’s beautiful and he’s got shoulders that just look like absolute mountains. But I don’t know, I got really, really nervous but I still got through the heats. Okay, it was more the semis that I think I was more disappointed in, but yeah.

And what did you place overall? 10th, 10th overall. 10th, so yeah, so close. How far off the semis were you? It was like 0.2. Yeah, 0.2. That was a good one for your final, yeah. Crazy. But it was 0.2, it would have been different if I won a PB and I was 0.2 behind but it was 0.2 when I was like what I went, 1.568. So I was 0.6 behind, 0.4 behind my PB. So my PB would have made the final and I watched it the next morning as well. My PB would have got like fourth or fifth but I’m sure there’s plenty of people in the field that had that thought going through the head, you know, we all were putting the same boat. So it turned out how I did. Yeah. Well, I remember Lee, so yeah, Lee Nugent saying about when swimmers go to like an event like this there, if they’re often used to just being so far ahead of the field and I imagine that’s like you racing here in Australia, it’s like you might have Mitch there but aside from that, like you’re pretty,

pretty well clear of the field and then when you go to the Olympics, you’ve got people either side and it’s such a tight race across the whole board. Yeah. How was that experience for you just, you know, I mean, I guess you raced ISL so it’s obviously different that way but yeah, how’s that experience been different? Yeah. So having raced ISL obviously that you’re around that sort of competition but at the Olympics, like how is it when you’ve just got people so close to you and it’s such a tight race compared to just racing domestically? ISL and the Olympics, I think, I mean my experiences of them were completely different things because of A, because of short course but because of just the atmosphere of the people there because ISL comes really at the end of the big season. So a lot of people are kind of winding down in their training and they go there and it’s a lot of fun and ISL does a really good job of creating an atmosphere of fun,

of making the athletes feel like they can be relaxed and enjoy themselves and just have a good time and not race week but you know, just to make sure that they’re not taking it as the big massive serious meat of the year. They want people to present that sense of fun to the crowd and the audience and the people watching at home because it makes it more relatable and rather than big serious thing. So the Olympics was completely different, I think, in terms of the way I went into it headspace-wise but then with the people being fast, I actually spoke about this with my coach. I think it was harder to race people you can’t see specifically in backstroke because when they’re up with you you can’t see them, like when you’re shoulder to shoulder you can’t see them beyond a little bit of splash maybe from the kick but if they’re back on your feet, they’re almost like pacemakers for you. You kind of know what the field’s going to be doing

so you know if you’re placed in this spot in relation to the field you can kind of get a gauge for how you’re travelling in the race but in this one you’re really blind to what’s going on around you and that’s specific to backstroke I think. I’ve always thought it’d be a bit ambious at freestyle as how they can race each other the whole way because at the end of the day like what makes you really competitive is wanting to beat the guy next to you but when you can’t see the guy next to you it makes it much harder to apply that drive but I put it down to one of the reasons I don’t think I swam as well but at the end of the day it’s on me to swim my race rather than swimming the race against the guys next to me but like in the semi-finals I came back in 29 flat in the last 50 but my best back end up to that point was 29-3 but it just represents that I hadn’t put out the pace in the early part of the race that I needed to

I came back with a lot of steam and it just showed I’d held off too much but I think that’s partly because I didn’t know I was holding off too much if you know where the people are around you you can tell if you’re too far back or too far forwards you can know those things but I had no idea what was going on around me until the last lap really then I think it just got too far out of hand I think that’s why I kind of didn’t race the race I wanted to but that’s just something to work on in the future everyone has to go and do it themselves maybe the solutions sorry maybe the solution because everyone’s a 156 swimmer there at strange the whole field suddenly does 156s like it’s insane you haven’t seen one for three years and then 20 guys doing it but maybe the solution is to be a 154 swimmer and then they’re the people you can pace off of just to make it the next step up have you always been quite reflective of your swimming

and mentally how you’re travelling and physically it seems as though you’re tuned into that quite a bit is that something that you’ve always had? yeah but I think you can’t overthink it at times I don’t think it’s so much of a help as it is it’s good to always be reflective and I think the way I race the 200 specifically is really in the moment and I do well when I can think and have a clear head and know what’s going on around me because if it all becomes a blur then suddenly you’ve gone out too fast and I’ve died and I don’t know what happened that just went wrong somewhere I’ve always been very clear with my racing but we’ll go through it a lot with my coach and talk about these things but then it becomes down to it’s just fall apps and sometimes I think it would be better just to dumb it down and just think just get to the wall as fast as you can because you get all up in your own head especially about the 200 you can get up all up

in your own head because it’s such a painful race if you do it wrong but I think it’s harder sometimes to overthink it but just based on what I’ve seen it’s probably easier to be maybe a bit like Ryan Lochte I’ve lived with you used to think but I could be great to just not think about things too much but we’re all built how we’re built right and that’s got the right sort of personality and all of that because I often find the hardest race for me is often the heat swim now it’s like an Australian champ the hardest race was the heats because I went in knowing that I didn’t have to swim that hard but then that’s kind of second guessing nature of not knowing you don’t have to swim that hard to make the final also then comes in to like well how hard don’t I swim and like am I swimming hard enough or like what am I doing here and it’s almost the second guessing that makes the race harder in the finals you kind of get this clarity

of like alright I’m just going to do the best I can do and we’ll see what happens it’s a much easier race to execute and sometimes it’s less painful that way as well for some reason like the PB feels less painful than the bad 159 yeah yeah and what about now so you you’ll get home in a couple of days time what are your plans from here I’ll spend like four or five days on the Gold Coast get a tattoo, how exciting nice I think I’m going to get it on the forum but it’s not fully decided yet on the right forum because it seems to be that before I even went to the Olympics I was thinking about getting it there and went there and to my knowledge at that point the only person who had it there was Dressel and then coming off of the back of that and going to ISL every single person and his dog has it there it seems to be like the the trendy spot of the year on the inside on the inside like in the crook sort of thing probably a little bit smaller than usual

but yeah it was either there but like everyone’s done that this year and so it’s a little bit like well I don’t know I want it to be unique and special to me but there’s not many people with the tattoos so we’ll say where it goes on the forehand or on the neck or something maybe I could get it on the small of my back I think forum’s good because then you wear a t-shirt more people see it there it’s like you’ve got to be swimming for people to see it so let people know okay when they go to shake your hand they see it there so hold on yeah there’s a lot of different spots I’ve thought about but we’ll say where where but I’ll spend like 3-4 days on the gold quest then I’m actually going to turn around and drive back to New South Wales because my family we grew up in Newcastle my family’s in and around that area so I’ll spend until December I think well until the borders open realistically once the border between New South Wales

Queensland opens I’ll head back but that might be as late as like a couple weeks before Christmas I’ll have a break then I won’t be completely out of the water I’ll go and find a pool but I’m not going to be thinking about training I’m going to go and surf and enjoy myself and mentally reset because I want to go to Paris and do the next Olympics so I need to reset big enough to have another 3-year grind yeah absolutely and you find surfing one of those things for you that helps you do it absolutely yeah I love surfing one of the biggest contentions of my coaches and I like to surf a couple weeks out from competition because often the big comps are in the middle of winter and that’s the best season for surfing it’s like the April’s and the May’s are like often the best swells of the year and you go and surf 8 hours a day when you’ve got yeah I don’t know a big mate coming in 4 weeks like what if you enjoy yourself it’s yeah

this year I was very light on it but I think if it’s not an Olympic year it’d be hard to keep me away from a good swell yeah I understand and you guys had it it was pumping up on the Gold Coast for most of winter by the look of it there was some crazy swells so it must have been hard sitting on your hands to not go I had my last surf in April I broke my board I very nearly hurt myself really bad so I was like alright that’s it I haven’t touched the water since but it was a very very good swell and I was like oh I should I shouldn’t and I went in and I got a couple really good ones and I kind of went out that one time too many got a bit cocky and got slapped around for it maybe a blessing in disguise it could have been a very different year if that changed things yeah exactly well I’m glad you got to where you are now when you made the team so far so I will enjoy the surfing over your break and I appreciate you being on the podcast

and sharing your story and like I was saying before just open and having a conversation like this because when I’m hosting these and for me when I’m listening to podcasts it’s like I love it when people are willing to be open and share what they’re actually thinking about and going through like you have so right thanks very much and wish you always in the future no worries Brenton appreciate it call anytime awesome thanks Matt

The post What It Really Takes To Be An Olympian with Tristan Hollard appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Irene Cats from Swimfitforlife based up in far north Queensland. I find a lot of similarities between me and Irene as a coach, we normally coach adults, and a lot of adults that haven’t got any swimming backgrounds or adults who just learned how to swim. In this podcast, I want to talk about the things that help these swimmers be more efficient, enjoy the water more, and become better swimmers.

01:21 Swimming Principles
04:11 Starting Point
05:13 Body Position
08:39 You Can’t See Yourself
10:43 Snorkels
12:34 Understanding Water And Finding Your Grip
18:37 Drills/ Bending Of Elbows
22:39 Timing
25:35 Breathing
30:39 Follow A Swimming Program/ Get Some Help
35:20 Swimfitforlife Swimming Camps

Coach Irene
https://www.swimfitforlife.com/
https://www.instagram.com/swimfit.with.coach.irene/
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you know, over the years, you know, you meet so many different people. And then and some people, you know, just take it. They go, right, OK, we’re going back to the basics. And some people need a little bit of encouragement to to go that way because they think that they’re very specific about the issues that they have. And that’s just what they want to work on. But yeah, actually going back to those basics, it’s yeah, it’s the key, I think. 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 Irene Katz from Swim Fit for Life. She’s based up in Fire North Queensland there in Port Douglas primarily. So Irene, welcome to the podcast. Yes, thank you so much for having me, Brenton. We met a couple of years ago. I can’t even think about how long it was now because everything’s a blur. But you you’re similar to myself in you coach adults and a lot of adults that maybe haven’t got any swimming background or adults who have learned to learn to swim as you know, in their older age. So I think that’s a lot of similarities. And on this podcast today, I want to talk about from your experience, what are those things that have helped those swimmers who have learnt later on in life to become more efficient, enjoy the water more and become better swimmers. And you recently came up with the four foundations of freestyle, which you use as like your, I guess, your structure of helping people improve.

And I think to have that that base or that that philosophy that that you’ve come up with that you use to work with swimmers is and I’ve done something similar over the past few years with my philosophy on helping people do that with the five core principles of fast freestyle. So I want to talk about what or what made you sort of think of these things and come up with them over the last couple of months. Yes. So, well, I mean, you must have it as well. Like a lot of adults who are just getting into swimming or want to get better, they have these these issues of I’m struggling with breathing or I just can’t, you know, can’t get certain things right, can’t get that catch.

And it just it just always comes down to having those in my view, those four foundations, right? And, you know, it just slowly, the more you coach and the more you help people, I started realizing that I was the same pattern with everyone and it really seemed to work. It really made them understand how swimming really worked and and how freestyle works. Like the thing is, like we all move on land since, you know, since we were born and moving through air is just so much different than moving through water. And if you’re new to that, it’s it’s really important to actually understand how it all works and and yeah, just just getting the basics right to then be able to to really work on those little things that will get you a few seconds faster instead of the big things that first that will really just help you to to just you know, get that first 100 meters or that first 400 meters, right? So, yes, that’s really how I slowly just realized

that the story was pretty similar to how I was helping people. And and yeah, just by putting it down on paper and and writing it out, I started to realize that it was that that was it. Like that would really help people if they would understand that. Yeah, that’s great. I found when I first started coaching that I was just using everything that I’d picked up from other coaches or I’d read in books or seen in videos and DVDs and then with enough time and enough of actual people and working through there, the problems that they encounter and the challenges that you get given a coach to try and help that person. You eventually come up with your your own way of doing things, which is generally based on what you either your experience or what what you have been told and that kind of thing. But then you come up with your own thing and it sounds like that’s that’s that’s where you’re at at the moment. And so with with people who are pretty new,

they might not be able to do that their first 100 where maybe you generally start what are you looking for and watching them swim? Well, I think the first the first thing and which is the first foundation as well is just that body position.

Like the basic formula of swimming, which I come back to so many times as well is the first thing is reducing your drag, reducing your resistance, because water is so much denser than air that that is a really important part. And yeah, just realizing how you can balance yourself in the water and having a horizontal body position and having your legs up, you know, head down, bum up, kind of being just getting getting that basic ride

straight away puts people in a position where they start to realize that they can actually glide through the water instead of having to fight their way through the water, which is usually the first big light bulb moment. Yeah. And what do you what are some of the things that you do with them to help them find that body position and improve it? So yeah, it’s that’s pretty simple. Like, you know, just pushing off the wall and you know, have you have your arms in front of you or have them next to you and just by looking straight down instead of because I guess when you’re new to swimming, you kind of the thing you want to do is have your head up and like be close to the air to get breath, but starting to realize that when you push your head down and look straight down that it helps to keep your legs up. So just yeah, pushing off the wall, arms in front of you, arms next to you. Easy kick and just yeah, just having a play with that balance.

Like the first foundation I like to call hold your balance because it’s all about that. Just realizing if you push down in the front, the back comes up or, you know, it’s it all works together. Yeah, that’s it’s so true, isn’t it? Like you as a someone coming brand new to anything like you just, you don’t know anything, right? Like you just and it’s no surprise that people first get in and they might have their head. So a guy sent me a video recently actually and he just he couldn’t swim about 50 or 100 meters and he’s swimming. He swam about 10 or 15 meters before he had to stop, but he’s swimming with his head just in the water, but the rest of it’s just being held way up because he wants to be near the surface just to be able to lift the head up. So it’s just it’s just what instinctually happens there. And and you don’t know if you to get into a streamline position, you know, people just push off and if their arms are there,

we can say it’s like, God, that is slowing you down so much. All you got to do is just bring in a little bit closer, 10 times better. So it’s just that it really is basics, but people don’t know those basics if they’re if they’re brand new. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the first few sessions I have with people that are new to swimming, there’s just so many likeable moments. It’s just like one after the other, like, oh, if you do this, that happens. And they’re like, oh, wow, I had no idea. So yeah, it’s so it’s so good to be able to help people that way. But yes, that first just body position. I think it’s the most important part. Like most you would have it as well. Most people show up for the first time and their legs are just hanging down. And that’s just creating so much resistance. And you’re just not in a good position in the water to to have a strong stroke. So that’s that’s really the first one. And with that balance as well comes that rotation too.

So, you know, in swimming, you never lay flat in the water. You’re either just to the left or just to the right. I move my head at the moment, but you don’t want to do that.

But yeah, just that balance there as well. Like if you’ve never really moved in the water, it’s it’s it’s really quite hard to just lay like slightly rotate it to one side in the water and just stay there for a little bit. Which in like a few steps down the road, you’ll you’ll need that to actually be able to glide. Because if you can’t balance, you can’t glide.

So yeah, just these basics, just that first balance of how the water works and how you can hold your body in the water is just this first massive, massive step and realization for a lot of people. So you’re doing some sounds like discovery sort of drills or exercises to get them just to experiment a little bit with with some some changes there. And what are you doing with them to get comfortable being on their being on their side and and getting them to be able to figure out. Yeah, that that not going too far, you know, not not being too flat. How are you going about that? Yeah, I think it’s just a lot of feedback to what they’re doing. Because the other thing that’s swimming is you can’t see yourself. Like if you if you do any other exercise, you can just put a mirror up and you see what you’re doing. But in swimming, you just you don’t know it. So if you can’t see yourself, it’s really hard to realize what you’re doing.

So just by giving that constant feedback, you know, after every little bit. So the balance is just a matter of, you know, one I’m out, one I’m next to you kicking slightly on your side. You know, it’s easier to go all the way on your side. So usually that happens first and then we have to bring it back a little bit.

But you’re just that constant feedback and just letting them try different things and realize what feels good and what does not feel good and what will help you in the future seems to work really well. Are you using bins with everyone or some people?

Yes, the good old kick. It’s an interesting one. Some people rock up and they’re great and they’re great kickers. And I have to sorry guys, but usually it’s the girls that seem to be feather with their kicking.

But yeah, if the kicking is good and are comfortable doing it, I tend to not get the fins in just trying to keep it as simple as possible. But yeah, if kicking is an issue, fins is a great idea just to get that momentum going and and you know, not move backwards. When you’re trying to kick actually go forward and the fins help. Of course, you’re kicking as well in the end of the day. It helps to give you a bit more flexibility and your ankles and a bit more strength. So it’s yeah, if you’re kicking is not great to start with. Yes, chuck the fins on. Yeah, it’s hard to it’s hard to find your balance on your side when you’re going backwards with your kick, right? So you need some sort of propulsion forward. Yes, and it happens. I’ve seen it. The other thing that really helps through the first three steps of this plan really is the spin snorkel as well. I didn’t get on board with it straight away. I was kind of like another toy.

Like do we really need this? But just having that snorkel and not having to worry about stopping for breath or or anything, it just makes everything so much calmer.

You can just really focus on what you’re doing. So the swim snorkel is definitely something I would advise as well to new swimmers. Do you have some people who struggle with the snorkel just breathing, being comfortable with the breathing? Will they take water up their nose or anything like that initially? Yeah, there’s a few people that use the snorkel with the nose clip.

Or yeah, just just kind of guiding them through it, realizing that you know you can breathe out through your nose or more of a bit of pressure just on your nose seem to work quite well. But yeah, sometimes a nose clip is just the easiest way to go. I think in the beginning when you learn how to swim, there’s so much going on already. Like everything else that you can do to just make it easier and more comfortable, go for it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and even just wearing a snorkel can take a little bit of practice sometimes. Like when we run our clinics, we recommend that people with snorkels, not everyone, we don’t make it a requirement. But I’ve just got some some nose clips in my my bag for those swimmers that are pushing off, coming up after five meters and going like they’ve taken water into their lungs, it feels like because they’re just not used to that. So I carry some extra nose clips for that.

Because it’s so different. Yeah, so different from you guys.

So that’s that’s the first body position balance. And then what do you move on to next? Next one is just understanding water and how to find your grip.

Water is a funny thing. Like if you try to grab it, it runs through your fingers. If you swap it or if you’ve ever done a belly flop in a pool, you know it can be very hard as well. So just understanding how you can find your strength because with swimming, it really doesn’t matter how strong you are, how many muscles you have. It’s about finding that grip on the water. So yeah, just just realizing how to move through the water. And I guess it’s an the natural thing for people is to go for the easiest way to pull your arm through the water because, you know, it feels easy and that’s what we’re looking for, right? But I guess with just that actual stroke in the water, it’s about finding the hardest way to get your arm back because that means you’re getting most out of it. So yeah, just just understanding that moving water doesn’t give you anything. So the water that you’re just just underneath your body that’s moving

because you just pushed your body through it. So if you see people like kind of trying to catch the water underneath their body, it’s not really going to help you. But if you go a little bit wider, what a water is still, you can actually grip it and you can push push yourself forward from that water. And it really goes from kind of, you know, the feeling of moving your arms through air. It goes to the feeling of moving your arms through mud or even pushing of a concrete wall in the end of the day, which is, you know, what we’re all aiming for.

But yeah, just just practicing that. So, you know, the good old sculling always comes back to that one.

It’s a bit of a funny one because when you try to teach people how to swim freestyle and you start sculling, they straight away go, how is this going to help you feel it?

But it’s just so good to just get that feel of the water, just, you know, sculling where you move your hand in and out from side to side, just trying to keep that constant pressure on the palm of your hand. In the end of the day, that constant pressure, that’s what we’re looking for in the stroke as well. So yes, just understanding how to find your strength and find your power in the water is the next one. Yeah, thinking about the swimmers that I’ve worked with who are newer to it, the adults, there definitely is a tendency to either have quite a drop of the elbow so they’re just sort of bringing their hand through the water and just they’re thinking that the aim is to just go from up here in front of the shoulder back to the hip. And it doesn’t really matter. You just, that’s where you’ve got to go. And so often they follow the easiest path. Or often there’s that tendency to be very like really close to the body

as you were, and when you go that little bit deeper and you get the fingertips pointing down, there’s, it’s harder and you’re like, oh, okay, that’s working. Maybe my lats or my shoulders a little bit more. And initially, coming to it with no experience is like, you’re right, because that feels like it’s a bit of hard work. So you move away from it. Yes, exactly. You’re scared to kind of hurt your shoulders or do the wrong thing. But that’s really what we’re going for. Like, yeah, just getting most out of every stroke, getting your efficiency.

Yeah, sort of sculling. But then when you actually get to swimming, just counting your strokes every lap. Just gives you such a good idea, especially when you’re trained by yourself. You don’t have a coach to look at you. Just counting your strokes and trying to get that number down. Like my magic numbers don’t know about yours, but my magic numbers. I always say when you get to like 20 strokes for 25 metres or 40 strokes for 50 metres, you’re heading in the right direction.

Yeah, exactly right. And I think you’re right. It’s a good way to know whether or not the changes you’re making, particularly with your catch,

improving you or not. And I was working with two swimmers last week, just locally here. And we were basically working on different things each, but we just had them. I had them do two fifties, go just not thinking about your stroke to swim for the first 50. Take 20 seconds and then swim back and then practice this change that we’re working on. And they made those changes really well. And for both of them, it was four or five strokes less for that 50 when they got right. And actually one of the swimmers, she was on both arms. Actually she was really wide through that first part of the catch, like wide and sharp. She’s going to come in, follow that better path. And for her, it’s just so much more direct.

Deeper, she’s getting a bit more water. And you can see the immediate results. It’s such a good way for people to self coach their technique. Now, you’re probably not going to look to hold that same really low stroke count when you’re starting to pick. And I think that’s what some people don’t tend to understand initially. And I think, all right, as long as I hit 40 strokes for this 50, then I’m good. But obviously stroke rates are a factor there. If you’re looking for speed, but if you’re just looking to, if you’re learning how to swim, then it’s certainly a good indicator. Yeah, yeah, true. Yeah, it always gets a bit confusing if you start sprinting and they still try to have that many strokes. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. You can go higher now. It’s okay. But yeah, but even if you swim, you know, if you’re trained by yourself and you swim an 800 or a kilometer,

like it’s a good idea to just count your strokes every so many laps. And, you know, it’s a good gauge is, you know, if you’re still holding your form, if you’re still holding your technique, if you go from 20 to a few hundred meters later, all of a sudden have 26 strokes, you know that you’re kind of falling apart to say it nicely. So it’s, yeah, I do it as well. I train by myself usually. And yeah, it just gives you a good idea. Like time combined with your stroke count gives you quite a good idea of how you’re going. And are there any other exercises or things you’ll get people to think about to help them with that part of the stroke? Yeah. So it’s, well, one of those light fall moments as well. You mentioned it before as well is just that bending your elbow and understanding why that’s so important. And so just, you know, usually when you call someone, they’re in a pool anyway. So just making that comment of

if I would ask you to push yourself up out of the pool right now, how, you know, you wouldn’t try to do that with straight arms. You wouldn’t be able to get out of the pool. You would automatically bend your elbows and have about a 90 degree angle because that’s when you’re strongest and that’s when you start using your lats and some stronger muscles. And just realizing that that’s how you’re going to get you to find your strength. It’s just one of those other little light fall moments where people go, oh, okay, yes. Because it’s not a hard thing to do, but you just got to realize it and understand why it’s so important. Yeah. And I’ve found with some swimmers who are quite new and they have that straight and deep with the arms. There’s no bend at all. With a couple of them, I’ve found that when they go from being completely deep and straight to then getting that bend in the elbow off, one of them will sometimes not keep that reach

and extension. So they’re so focused on being bent with the elbows that they’re just, it’s all bent the whole way through. And so sometimes it’s like, all right, we’ll add this into the stroke. We’ve got a bit of bend in the elbows to help with your catch and all right, that’s good. But now we’re not reaching and extending and maybe we’re coming out short. Yeah, coming out short, it’s a big one too. Like as soon as you start talking about a bend elbow, they come out like a belly button. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we do want to go further. But yeah, it’s just, I think so much of it. It’s just realizing and learning how it all works. Like when people never really learn how to swim freestyle.

A lot of people seem to think it’s just kind of this like round, you know, circle kind of movement. And it’s so not like it’s more of like an oval kind of shape. Like when you start to pull through and then you come over, like there’s no full circle whatsoever. So just visualizing things like that as well really helps to get it right. Even just with the timing, looking in the mirror. So someone, you know, how people will be very windmilly in the beginning. So there’s no, they’re not sorry for taking their time. And just getting them to look in the mirror, even go side on and just getting them to keep their hand out in front. And I had one of my swimmers who I coached online. She sent me a video of her just practicing the recovery and the catch just out of the water because she didn’t have access to a pool for a week or so. And it was actually interesting to see because yeah, I would rarely sort of analyze someone

out of the water, right? But one of the things that we saw there was she was just, she was windmilling. She wasn’t keeping the arm in front. And some of those areas that we, or faults in the stroke that we were trying to work on in the pool, they were coming out of the water. And so it was actually really useful. And so the next video she sent, her timing was a lot better and she was front quadrant. And I’d like to think some of that was from actually just seeing what happened out of the water and then getting her to make those adjustments. So yeah, it’s interesting with that, isn’t it? Like there’s a few different approaches and because it’s so much harder to change things in the water, if you can’t get it right out of the water, it’s unlikely it’s going to happen in there too. So it can be another tool that our disposal is. Yeah, you’re a great idea practicing that in the mirror. Yes, because yeah, like I said before,

you can’t see yourself when you’re swimming. So just sometimes seeing what you’re doing in the mirror, even though it’s out of the water, that’s a good idea. What do you, I just, I look at myself in the mirror too much. There’s just a minute you came to me.

Not true, I didn’t really get true. You did touch on the third foundation there, which is all about the timing. So yeah, the whole wind milling and going against that and realizing why, just realizing that we always want to stay long in the water. You never want to find yourself at a point where one arm has already dropped and the other arm is still in the air because you’re just not long. You’re going to fall down, well, not fall down, but you’re going to sink a little bit and just always having that one leading arm out, waiting for that one to come forward. And then just taking over, just take over just before, just keeping yourself long.

That cue usually seems to help quite well.

Take over, but taking over. Yes. Yeah, I was about to say, I haven’t heard that one before. I like it. I’m going to probably steal it from you.

That’s a great one because the way I’ve sometimes described that position in front when the lead arm is out there and you’re on your side, I described it as like the base position, the position you always want to return to. You’re basically going from your right side to your left side. And it’s essentially one arm taking over the other arm out in front of you. So yeah, it’s a really, really good one. Yeah. So the way I like to practice it first is with the good old underwater switches. And so, you know, in the recovery, bring your arm forward underwater because usually when you start lifting something out of the water in the back, something drops in the front. So it’s a lot harder to keep that leading arm out. So just by bringing, just doing your normal stroke underwater, but then bringing your hand forward underwater. And then you can even almost look at your hands. Like we always say look down, but you know,

every now and then have a look at your hands and just before you get to the front, just take over or even do it with a full catch up first. Just go full opposite to start with and then just take it back a little bit with that just taking over before it. That seems to work really well. That’s good. And are you getting them to do that

on their side a little bit when they’re reaching forwards and then coming through and then swapping on the other side or just getting them to do it? Yeah. Well, firstly, you know, step by step. But yeah, in the end of the day, it’s a great opportunity to practice that rotation as well and then get that going. Because it’s quite natural that rotation. Like as soon as you kind of start pulling your arm back and reaching that side, your body up automatically wants to turn. And a lot of people in the beginning think that that’s wrong and they find it. But it’s actually, you know, you just want to go with it. You just kind of want to swing from side to side, get into the rhythm and just glide through the water. So yeah, definitely get the rotation involved there as well. That’s excellent. And what about the fourth thing, the final one after that? Final one is the one that people have most issues with. But you first have to get all three rides

before you can get to your breathing.

It always makes that in a good way. It makes me laugh when people come up to me and say, oh, I’ve got issues with my breathing and swimming. And I’m like, well, we can all breathe, but you’re doing it now.

The other issues with your breathing is obviously some bigger things in really in the foundation and the basics of your stroke that are making it hard for you to get a good breath in. So usually by going back to the basics, and it depends, of course, on the swimmer, like, you know, have a look at what they do. If their body position is good, you know, it might be another foundation, but usually it comes down to just that basic body position. If you’re swimming with your legs down and they’re hanging down and you try to breathe, of course, you’re going to lift your head up to take that breath. That’s just what’s going to happen. So if you correct your body position and really get into that flat horizontal body position, it’s going to be a lot easier to just go from looking straight down to just looking to the side and having that one eye in, one eye out in the water, body position to take just a relaxed breath.

Because the thing as well is if you start lifting your head to breathe, you just stretch your neck and it just makes it so much harder to breathe as well. So yeah, the fourth foundation is really just that final step where we can finally take that snorkel off and start working on the breathing. I find that a lot easier to really just get everything right first and get them comfortable with that, feeling relaxed, because if you’re not relaxed, your breathing is always just going to be at the top of your lungs and it’s going to be a short, shallow breath. So if you can get everything right first and just feel comfortable in the water, the breathing doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore. It’s just something extra we do and it just happens and no issues. Yeah, yeah, there’s certainly… I mean, it’s one of the main things, isn’t it, that can cause people to start feeling that breathing. But as you said, there’s so many other parts

of their stroke that can be making it hard for them to breathe, like not having the timing. If there’s nothing in front, you’re not going to be balanced, you’re going to take over because they’re heavier and then same with obviously your body position and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, we’ve got to get those just basic balance and timing and all that sort of stuff right. And in terms of going through all of that, do you talk about more when you’re doing private lessons and that kind of thing, or are you sort of throwing a few of these things in for your squad sessions that you’re doing? How do you like to sort of approach it? Yeah, well, obviously with private sessions, you get the luxury to just guide people through whatever level they are and just help them move on. So sometimes it’s so much better to get someone who is totally new to swimming and you can just really just take it from the basics and get it right straight away.

A lot of times it’s a lot harder when someone has been swimming for 10 years already, self-thought, and now they have issues with their breathing or they can’t get their 100 freestyle in two minutes. It’s like, okay, we have to go back to the basics and they’re like, oh no, no, I have the basics, I can swim. And I’m like, I get that. But obviously sometimes by just going back to the basics and making sure you have that all right, it doesn’t have to be all the foundations that we just talked about. You might already have a great body position, but there’s just some other things that we can work on. But yeah, just in those private sessions, you can just cater it to how they’re going. And some people pick up really quickly on some of the exercises, like if they’ve been doing other sports in their lives and they’re pretty active, they seem to really understand how their body works so it all goes a little bit quicker.

But yes, of course in the squat sessions that we do or the group sessions that we like to call them, because some people tend to get a bit scared of squats.

Yeah, always, we always do a little warm-up and there’s always drills.

It’s just a great way to set yourself up for a good swim. I do them as well every time I swim, just a nice easy warm-up to just get the muscles going and then depending on what the set is. So if it’s kind of like a long-distance set, I prefer working on my body position and just getting in a nice streamlined position before I start. If it’s a sprint set, I like to walk on really that grip of the water so potentially some sculling or just kind of adjust the drills to what you’re trying to do in the set.

But yeah, the main thing I’m just trying to bite and educate people on is if you want to get better at swimming, you have to follow some kind of program or do some different things. Like just jumping in the pool and swimming a kilometer. It’s just, you know, if that’s what you like to do and you’re not training for any race or anything, go for it. But if you really want to get better at swimming and faster and tackle some races and stuff, you just get a coach, find someone who can help you either online or someone local and just get some help and really improve and develop your stroke and your fitness, your swim fitness. Because it’s a lot different than moving on land. Yeah, that’s exactly right. There’s a few that I want to touch on. And the first one is just like going back to basics. I had a podcast a couple of weeks ago with a guy I’ve worked with for maybe going on three years now from memory. And he just basically went back to basics

a couple of weeks ago because he found his open water times to just, they dropped off about 30 seconds per 100 from his pool times. And so he was just like, he was just like, I need to just do something. So he went back to basics and going through his eight week course I put together and we start with like just like how you’re breathing and then we go to some balance stuff. And after a couple of weeks, I think it was four or five weeks, he finally got his times and he was swimming well and he’s been swimming for quite a while and I’ve worked with him for ages but he just went back to basics and was able to improve. And it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re at like just some of his basics. They always have to go back to him and I was listening to, I don’t know if you’ve listened to this podcast with Dean Box also around, Titmas’s coach and it was with Brett Hawke and Dean Boxle and he was just talking about like some of the things

that they would go through in a session and he’s like every session he’s watching is he was talking about Arnie and saying like, I’m watching Arnie and the head position is not right or I’ve got to get that down a little bit and this is like the fastest swimmer in the world for 400 free, 800 free and sorry, 200 and 400 free and even there you’re looking at head position, right? It’s a pretty basic thing but he’s not going to get it right every time he needs a coach to be able to Exactly, I’m so happy you said it as well because over the years, you meet so many different people and some people just take it they go, all right, okay, we’re going back to the basics and some people need a little bit of encouragement to go that way because they think that they’re very specific about the issues that they have and that’s just what they want to work on but yeah, actually going back to those basics it’s yeah, it’s the key I think

Yeah, and it’s, I mean, especially with adults particularly those that have swum for a long time and they just love the fitness or the social aspect of it

each to their own, nothing wrong with just just wanting to go and knock out a workout but those that do want to improve and get quicker you’re right, probably got it you might need to change something up you’re probably going to have to change at least something about your technique and be open to a bit of feedback there or change the type of training you’re doing so you’re just going to keep doing the same results And that makes the timing as well, doesn’t it? Like just getting something new to focus on like, you know, that makes swimming interesting there’s always something that you can work on and you know, just getting those little things right and then seeing, you know, seeing your time’s getting better as well like that’s the excitement really Yeah, it’s so true and I had a guy, Chris, who I’ve been working with on the episode before this and he was saying that he was going through this catch challenge course that I’ve put together

and like, there’s like a drill a day that we go through and he just tried it and it worked for him and he was like, okay, so drills, yeah, all right drills, you know, and I think a lot of people are like that they go, oh, here’s a drill and you just go through it but when you know the purpose of it and the reason you’re doing it and you know how that’s actually going to make you faster as a swimmer, it’s so much more motivating so he’s saying now with his running drill because he was a runner, he’s gone back to those and started doing them again that he used to do like 10, 20 years ago as a runner but now he’s like, okay, I can’t work but I’ve just got to be specific about them and actually have some intention with them Yeah, I think that’s an important part like you’ve got to know why you’re doing these drills if you’re just sculling for the sake of sculling Yeah, pretty boring but if you’re sculling really that, you know

that intention of finding more grip on the water and getting your feel like, yeah it just makes it a lot better like understanding why you’re doing these things Yeah, absolutely and you’ve got, have you got a camp coming up?

Yeah, so on this four foundations way of teaching I thought I would just throw a retreat in there because Port Douglas is such a beautiful place to swim and every time I post photos of our pools people are like, oh, I wish I could swim there so I thought I would just make it happen so the first one is the first weekend of December so I understand that not everyone can travel here at the moment but yes, if you can, if you’re in Queensland or I believe South Australia at the moment can travel here yeah, it’d be great to see you up here it will be a pool-based training weekend because it will be the summer months which means that we can’t swim in the ocean here, unfortunately but the pools will be nice and warm and the sun will be out so it’ll be a great opportunity to exactly go back to those basics and really work on those foundations and yeah, you’ll walk away knowing which foundations you can really work on a bit more, how to do that

and hopefully that will help you to get your times down and reach your swimming goals Awesome, and we’ll put the links in the show next that’ll be on swimfitforlife.com Yes, yes, and I obviously am working on an actual online program with these four foundations as well hopefully that will be launched soon too because yeah, I just want to spread this knowledge and I’m sure you’re the same and that’s why you’re doing these podcasts like you just realise that you have this knowledge that can help people and I just want to make sure people enjoy swimming and don’t see it as that hard thing that, you know, if you do a triathlon let’s get through that swim and then start enjoying the rest of the race like let’s just make swimming that enjoyable way of exercise and way of movement that it is Yeah, absolutely and yeah, that can be great and I’m looking at you, you look like you’re warm up there and here I am, I’m sitting with her

I should go and get a rug from the living room because I’m cold Yeah and I’m pretty quite envious of you at the moment having had warm weather for a very long time Yeah, well, I’m never just saying on the news that it was raining all over Queensland but we’ve got blue skies and 32 degrees at the moment so yeah, it’s definitely come up and the retreat will be at the Sheraton as well so I mean, what better place Yeah, beautiful spot up there Yeah Well, Irene, thanks so much for being on the podcast and great to catch up again it’s been a few years but yeah, great to have you on and is there anywhere else you’d like to direct people to perhaps your Instagram or Yes, yes, of course there’s the SwimFit Instagram which is SwimFit with Coach Irene and then there’s the Facebook page as well SwimFit for a live and yeah, whenever I have those live fault moments I like to write a little blog or you know, post something on Instagram

whatever I can do to help people to make the whole swimming journey more enjoyable, more fun so yeah, keep track and yeah, hopefully I’ll be able to help some more people out Love it, thanks very much Thanks so much, Brinton

The post The Beginner’s Guide To Freestyle with Irene Cats appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Seeing some incredible improvement with his swimming time, I want to get Chris into the podcast to get his take on what’s made the difference for him and with experiences like this, a lot of listeners will surely have a lot of takeaways that could help them in their swimming journey.

01:36 Swimming Background
04:14 Training Plan For Triathlon
07:47 First Swim Analysis
04:15 Saw An Effortless Swimming Video Online
16:21 5-Day Catch Challenge
16:52 Slower With The Masters Club
18:23 Areas OF Improvement
20:14 Doing The Drills
23:09 Variable Pace Training
26:15 Not All Sunshine And Rainbows
34:45 What’s Ahead
36:51 Recording Swim Videos

Join the 5 Day Catch Challenge
Join the Effortless Swimming Membership
Effortless Swimming Freestyle Clinic

Cause I felt like, you know, cause you’re watching yourself as you do it and you’re imagining yourself doing it. And when I kind of do the drills, I kind of picture the person in the video trying to do them and trying to like mimic like those different art movements and stuff. And so it, I think it definitely, definitely made a huge difference. But I remember like, you know, you want to like, I was progressed, you know, digressing. And so I was like, I remember being like just like around 136 for 100 yards. When I first started that five day catch challenge and by the end, like, and I gauged myself off of doing that four by a hundred meters, I think you had with like 30 seconds rest. And so my average when I first started was like 136. And when I finished, I was down to like 125 at the end. But and I did it on five consecutive days because I was like, you know, that’s what it’s set up for. It’s set up for a five day challenge.

So I did it in five consecutive days. And I saw like, welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast. This is episode number two hundred and three. And my guest today is Chris Namoli. Chris, welcome to the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I wanted to get you on the podcast together the last couple of months and seeing some incredible improvements on your end. So I wanted to get your take on what what’s made the difference for you. Because I think when people have made those improvements and they share what’s made a difference for my fine, there’s a lot of takeaways for for the listeners of the podcast. So I want to get you on for that and to chat about some of the successes that you’ve had. So what’s your your background with swimming? So you’re a triathlete, but what’s your background with swimming? When did you start 2018? I have never I’ve never done competitive swimming or done any kind of like real swimming. I just watch people do it. And so I was able to kind of just do it to survive out in the water.

I do some surfing and stuff. And so I am able to swim just enough to be able to survive out in the water and get myself back in the shore. But as far as being a competitive swimmer and doing it for full for fall for the for full lengths and long lengths of time, I just I’ve never done it until 2018. And you just picked that because it’s a necessary enabling triathlon that’s that. Yeah, yeah. So I was yeah, I was coming off a foot injury and running. I was having a set of in the foot issue. And so I wasn’t seeing the the drop in weight that I was hoping to see in my training after six weeks. And so I was like, all right, you know, instead of pushing being over 40 and being close to 40, I was like, I didn’t want to be able to like start hammering miles and like really press the envelope. So I was like, all right, I’m not going to be racing for a while anyway. While I do some triathlons, it’ll give me a chance to do some cross training.

And then that I can I can add that as cardio to be that I’ll be able to see the results that I’m looking for. And I don’t have to push the running side of it and increased mileage too fastly. I could still be patient because I was coming off a good break where I missed like two to three months of running. And so I was just trying to do like a slow build up backup. And so that’s how I got into the triathlons. And I knew and eventually the future would be that way because I don’t want to continue to be like, you know, I eventually figure I’ll break down eventually running wise and like I won’t be able to train, you know, the 70, 80 miles a week that I normally would like to run. So, you know, triathlons, I figure would be able to be in the future anyway. So it was a good time to kind of start. And once I started, I had like a really good fall season in 2018. And then I did it again in 2019 and had a better fall.

So it was just like it just became a no brainer to just do it in the summer because it’s just fun to kind of like focus on something different. Yeah. And so your background’s running.

Yeah, yeah. I’ve always been a runners.

And because I mean, just looking at your half Ironman runtime, was it was it a one an hour, 15 hours, 16? Yeah, I was 75, 12 for the half Ironman. That’s quick. That’s very quick.

And and so with your swimming, when you started swimming for triathlon, what was your experience like and what sort of like training plan where you’re following when you first began to just rock up at the pool and cut a few laps or do you have exactly what it was? It was so my so the first triathlon that I was doing was going to be obviously a sprint that had a quarter mile swim. So my goal was, all right, I need to be able to swim at least 400 meters. So literally the first. So I want to say I started training in May and the race was in July. So the first month and I was just making stuff up. So I was just like, all right, I just need to do four by I was literally I was doing four by 100s with 30 seconds rest. And that was my swim. I did that for about a month, two to three days a week. And then I got to the point where I was like starting extending it. So I was now I was doing four by 400. I would do four by 100 and then I would swim for 200.

And then I would swim for 300 and then swim for 400. And so that was like that ended up being the way that I trained for that first Ironman. I mean, not first Ironman, first triathlon was probably not a bad like not a bad way to go about it, just that steady build up of distance. And when you first got in the water was did you have much an idea of what you should be thinking about with your technique? Did you have any one helping you or any advice for friends? I didn’t have anybody helping me. I didn’t I didn’t use my GoPro at the time yet. I was just just I was just getting pointers from people and really just trying to survive and just trying to, you know, all right, I did this, I’m looking at this time. All right, this was good. This was good. I didn’t really start diving into this techniques and stuff until I got done that those first two races. So I had done two that first summer and it was one in July.

And then the next one was in August. And then I didn’t do another one again until the following year. And then it was sometime in December because I was like, oh, I did the same. I can keep swimming during training and stuff and use it as like instead of doubling, I can now like train doubling for running. I can now just swim instead of like running and that’ll just save me even more pounding on. So my plan was so I went and got a swim analysis done by a local guy who does like swim clinics and stuff around here. And that’s where I started first making some of the adjustments that I was kind of able to start making. And what pace were you for those first two triathlons? Can you remember roughly where you were? I was right at eight minutes for the quarter miles.

For the quarter mile. So it would be about four hundred meters. So about two minutes. Two minutes, yeah, per hundred meters, I think. Yeah, based on it. So and when I was doing the four hundreds in the pool, my goal was to break eight minutes. And I was like eight, oh, ten, the first couple. And then like got down to like eat something and then I was down. Then I finally right before the race, I think I just swam like 750 or something like that. Yeah, yeah, nice. And then just for context for those listening, your recent half-iron man was about 130. I’m trying to think of the pace. 134, 135 pace, 100 meters. 29, 32 for the 1.2 miles. So I think that was like right around 130, 132. Yeah, nice. So yeah, that’s a significant improvement even just sort of working with you and working to develop your stroke. We’ve seen some really good changes over that time. And maybe going back to when you had the first analysis by the local swim coach,

what were some of those things that he pointed out to you? He said I was swimming flat. So my hips were flat when I was swimming. I was late breathing because it was like when my arm was coming, like when I went to go do my recovery, I was coming up late to breathe. And I was coming too far back. And so it was like making my also hips kind of like sinking everything.

He mentioned that, you know, I had a high turnover and he said my aerobic engine, like the only reason I was able to swim the way that I was was because of my aerobic engine and had nothing to do with any kind of technique or anything. It looked like I was a drowning fish like just wallowing in the water.

But with the drills that he had given me to do it was like holding on to a kickboard vertically or horizontally and then kind of like just swimming with one arm, grabbing it and then going back with the other one and grabbing it and then like swimming that way. So to kind of like slow the stroke down and kind of like introduce that pause

and then doing where you have like the one arm on the kickboard and you’re just using kind of like one arm to swim to kind of like and that those were mainly more to help. I think one it was to help with my catch, but two was also to help with my breathing. So that was the other thing. My arm was dropping too far when I was going to breathe. So that’s what one of the things he was saying is that so I was late breathing because my arm was dropping down too far. And so that was forcing me to have to come all the way back up. I wasn’t breathing enough out of my nose

to do that. And then the hips thing was the one thing that he was like really. So it was like those drills and then just kicking on one side with things with my head, with my one arm out just to get a feel for that. So those are the first few drills that I had to do that he gave me when I first started. And can you remember how long it took you to make those changes or to feel a difference with them?

I did another analysis with him. I want to say right before the next triathlon season.

So I want to say like maybe May of either, like March or April of 2019 was when I did the next one. And so I was really working with him. So I worked with him again and he was like, you’ve made incredible improvements. Like, you know, my hips were still flat, he said. And so that was like, you know, and that leads into like kind of like where when I started first started working with you saying that I was over rotating my hips because I was like, all right, I really need to get these hips rotating. And so I think I kind of like over did everything. And then I started swimming really well. I started like I got, I was doing like, so I was back then I just changed up from doing workouts and I would just swim straight for like 2,400 meters or something like that. And then I got down to like, I was going under 30 minutes for 6, for 20, you know, for two, no, that doesn’t make sense for 1,600 meters. I was going under 30 minutes for 1,600 meters.

And I was like, oh, that’s, and that was like right before this race I did in August in Atlantic City that was in Olympic tri-distance roughly. And I, so usually I was a big, I would usually be like three minutes behind my friends that were in the races that were just as good as bikers but they weren’t as good as runners. So it would always like be a race to see who, if I was going to be able to catch them or not depending on how bad my swim was. And so I remember that day, I was only like a minute and 45 seconds behind them and it was a three quarter mile swim. So it was a 1,200 meter swim and I was like just under 20 minutes. I think I was 1930 or something like that. And so that was like, so I was seeing a lot of improvement there but I think like looking back on it, some of the things that I was still doing wrong is like my arm was still coming straight down.

I was still not breathing correctly. I don’t think, and I was still crossing over doing, still doing the crossover stuff. Yeah. Yeah, well, and what’s it like now? So when you look back at that, you’re throwing minutes behind down to a minute 45 and with your swim where it is now for that half Ironman around just over 130 pace. Did you feel like that was possible a year, two years ago? Did you just be able to make all the improvements? So that’s when, so I really started getting into swimming last year with the pandemic and everything because it just, everything was shut down

and the good thing where I’m at is that we have the Jersey Shore that’s just an hour away from me. So the fact that I was biking inside, I had really bad plantar fasciitis going on so I wasn’t running and I was just like, I need to get out of the house, I need to do something. So I asked my, so my friends that I’d swim with there, they have a place down on the Jersey shore just north of Atlantic city and there’s a place where they do open swims there. It’s just in like this little bay in this little area where they go to dock boats and it’s a no wake zone. So we just throw on our floating buoys and swim around 50 yards per loop. So I was just going down there and just doing, I’d swim two loops, take 30 seconds, swim in other two loops and then drive home. So I was doing that like four days a week. And then on Sundays, we found a group that goes in a different Jersey short town that where they just do these big long swims

on Sunday mornings for like at least an hour, hour and 20 minutes. And so we’d go down and swim with them. And it was kind of like, so it’s like you go in, it’s like in behind houses and stuff where they have like boats that dock them behind houses and all these rich million dollar houses and stuff. And so you just swim up and down these channels that they have made in there for these houses and stuff. And so it all led up to like this big race that they had, this big swim race that they have at the end of August, that’s a 2.4 mile swim. And so I ended up doing that at the end of last year. And that’s what kind of like convinced me that I could probably do some of these Ironman slight distance races. Yeah, nice. And then when you contacted me, you, so had you seen some of the videos that we’d posted on maybe Instagram or something? And that’s when you decided to get into it. That’s what happened. So last year, at the end of last year,

I started really getting into swimming and like I started videotaping myself and showing it to my friends. Like a couple guys got inducted into like, you know, there’s some, so they have like division three swimming here like for colleges. Like the one guy got inducted into the school’s hall of fame for his university hall of fame for swimming and stuff. And so these guys kind of looking at my swim and like telling me what I’m doing wrong what I’m doing right. And then somebody had shared a video that you had done. And so then I just became obsessed with like looking at the videos, trying to make those changes, doing this, that and the other thing. And so that’s when I really started like figuring out breathing from the diaphragm, you know, breathing more out of my nose from techniques that I had kind of like seeing from you and seeing from your videos and everything that were on there. So I had done like, like I said,

I was really, I had really seen big improvements last year. And then I started, so I was like, oh, I’m going to join master swim. Like I should be good enough now to join the master swim class. And so I joined the master swim to get ready. Fantastic as I was doing in April. And I started actually getting worse at this master swim class. And I started not, I started like when I got there, you know, with drafting and everything I was doing a hundred intervals with like 15 seconds rest in like 125, 130. And then all of a sudden I was swimming like 140 and not even be able to like recover, you know. So I was like, you know, so I just started getting into my head and like, and I need to do this, this and this. So I’m like, I just need to start working with people. I need to start from the get go. I need to start, you know, so I stopped. And then I talked to like one of this guy that’s like, he was a former division one swimmer

for Clemson who does like, who’s really good triathlete and everything. So I was talking to him and he’s like, oh, see, you know, at the pool that we’re at, where we swim at, you know, talk to Tyler, Tyler can help you. So I worked with Tyler and I got some changes from him that kind of like helped still kind of like in my head. And then it was when you did that five day catch challenge, I saw that being populated and market it. And I was like, you know what? I’m like for 10 bucks, what can I lose? Like, you know, worst, worst things I’ve, I’ve wasted 10 bucks more at a bar on a Friday night than I would like, you know, taking a swim, you know, taking a couple of like swim lessons and stuff like that. And it wasn’t until that that I was like really sold on like work one to work with you personally and like see how far I could go with this. And what do you think you got slower with the Masters Club?

I think it was just more because I was more focused on speed and not focused on technique. And I do think I’m better in the open water because then I’m not like, every, every time I swim in a pool, I don’t do flip turns. So it’s like, I’m just stopping, kicking off, floating. And then I have to get back into that rhythm again. When I’m in the open water, I can at least like, I’m more cognitive of what I’m doing over longer distances of time and distance. So I can actually like really hone in like, I keep doing this, keep doing this, keep doing this. But when I’m in a pool, I can’t do that. And I was so focused on trying to keep up with everybody and be faster, faster, faster that I think it just made my technique worse and worse and worse. It’s, I was just out of curiosity really because I’ve seen that with a couple of other swimmers that I’ve coached before. And I’ve have found that personally as well in some squads that when I do swim in a squad,

there might be a lot of people. And if people are leaving like two or three seconds apart and it’s just on the feet, like my technique definitely gets worse when I do that. I think fitness-wise I can, it often increases, fitness does, but then the technique element falls away a bit and just depends on what’s more important individual, I think at that time. But yeah, that’s interesting. I, yeah, I’ve seen that with a few others. So, and then, so when you first started, you sent your first video. Can you remember some of those things that you then took away and went to work on? So, yeah, I remember specifically, like at least in the five day catch challenge, the first thing was to entry into the water. So I wasn’t like going, I don’t know. I was thinking I was more slapping and I don’t think I was reaching out as far as I should have been. So I was kind of like going in and then reaching out and like, cause I was told was like,

you need extension, extension, extension. So I would put my hands in, but then I would like reach out as far as I could. And I think that’s, I was causing myself to over rotate. And then, so I knew, so once started working with the entry, I wasn’t, and I was listening to kind of like, how you describe them with the videos did. I found myself not rotating as much, but I could feel that when I put my hand in and it was time to like go to the next phase that I could feel like I was definitely setting up better for the catch. I think one of the things that I was really doing was that I still was coming straight down. And so with the catch part, cause we were doing the doggie paddle drill, I could feel that I was really getting a feel for the water. And so it kind of like sold me on drills. I was kind of like drills or drills, you know, what are they gonna do? Like even with like running drills, I kind of, I felt like I kind of just go through the motion

and it kind of just like kind of like woke me back up again, like, oh, I really need to do like, not only swim drills, but I can really, I should really get back to like really focusing on my running drills and my running technique and things like that. Cause it just kind of like woke me up to everything. Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. And even now, like you feel,

you can say the benefit of doing the drills and- Yeah, I started loving the drills there and the parts that I’ve really looked forward to because I could really, cause I felt like, you know, cause you’re watching yourself as you do it and you’re imagining yourself doing it. And when I kind of do the drills, I kind of picture the person in the video trying to do them and trying to like mimic like those different arm movements and stuff. And so it, I think it definitely, definitely made a huge difference. But I remember like, you know, you wanna, like I was progressing, you know, digressing. And so I was like, I remember being like just like around 136 for a hundred yards when I first started that five, they catch challenge. And by the end, like, and I gauged myself off of doing that four by a hundred meters, I think you had with like 30 seconds rest. And so my average when I first started was like 136. And when I finished, I was down to like 125

and I did it on five consecutive days because I was like, you know, that’s what it’s set up for. It’s set up for a five day challenge. So I did it in five consecutive days. And I saw like a little digression on like day three, but I think that was like more like fatigue issue just for swimming three days in a row. But by the end of the fifth, by the end of the fifth day, I was down to 125 and the four by a hundred. Wow, that’s awesome.

And what about how you, how you feel through the stroke when you’re swimming? Now, is there any difference there from a couple of months ago to now, just in how you feel you’ve got a hold of the water or you’re getting better at catching fish? Yeah, I feel a lot stronger. I definitely feel a lot stronger in the water. I definitely feel like I can increase pace, decrease pace. Like before, for me, it was just like, I only had one speed and so I started out and then I would just swim until I got to the finish line. And so there was obviously like a huge digression, you know, a huge drop off in pace. Cause I’d be, you know, I didn’t know how to pace myself or anything like that. So now I can actually like pace myself and be able to like focus in and I can, I can turn it on and turn things off. Like I can with like running and stuff like that, which I wasn’t able to do previously. And what do you think that’s down to?

What’s helped you develop those different keys?

One, the technique stuff, but two, just doing certain different drills. Like I know I’ve never done, like I never knew the explanation of like doing builds, build sets. Do this one at a smooth rate, do this one, these next two at an easier rate, slightly harder rate and then just go hard for the next one. So just learning different, learning how to pace myself through different techniques. Like, all right, you know, we’re breaking it down each hundred, you know, say we’re doing a hundred and say, all right, this 25 is easy, the next 50 is medium and then the last 25 is hard. And I think it kind of like really helped me kind of like figure out like what’s sustainable and what’s not sustainable when doing an actual swimming and stuff, yeah. Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. I like that explanation because I’ve seen that with a lot of others who have just included some of that variable pace training in their workouts because if everything’s just done

at the same pace, it’s great for developing your ability to swim at that pace, but then it just doesn’t give you any options. And I think when you’ve got the confidence and the ability to gauge how much effort you can put in for the return on your speed, you then have confidence going into a race and a much better sense of the heart rate and the effort that you can sustain for the race distance. And yeah, it’s great to see that. Did you feel that, let’s say in the half-iron man the other week, did you notice that when you were racing that you had a good… Yeah, so I actually had like, that was like, I don’t know, I forget if I had like ran this by you or not, but I had felt like when I did age group nationals and at the beginning of August, I felt like I didn’t have as good as a swim that I could have had, but it was still a huge improvement on what I have done previously. I had swam 24 flat for 1500 meters,

which I think is like 136 or something. I forget what exactly it is, but…

But so, I was like, all right, so then I, so gauging off of that, I was expecting like a 32 at main 7.3, what I did there.

Going into main, I was like, all right. You know, I was like, it’s, I had kind of like done the swim and I figured out kind of like where the bill, I was like, all right, you know, the first bill is roughly 600 yards and then you got to swim, you know, I’m not, you know, then you’re like a thousandth this way and then like another 600 back in. I was like, so my goal, so my plan was, all right, you know, go hard to that first billy because I’m like, all right, I’m not gonna die. So just go hard to that first billy, hit the left. And then once I get to the left and smooth out the stroke, make sure that I’m really getting like good pulls but don’t really worry about like, you know, fast turnover, just make sure you’re getting strong pulls. And then when I made the left to go back in and it was like, all right, you know, now let’s finish this off and then try to like pick it back up again and like close out the race.

So I was definitely super shocked when I like, so I had my watch set to go off every 500 yards and every 10 minutes. So I had not heard that that third beep go off yet for the minutes. And so I was like, I can’t believe this. I was like, I’m gonna be under 30 minutes. I’m gonna be, so I crossed that line and I saw it was under 30 minutes. I was like, this is game on, this is game on. I was like, I’m done the hardest part now. Now we’re into my wheelhouse. Like, let’s go.

That’s awesome. I was stoked when I read your message about the swim. I was like, it’s so good to see those sorts of things after the work you’ve put in and stuff. So yeah, love seeing that. And then as you know, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It doesn’t mean that every race from here on is gonna be, gonna be amazing.

Especially when it’s not, it’s gonna be legal.

So we, and then you had Iron Man on the weekend and they didn’t quite go to plan, but everything’s a learning experience. So do you wanna talk a bit about that Iron Man swim and then what happened there? Yeah, just I had gone in thinking that, all right, I can swim. I had done a 3,200 meter time trial in the pool where I was right around, which would have put me at like 66 minutes. So I was like, okay. I was like, if I put on a swim, a skim suit and I was like, the lake, everybody talks about how flat the lake is there because it’s a man-made lake. So there’s no current, there’s no nothing. It’s just like, it’s just water that they filled in there. So I was expecting to kind of go in that 65 to 66 range. And so when I got smacked in the face and my goggles and cap come flying off and so immediately the heart rate goes up because I’m like, all right, you know, I’m like, I should be, you know, in my mind, I’m like, I have a shot at a kind of spot

and there’s only two there. So I’m like, all right, you know, I’m like, now I know, now I’m like really nervous and like my heart, it shoots up because now I’m panicking because I don’t like, I gotta look for where my goggles are, I’m pausing. People are now like, you know, swimming into me because I’m just standing still. So if I get my goggles on and so I have, I’ve had troubles keeping swim caps on. So I always put my goggles underneath.

So that the, so if the swim cap slips off then it can just like go off and I don’t have to worry about like, because I’ve been in a race where I had my goggles over the top of it. And now I just have like this thing being held on by my goggles and my creating drag and stuff. So, so when my goggles came off it flipped my cap off too. And I didn’t know if I really needed it or not with this being my first Ironman. So yeah, I got those. And then it was windy that day. So I definitely like didn’t expect as much chop that was on there, but there was a lot of chop and I was kind of just taking on water and it wasn’t, it was not wetsuit legal. So I was in a skim suit, which for us swimming deficit people that puts me in a little disadvantage to a lot of other people.

But yeah, so it was a learning experience. So, but yeah, it was a lot more violent than I expected than I experienced at other races and definitely a lot more, a lot harder than I had imagined to it to be. But I was like, right around, I was just under 75 minutes for that. So about 10 minutes off when I thought I was gonna swim. I was like, I remember coming, I was like, oh man, I was like, I’m so embarrassed to tell Brian what I did in the swim, he’s gonna swim. I was like, I’m like, we got the podcast. I was like, I’m gonna embarrass myself instead of that.

So it’s all good. I think, I think, you know, people, everyone goes through it. Everyone has a bad race here and there. And especially being your first Iron Man, you know, when I went into my first Iron Man, I thought there’s no way I’m gonna mail every single section of this. And I’m just gonna have to wait until afterwards to see what are those learnings that I can take from it. And something’s bound to go wrong. And inevitably it did because I had no experience to really draw on apart from friends and a few coaches that I know. But yeah, that’s all part of it. And especially those choppy waters and choppy conditions without a wetsuit on, being beat up as you’re trying to put your goggles on, like it’s everything that you can then take into the next race. If you experience something similar, you’ve got that experience of drawing. You can know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, do I have a better swim next time?

But yeah, that’s, I thought when I hadn’t heard from you on Monday, I thought, yeah, I reckon he hasn’t probably had his best swim.

I was like, ah, I’ll just save it. I was like, I’m so embarrassed. I was like, I’ll just save it for the party. Yeah, yeah. I didn’t get to follow in myself for the rest of the race. So I just went and got like really drunk on Sunday watching the American football games.

Well, you got to reward yourself part of such a massive event like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what, and that’s what I kind of like, I kind of see myself for those, for those big, those big races. Cause I’m like, all right, you know, you’re going to feel like crap the next day anyway. So you might as well give yourself an excuse on why you feel like crap. Yeah, that’s right. I remember sitting down after my man went out for dinner with his family that came along and I was sitting there, was eating my meal for 15 minutes and then I just started sweating profusely. I couldn’t stop myself from sweating. I don’t know what happened, but my body just didn’t know what was going on. And I was a little bit lightheaded. I’m just like, oh, I’ve got to, I’ve got to go, go back to the apartment and just, just relax. And yeah, I was too tired, too exhausted to actually stay up past about eight o’clock, but I couldn’t sleep either.

It was a problem. So that’s what happened with me. Well, I got, we finished, I met my fiance, we got some, I got a burrito at the after thing and we just walked right back to the apartment and she had a glass of wine and then I passed out in the bed and we were just out. And I think I woke up at like four o’clock in the morning and I’m like, all right. I’m like, I need to figure out how I got to get my bike. And then I said, I go on the athlete’s guide thing and it’s like your bike was supposed to be picked up at one a.m. And I’m like, crap. I was like, I’m like, I gotta go get, so I’m like getting dressed and I’m like walking over to probably help me for the rest of the day because it kind of like loosened me up, got rid of some of that junk and stuff. So I was able to kind of like get fluid. So I was able to pick, you know, luckily the people in Ironman were just awesome and they just, they packed all my stuff back into the bags that we had there

and my bike was with a bunch of other bikes that were on a rack. And so I was easily just able to grab it, bring it right back to the place. Went back to sleep for a little bit and then I dropped it off for the transport thing that I had. And then I was off, I was off, but then that next day, yeah, that Sunday I was able to go and like actually get some food in me and actually go and have like some celebratory alcoholic beverages. Yeah, nice. And well, going back to the cap thing actually, are you just wearing the silicone cap? Whatever they give me, yeah, yeah. So my, yeah, I’ve always had a problem where I was just like, I don’t know, I have like a pretty oily head. Like I just produce a bunch of oil. So if I do a fresh shave like near the start of the race, then there’s nothing to kind of like grab it and that oil just kind of like sometimes like slips right off of it. So I just have to remind myself not to like shave my head the day before.

Give you some friction. It’s the other thing you can do there is if you get a silicone cap, put that. So I normally go goggles and then a silicone cap and then the race cap. And it’s not perfect, but it’s better than just a silicone cap. So they’ve got, they might be called like dome silicone caps. Like there’s a few different cuts that you can get and they sort of dome ones are pretty tight, but they stay on, stay on well. So that’s another option. If you, if you have trouble. Yeah, my net, what I was gonna look at too, this off season was like trying to look into like kids sizes because I just had this small peanut head too. And I think that like, when I put it on and I try to like get it as tight as I can, like the eyes are like down here. And it’s like down. Yeah, really. So it tends to be like a little big for my head. So I ended up kind of like just rolling it up. Yeah, gotcha. Although I reckon those, one of those dome silicone caps would be,

would be good. Like if you’re probably on, I don’t know, one of the swimming competition, like maybe swim out later or something, they’d probably have like a plain black one or something like that. That’d be worth trying because I’ve had my issues with caps coming in the past. I remember that I did a race and I think it was like a small local race and I think I won it, but they were considering disqualifying me because my cap came off. I was like, there’s only so much you can do to keep one of those crappy caps on your head. I like getting some of the races, some of the races give out orange caps and I’m like, I’m not even wearing it. It’s the same color as my head. Yeah. Like bald as orange.

And looking forwards, what do you feel like the next stage of your improvement can come from in the swim? What do you feel like is possible for you over the next six to five months? So definitely still working on like that catch phase, but I think also, I think there’s a lot that I can do with, obviously still technique, but I think there’s a lot that can be done with like my kick because I still don’t know what I’m kind of like doing there. So I try to like, so the whole time I’m just doing like a slow fluttering kick and so I don’t know if that’s really proper or not proper. Like I look at like some videos and I think I feel like watching some people, like their leg feet like never come below their hips, but I watch myself and my feet are like coming below my hips. So I feel like I was watching a video that you did of like Sam Long and you mentioned that his foot was probably causing some of his drag that was in his swim

and like where he can improve and stuff like that where he kind of called you out asking you if you could like fix his swim or if you can analyze his swim and you pointed out how his foot was kind of like probably causing some drag because it was like hanging down a little too much. So it turned out to be. I kind of noticed that with me and then I think just getting more and more like distance under my belt and just like doing that type of stuff. I think I felt like after the Ironman I was like, okay, I’m like, hindsight thing is like, I definitely need to be doing more just getting in an open body of water and just like swimming for long periods of time and just like doing that so that you’re just used to this swimming for, cause you could do all the long workouts that you can but there’s like breaks in between and stuff like that and nothing can really like simulate just going out for like a long period of time and just swimming.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I guess just a technical question on how you film yourself. The question I get asked people is how do I take footage of myself and you do this pretty easily by the look of it and the footage you send through is great for sending to me. So how do you go about recording yourself? So I have an iPad, I have a GoPro that has a tripod with bending legs and stuff. So I hook it onto the side of the wall that like I have that I swim flowing into it. So that takes my front on part. When I do the above shots, I put it on top of the starter blocks. So that’s how I get the above shot. And then I try to go at a time where I know that there’s gonna be, that it’s kind of gonna be kind of empty. And then if you do the side, so then I do the tripod, colleagues, I put that on the lane separator but I go one lane over. So I don’t put it on the side that I’m on. I put it on the one lane over side. And then that kind of gets like,

at least two to three strokes inside like one frame. So you can kind of see almost the same, the full thing happening within like two strokes instead of just like having to pause like each section and seeing it come through. Like if you put it on the lane separator, that’s on your lane. Yeah, it’s too close isn’t it? If you’re on that, on your own lane. And then after that you upload, you download it through the iPad, who’s saying? So yeah, so I take it, I put it on my, I take the disk out. So I don’t, I started trying to use like, trying to upload it to the iPad and like my iPhone and then putting it on. But you tend to like, it’s the files are just so huge that I ended up just getting a mini USB port and then just putting it in that mini USB port and then just uploading it to my computer. And then the computer puts it right onto YouTube and it’s just that simple. Yeah, cool. Yeah, it’s just one of those things

that people ask all the time. So it’s good to hear how you do it because, and that’s how I’ve, most of the swimmers who get their own footage, that’s how most of them tend to do it with a GoPro or underwater action cam with those, with a bendy lead tripod. Yeah, and I mind the GoPro seven. So it’s not like you need the latest and greatest. Yeah. The seven I think was like one of the first ones that you don’t need the underwater cage if you want it or something like that. So I don’t use an underwater cage over top of it. I just use the actual, the camera just goes right into the holder and it just goes right under. So, you know, you get yourself a good, like use GoPro seven. And I’m sure it’s probably like, you know, 100 bucks, 150 bucks or something like that. Yeah, not too expensive at all. And just, and finally, so for the next season, because it’s obviously off season for you now, the next season you’ve got world champs over in Dubai.

In, is it November? Yeah, I think it’s somewhere around November 15th, the age group nationals for the Olympic distance, for standard distance. And then World 70.3 at the end of October, October 28th, 29th, I think. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast and for sharing your journey over the last couple of years with your swimming. I’m sure that a lot of athletes listening will get a lot from it and be able to perhaps take some of that on board and maybe adjust what they’re doing. So thank you and yeah, appreciate it and looking forward to working with you towards nationals and worlds and see what we can get this swim down to. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. I thanks for having me on. I’ve really enjoyed the process and I’m really excited to see what happens over the next year. Awesome. Thanks very much, Chris. Yup, you’re welcome. 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 Cracking The 30-minute Half Ironman Swim with Chris Naimoli appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

I have been working with Chris for a little bit over a year and recently had a good result in his Ironman swim. I thought it would really good to get him into the podcast to talk about what he has done to improve his swimming.

01:09 Swimming Background
02:40 Swimming In The Dark
04:18 Reluctant To Record A Video
06:02 Ripping The Band-Aid Off
08:03 Get Over That Fear And Talk About It.
09:42 Ironman Race
15:57 Focusing Technique and Drills
17:50 Training Solo
18:42 Confidence In The Pool
20:32 Areas Of Improvement
24:16 Sprinting Faster

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about that time I started thinking, you know, I need to get some really, some real help here because I could be better. I could be good, but I’m really swimming in the dark here. Literally, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. And no one could tell me being through a few teachers and it was all very generic. It was nothing really, you know, there was no yeah, it was very I was really literally like swimming in the dark. I didn’t know what to do next to improve or what was wrong. Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Welcome to the effortless swim podcast. This is episode number two hundred and two. And my guest today is Chris Georgeson and Chris, you’re you’re

some Berg and Reese. Yeah. And recently had a really good result for your Ironman swim. And we’ve been working together for a little bit over a year. So I thought it’d be really good to get you on the podcast to talk about what you’ve done to to improve your swimming in such a dramatic way. And we’re just talking before we started here. And really interesting just listening to what’s what’s made a difference for you. So welcome to the podcast. And I guess I tell everyone listening just a little bit about your background with swimming and racing. Yeah. So I think that I always loved the water, I guess, in the in the grew up by the sea. I never really did any swimming with with clubs or anything when I was younger. It seemed a little bit dull, but it’s been lots of time in the ocean. When I sort of obviously was doing a bit of like running and cycling. And a few years ago, I decided to give a give triathlons ago.

So I picked up a swimming again. And yeah, you still there, Brenton? Yeah. OK. I’m sorry. Yes, I picked up the picked up the swimming again. And yeah, and I actually got quite passionate about it. I really enjoyed it. I found that it was a lot of fun. And yeah, really, it just just just became a lot of fun. Really, really enjoyed it. And I thought it was a lot of great. Since I was younger, the swimming had changed as more modern. There was better teaching techniques available. And I sort of obviously came across your channel on YouTube and started to follow and think, OK, I could become a better swimmer.

And you started, I think you were saying your first Olympic distance race was two thousand and eighteen. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, so I did. Yeah, do you want to talk a bit about where you were in terms of speed and time and just even like when she had with you with your swim, where you’re at two years ago, three years ago. Yeah, that was pretty funny. I think I had a lot of confidence because I’m quite relaxed in the open water. But yeah, I did that first Olympic swim and it was two minutes, sixteen to get around the course, which is quite funny. So that’s quite slow. It involved a lot of over swimming. My sighting was really, really bad, but there was a lot of enthusiasm there. Yeah, and that was that was three years ago now. So, yeah, so that was probably my my starting point, my very first swim. After that, I joined a I joined a local club to try and get some swimming, you know, swim more in a team, see if I could learn from other people.

Were there any coaching programs that I was missing out on? And that seemed to help me a little bit. So by two thousand and nineteen, I did another I did a half Ironman. At this point, I was down to one forty seven for a half Ironman. So that was that was great. I got I got rid of a lot of the kinks, but it was a huge effort. It was it was a big one forty seven. I was putting a lot of effort into it and I was.

Yeah, it was it was it wasn’t really relaxed. It wasn’t really like, you know, I wasn’t technically very good. And I think that was about that time I started thinking, you know, I need to get some really some real help here because I could be better. I could be good, but I’m really swimming in the dark here. Literally, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. And no one could tell me being through a few teachers and it was all very generic. It was nothing really, you know, there was no. Yeah, it was very I was really literally like swimming in the dark. I didn’t know what to do next to improve or what was wrong. And then when you you recorded your first like a couple of videos, like halfway through last year, I think it was, had you seen yourself before that or these like the very first videos you’d ever seen? Oh, these are the first videos. Yeah, so I was I was I think I was I think in the back of my head, I knew I didn’t want to see myself swim on a video because it was it was

going to be bad, you know, and it was I think that was one of the biggest.

I think even when I signed up, I still a little bit reluctant to record a video. I was hoping maybe we could just talk and you could tell me how to improve. But yeah, seeing yourself on video is pretty confronting. There’s so many mistakes. And I think the first thing you showed me, which became really obviously I was crossing over at the front, which is quite funny because yeah, I thought I was swimming on train tracks. I thought I was doing everything perfectly. And then you see this video, you know, who’s that guy in the pool? He doesn’t look cool at all. Yeah, I actually had a look back at those videos because I I hadn’t seen him since last year, I don’t think. And then just obviously looking at the recent ones that you sent through. And it’s it’s really interesting to see that progression for people like people still look the same like the same sort of style when they swim. But when they improve and they develop like you have,

it’s just everything works a whole lot better. Everything’s a whole lot better connected and timed and obviously improving the catch and alignment, that sort of thing too. But yeah, it’s interesting, like looking at that first video, you there was like a real high recovery, like really close to the body and getting a bit jammed up. And then I think that was leading to a bit of over and and everything. So yeah, it was good to see that that first one. And once you’d got out, once you’d sent the first video on giving us some feedback, was there reluctance to send videos after that? Or was it just like, was it like ripping the Band-Aid off? And it’s like, OK, free for all. Yeah, I’ve seen it. It was, you know, you know what? I think what it was is definitely ripping the Band-Aid off. And actually, I would go swimming a lot with my with my daughter. And then she would she’d watch your videos as well. And my wife was watching.

And now you’re still doing it wrong. So I actually I go to the pool and everyone would be giving me feedback that’s in your videos. And I know you’re not doing it yet. So actually, I took a bit longer to to send you the next video because I really knew that I hadn’t actually worked it in yet. And I I think there was some point. There was yeah, there was some point. Actually, right before I sort of got in touch with you, I realized it was sort of possible to to make these improvements in the pool because I’ve been practicing my broken arrow in my and I and I what I realized is, OK, maybe it takes me three to six months like to make an improvement. And I became quite relaxed. So I knew with what you were saying to me, like, yeah, don’t rush to see one in the next week or the two weeks. Like if it takes you six weeks or eight weeks, just get comfortable with that change and it will come. And I think that was the bit I’d sort of come to that understanding

that swimming is about, you know, changing that changing that muscle memory, changing that technique and just work on one thing. And when I did that, I think our videos I felt like each video was meaningful because they were, you know, there’s been a meaningful improvement and that was positive for me because I felt like I’d achieved something with each video.

Yeah, that’s interesting. And that feedback, obviously, from your family helps as well, because as you know, it’s so it’s so easy to think that you’re made to change. But then when you see it or when someone’s actually watching the gun, you haven’t touched anything yet. Yeah, it happens all the all the time. I remember that I filmed and yeah, I was like, man, I’m not. I thought I was changing something here, but it’s not the case at all. Yeah, I think it’s the same for everybody. You have to just get over that fear and have a discussion. And I actually, I train with another guy sometimes and he’s got quite into it as well. And, you know, we take the camera down. You get someone else to talk about it or to have a look. And I think it can be quite a good quite a good process. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And it’s so much more enjoyable to know what you need to to work on. And it’s specific to you because you’ve just got to see it.

You know, you know what it is you need to change. I really liked as well that, you know, I think we know when people are asking, you know, what’s it like, you know, with Brenton’s coach and you and it’s quite funny because you’re a bit of a personality and swimming circles. So what I what I sort of say is that like what I really like about it is you it’s simple. There’s one point I know what I need to focus on. And it’s it’s like you kind of get to the essence very quickly. Like, I don’t think it takes you to, you know, long to say, Chris, just work on that. And I think I straight away sort of big improvement. I mean, it doesn’t mean that you go faster, but maybe you’re more comfortable. You’re fresher. You’re not having any pains. But I think that’s what I really liked about how you teach was just that getting to that one key point. And that was all I had to think about. Yeah. Oh, that’s good. That’s good because it is always get distracted in swimming.

Just like whether that’s watching different videos that I’ve put up or other people have put up and then going, oh, that’s interesting. I might actually try that when but when you’ve got that thing that’s specific to you that you can just dial in on. It’s yeah, that’s when you see that. Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s really amazing. And it’d be good to talk about. So your race, personally, it was Ironman. Is it severe? So yeah, severe in Italy. Yeah, severe. And yeah, and so tell everyone about the time that you went at the pace that you were at and just generally about the races as well because looking at your results there, like top 10% in the swim, I think, across like 1500 competitors, that’s like a huge result from where you started at 218 pace for an Olympic distance swim. Oh, it was a really great race. Yeah, I was really happy because I was, it was a, what it was, was that the, it was even, yeah, so it was in the sea, which was great.

So I kind of liked those sea swims. It was a bit of a swell, not too much. So obviously the boy salt gives you a bit of buoyancy and you’re in the wet suit, which is great. The, I sort of got into the race thinking, okay, I’m gonna take it very easy. You know, I’ve got this, my biggest probably concern was probably the run. I knew the cycle I was pretty comfortable with. So I really wanted to take the swim easy. And I was like, I don’t wanna, this wasn’t like a hard effort. This is not me like pulling on every stroke. This is just a really relaxed, natural, had the clicker in my ear to know, okay, just swimming on that stroke rate. And it was a very, it was a very sort of peaceful swim. So I was quite surprised when I got out at 137 and I was like, gosh, this is much faster than I thought. Yeah, and so that was pretty awesome. And I think that, you know, it really felt like it was just a technical swim. I didn’t feel like I was pulling anything

on my energy stores. So I finished the race, finished the swim, you know, really, really fresh, jump on the bike really fresh, no stress. I only had like a hundred meters of extra distance. So I actually saw I was citing better than the main pack. So I ended up not even swimming on feet. I was just, I swam my own race, boy to boy. And just to actually, I saw people swimming way off. And I was like, it was a bit strange in the moment because you’re feeling like, okay, why is everybody going in that direction? But they just weren’t citing well.

So yeah, really, really, really fun race, really enjoyed it. And yeah, it got a great time as well. So that was 10 seconds up. Yeah, I mean, 137 for four kilometers, just under. That was awesome. I was really proud of that. Yeah, like a 103 is a solid I-man swim. I think a lot of people would be pretty stoked to get down to that sort of time. So it’s great in the moment of the race, like in terms of like the main pack going off course. It’s like, you’ve got a moment there to decide, do I stick with them or do I just keep going straight? And it’s a tough one because sometimes going with the pack is going to be quicker if they’re going in and you’re a little bit off course, but you get that draft. But yeah, just keeping on track there, seemed like it worked really well for you. Had you thought about that prior to it? Had you experienced that in previous races or was it just like, are you swimming with your gut? I just went with my gut.

I think I felt like it felt really strange because this was the first time I was just constantly passing people on the swim. So I went to the back of the one hour block and I was just constantly overtaking people. The people were on my ankles or people were around me. I just put on a little bit of pace and I was suddenly 20, 30 meters ahead of them and it was back then back to my slowed down pace again. I didn’t want to overexert myself. So I think I had the reserves as well there. I knew I could out swim these people around me. I was just constantly overtaking. And even I was thinking about my diamond and my entry because I was watching people swim and I was like, oh, that guy’s got like a really terrible entry. He’s like, oh, his high elbow is nowhere to be seen. And I look at it. So it’s kind of funny. I was going through watching these people as overtaking and there was something much faster stroke rate but I was just relaxed, you know, going past them.

So it was a good swim. That’s awesome. And it sets up so well for the bike and run. If you can just take it easy. And being your first, is your first diamond distance, right? Like full distance. It was, yeah. Yeah. And like, well, I know for me personally it was just like really, yeah, I wanted to do well but it was just make it through it. All right. And don’t be overly concerned with the pace. And so I would imagine that next time, if you do another one, that you’d probably find yourself swimming faster because you know how much you can push it under the belt. Well, I think my goal is, I’d like to take like another five seconds off. That’s kind of my goal. I think I feel like I could have easily got under the one hour, you know, maybe the conditions can be different on the day. But I, like I said, I really finished that swim fresh, no pressure, just very, very relaxed.

I’m curious now if I have pushed it a little bit more, probably my coach won’t recommend that. I probably won’t push it. Yeah. The next one will be to get under an hour in the swim. And yeah, I’m keen to do another one again. I mean, it was like you say, the first one is just a finish and people are crumbling all around you and people are racing off on the bike. And it was just, it was carnage, you know, it was really, I was not, and I just stuck to the plan very slow and steady. I did my, did my swim, I did my cycle. I got around about six hours. Did my, I did stuck to my, my running pace got through about four and a half hours. But I didn’t push anything. Took my time and transitions just like I just really want to finish. Like I said, then maybe, and I’ll go back and do the 70.3 in Lux next season. And I, and I feel like, yeah, already, like that won’t be a fun one to really like attack a little bit on the swim

and just really go for it a bit. Because, yeah, I can always recover on the bike a little bit, you know, but it’s fun for the swim. I really enjoy the swim now. I just, yeah, I love it. Yeah, that’s great. And he was saying actually before the call about last year when your pool stayed open. So it’s basically like booking, you have a line to yourself. And you found that that was actually an official for your swim because it was just a slightly different approach. Yeah. What you’re doing. Absolutely. Yeah, no, it was, it was great. I mean, I was really fortunate because I saw everybody was on, was locked down. And I, yeah. So I took the opportunity just to say, right, okay, what’s wrong with my swim? And I knew it was my technique. I knew my fitness was pretty good. And I just sometimes I started doing like getting up to like, say doing the first kilometer was, it started off with like my drills. And I think you said in somewhere to me,

or you’ve said it on anywhere on YouTube. Is it here? Oh, sorry. Said to just focus on your drills. If you’re good at your drills, you’re a good swimmer. So I sort of took that to heart a little bit. And it was a little bit embarrassing because everyone’s going past you in the pool. Everyone’s looking at you going, oh, you’re like a beginner, you know, because you’re doing all these drills all the time. I just sort of blocked it out a little bit. And then I started growing and growing. So I think the six months there, I started off doing, say, 500 meters of drills, enjoyed it. I saw what else you were teaching. I actually made my own program and I got it to like 1200 meters of like warmups and drills. And then I did a, I sort of got to about two kilometers and I realized, okay, you know, just take the six months, you haven’t got a race, everything has canceled. And I just focused purely on the technique and the drills.

And there’s so much to learn, so much to focus on. Yeah, so I really, really, and I’m actually still doing that a little bit. I actually get my fitness from running and cycling. And I’m with the swimming, I feel like just to learn about the technique and the, and I’m getting improvements like that, you know, just purely technical. Yeah, that’s so good to hear. And I mean, I don’t do it as much anymore. Since I moved on, generally swimming with a squad. So we, you know, we usually push in the pace a fair bit, but I used to train mostly by myself. And it was, what I liked about training solo was that you’ve got the time to spend on drills and technique. And then you sometimes have a land to yourself. And so there’s not as much going on. And you just like much more tuned into what you’re doing. And that sort of time aside from all the chaos that you can have in either a squad or when you’re got people in front and behind,

like it’s very beneficial, especially for technique because you haven’t got as much happening in the lane with you. So it’s quite good. And how do you feel when you’re at the pool now compared to say two or three years ago, like where’s your head at, where’s your confidence at and what are you thinking about and what’s different there? So yeah, so when I get to the pool, I mean, I think that normally, yeah, I’ve started, obviously started to be one of the better swimmers in the pool. So I’ve got like a lot more confidence to try different things. You know, I think that I’ve started to, you know, I’ll be pushing a lot more butterfly to build up some strength. I really liked your videos on Kali Ledecky. And so I was like, I’m feeling more confident to start trying different strokes. And that was been a lot of fun as well. I’ve been trying to, you know, see what happens when I swim in a different style, which is cool.

I haven’t done any videos for you of those yet, that they don’t understand about. Yeah, experimenting with my style. I mean, I’m doing, I’m pushing it a bit more. I’m trying to do like one arm swimming drills to build up that strength. Especially since I did that five day catch challenge on a holiday, I’ve sort of been trying to work in some of those one arm strength, the coordination, the balance. So yes, I really wanted to push that a bit more. And yeah, I mean, in the pool, I think there’s just, yeah, total confidence here. I think that I would love to swim again with a good squad, but I think you’ve got to have a good, yeah, if you’re not in a good squad, you’re probably not improving and you’re not changing too much about your swimming. So it’s got to be a good swim. Well, it’s been great to see your improvement over that time. And I certainly don’t think that you’re done neither like there’s before like,

even if you’d pushed the pace a little bit more in your Ironman swim, perhaps you could have gone under that 60. But that aside, like, I think there’s obviously still a lot more improvement available and that’s what we’re obviously working on. And where do you feel like that can come from for you? Where do you think those areas are? You know, I’ve been really focusing on the sort of, on the catch. I think it was a Eureka moment about three months ago before the Ironman, and I finally felt that high elbow in the water. And it was just awesome. I think I sent you a video and I said, like, Brent, and I’ve got it. I’ve got that, like, I finally understood what you were talking about with that high elbow because you can watch all these, but it’s like Confucianism until you experience it. You don’t, you know, they would say you don’t really know it. And I think that’s the thing I would say to people keep trying because you’ve got like a lot of knowledge

and you’re explaining a lot of things, but you just certainly you won’t get it until you feel it in the water. You touch it, then you get it. And suddenly it’s amazing. And it’s that high elbow for me was just, I’ve heard you say it for like years and years. And then suddenly I got it on the pool and I got that feeling in the water. And it was just, it was like magic, you know. So now I’m working on that. I’m doing a little bit of strength work in the park. I’ve realized I can work on the lats. I can do a few sort of, there’s a few of those exercise machines in the park where you can actually practice your YMCA drill slightly with a little bit of resistance. I really wanted to say just play around with that, do a little bit of strength on the catch between the catch and the diamond. So I’m down at the local park doing a bit of strength work like that just to really sort of get that ingrained in me. And that’s where I think the big one is for me.

I need to get a bit more acceleration on my pool, you know, from slow to fast. I think that’s really the big one. I’m locking that technique, build up the strength and fitness a little bit. And I think probably over the next year, for me it feels like that’s where the strength’s gonna come from. I’ve relaxed my legs a little bit. I’m not kicking so much anymore. I’m just using them to balance. And that’s leaving me a lot less tired as well. I’ve got like a lot more oxygen, a lot better breathing capacity since I stopped trying to kick so much on my, which is one of your points as well, I think. Yeah, that’s great. And I completely agree with where I think that improvement can come from, like with perhaps a bit more strength through those movements, especially when you’re doing open water swimming and triathlon, like you need a reasonable amount of strength there. And then, yeah, perhaps it’s just that being able to sustain a,

well, sustaining a higher effort level throughout the race. And that’s what that half-iron man would be great to sort of test out with. And let’s say you push it too hard and you might blow up a little bit in the swim. Yeah, it’s not bad to get to that point sometimes and just see what you’re capable of. So it’s, yeah, it’s exciting. And look, I think, you know, perhaps goal would be like your sub, sub 130 pace for a half-iron man swim and beyond. And once you crack that up, to me too, that’s like one of those benchmarks where I think for a lot of people that initial benchmark’s like two minute pace, get under that. And then sometimes like 145 and then I think 130 is that next one. So not too far away from it. Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I think I could, like I’ve been doing some faster swims in the pool, getting down into the 130s in the pool, which you don’t have the buoyancy, you don’t have the, you know, you’re also sort of doing your turns.

But I also sort of encourage myself over the summer to go up to the lake and when we take a holiday, always go somewhere around the beach. And when I always take, you know, some time during the day and those longer swims to do like these 200 meter, like 200 meter distances to, you’re turning at 200 meters just to practice that longer swimming. And I think that that really helped as well. And then, yeah, I’m super excited. My, yeah, my sort of goal at the moment, when we first started working together was to get into the 130s, swim comfortably. Now I can see the 120s. I’m like, okay, maybe I could get down to that 120s. But I’m actually striving at the moment too with all the technique gains to go much, much faster. The funny thing is, you know, I might have sprinted faster before I knew, before I knew what I know now. So now it’s a bit harder to get my sprints faster because I feel like I’m doing, so technically it’s great,

but that might be something interesting for us to say, how do you sprint faster? Or is there any benefit to it? Because I’m still improving, but you know, sometimes you wanna sprint and yeah, that sort of has been a bit challenging with all the remembering to what to do. And yeah, sometimes when it comes to sprinting, I think it’s allowing yourself to just let it go a little bit and just allow some errors to come in, because the stroke’s probably gonna be different as well. It’s, you’re not gonna be reaching for as long because you’ll start the catch a bit sooner. The entry will sometimes be a little bit more, a little bit quicker and recovery is a bit quicker. And yeah, so it might be a matter of just like, just throwing a couple of those things out the window and just like, just going based on effort and then fine tuning from there if you’re doing some repeat sprints. So that’d be interesting to do because I think one way to kind of look at it is,

if your best 100 meter time is say 120,

then like a 130 or like a certain percentage of that 120, but if your best 100 meter time is a 115, then 130 is much less of a percentage of your top end speed. So it is worthwhile, sometimes just being able to get that sprint timed down a little bit or to work on that because it can mean that like your threshold pace is a low percentage of your top end pace. So it’s, yeah, it’s worth kind of doing and even just testing it out. I’ve got a couple of snows that I work with that will do their like 100 meter, like they do 100 meter effort like once a week or once a fort and they do like to see what they can get it down to. And it’s quite a good benchmark too, I think of just of your technique as well because at the high speed you create more drag. And so if you can bring that down and it’s a sign that your technique has improved as well as one part of it. So it’d be good to just probably test that every now and then too.

Yeah, well, I think we’ve got the winter season now too. I sort of see it as the downtime to work a little bit on these techniques, try some sprints and really maybe consolidate the gains. So we go into the next season. We’ve, yeah, we sort of work, I think, but definitely the underwater push, get that strength, lock in the gains on the high elbow to the diamond, get that strength, repeat the movement and get that acceleration. And I’m not accelerating anything at the moment under the water, it’s a very one speed. So that’s also gonna be a, I think that would probably be more than enough for the next six months. Like, yeah, you, it’s a sort of a marathon ride of improvements that I need to rush too much at once. But yeah, no, it gives me a real buzz. It gives me a real focus to go into the pool. And it’s great when you’re working and you’re busy to know you’ve got this other side project. Be a dash off to the pool

and think about some sort of small aspect of it. Yeah, that, yeah, it’s exactly right. Well, I mean, what you’re doing now has worked inside that willingness to take your time and to just focus on the technical side of things and the speed calms, that’s been a big part of your success, it seems like. So I’ve really enjoyed working with you and I appreciate you being on the podcast and sharing this cause I’ve got no doubt that people listening will be able to get a lot from it cause I’m sure that a lot of them are in or have been in a similar position to perhaps way where two or three years ago. Yeah, I think so. And it’s just, I think it’s not to be afraid to just focus on your technique. And I heard so much negativity about not being able to improve, when you’re an older swimmer or so many people put the mentor blinders up but I would encourage people not to listen to that and just say, yeah, no, just focus on your technique.

You know, it’s sort of you’ve got the time, there’s no rush and that’s where all your gains come from not from fitness, not from anything else. And then you’ve got so many and you’ve sort of distilled it well Brent and I think, you know, you’ve got a great formula there and I can really visualize now exactly the improvements and where your swimming changes and I can see to get to 120, what I need to do it’s becoming very clear to me. So I think that’s a great, you know you’ve got a great formula. So I’d just say to people, yeah, just try it out. Don’t be afraid to just really invest that time. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And yeah, I love seeing results like you’ve had and when you sent that message after the Ironman you seem pretty excited about it just based on your message. And now, yeah, I was just like, I guess, yeah it’s great to surprise yourself with this one as well. So yeah, fantastic. And thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post Getting Beyond 1:45 per 100 with Chris Georgeson appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Prescot Balch. Prescot was recently featured in one of our YouTube videos where we are looking at how can someone can go from 2:10 minutes per hundred down to 1:30. I want to get him into the podcast to talk about his experience and frustrations when it comes to open water and how he was able to manage it.

02:03 Swimming Background
04:19 Dont Try To Work On Too Much
05:44 Steady Progress
08:21 Terrible Race Results
10:34 Frustrations
13:51 8 Week Faster Freestyle Program
15:13 Open Water v.s. The Pool
20:19 Half Ironman
25:23 Starting Slow In Triathlon Swim
26:45 Easy Speed
28:28 You’ll Never Know What Race Day Brings
31:51 Always Be Humble Enough To Go To Basics
33:21 Breathing And Relaxation
34:10 Learn To Like Open Water Swimming

24:54 Technique And Drills
28:24 Tension Is The Enemy Of Fast Swimming

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You know, do your work out in open water and really get used to it and get comfortable with it, make it feel as comfortable as the pool and and test yourself in all the conditions because you never know what race day brings.

So for sure, that’s that’s lesson number one. And welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Welcome to episode 201 of the effortless swimming podcast. My guest today is Prescott Bolch and Prescott was recently featured on one of our YouTube videos where we’re looking at how someone can go from a two minutes 10 per 100 down to 130s and over the course of three years. That’s what you did and and have really made some huge improvements. So I want to have you on the podcast to talk about that. But also talk about what’s happening recently about getting a little bit frustrated at the start of the season, not having some having some sort of races that weren’t as quick as you wanted. And then you’re able to overcome that And and get the times back down because I think a lot of people tend to go through that. So first of all, welcome to the podcast Prescott. Thank you. God to be here. And you, you came to our first news to camp, actually, which was at the start of 2020, about a week before the world shut down, traveled over from the states.

Yep. And turned it out very well. It did. Yes, it was great. A lot of fun. I do it again. As soon as your country opens back up, maybe we can do it again. Yeah, I’m mad. I’m hoping so. I’m really hoping next year we can get something going because I certainly miss coaching face to face. There’s only so much online. I think I can can do without actually seeing people. Yeah, well, I have a good story to tell about how good you are at coaching over the internet. So maybe let’s maybe let’s dive in and we’ll toot your horn.

Yeah. So yeah, would you like to tell people about your your background with swimming? How you got started in all of that? Well, I I took up triathlon three years ago and it the swimming was like like with many people. It was the thing you had to add to get to triathlon. I rode my bike a lot. I ran a lot and I decided heck, I’ll add swimming and start doing this triathlon thing and have have some fun. It was really apparent really quickly, especially after the first race that it wasn’t something I could just do a lot of and get better at myself. And so I consulted the internet to go look for some help. And I don’t know how I bumped into you, but I did. And we connected and I’ve been using your coaching services for those three years. I had had one race under my belt before I got started with you. My pool times were whether I was going all out or going as slow as I could. They were about 210 to 13 per 100 meters. And my my

pace in open water was about the same. And

with first race after that, and after maybe four to six weeks of coaching, I took a good deal of time off that. I think I came out of the water in an Olympic distance 1500 meters under 30 minutes. So right around two minutes per 100 So really quick improvement at the start of that three year time period, you know, big gains at the beginning and then they sort of taper off and they get smaller and smaller. But I’ve had

subsequent to a couple races in that season and and then into 2019 with the new succamp. I was making really steady progress. I think I’d taken that that single pace of 210 to 13 and I had taken it down into the probably the upper 130s. By the time I got to Nusa, that’s an all out 100 meter pace.

And, you know, all of a sudden I discover I have multiple paces. I can go really hard. I can go easy. I can find some tempo pace in between and you start to feel like you’re more of a real swimmer. I think the the beauty of the approach that you took during that time period was don’t try to work on too much work on a couple things take take those couple things focus exclusively on them and ultimately for the purpose of getting them into subconscious muscle memory rather than conscious focus. Once they’re embedded in conscious or subconscious muscle memory, then, you know, you go to the next things that you need to work on. And fortunately or unfortunately in swimming, there’s a never ending list of things to work on.

But here I am. I go to the Nusa camp spent a week there get a lot of really solid feedback ended up having you had a race. We had us all participating in a race on the last day there I had a pretty decent race was really happy with the result I came home and

Just as the world was deciding to shut down. I was really disappointed because I was only a couple months away from our

From our summer triathlon season. So I had races lined up. I was all ready to go a couple more months under my belt of training the pool and I’d get to open water and I’d show up in June, July, August for a race season and I was open to do really well. And of course, you know, you know what happened. There weren’t a whole lot of races in in 2020.

After after that Nusa camp. I kept swimming. I fortunately had a gym that stayed largely open during during the shutdown. So I got a lot of time in the pool. I got a lot of yards under my belt and I kept shooting the videos every every once in a while and getting your feedback and paces were coming down steadily.

You know, a few seconds off 100 pace every so often periodically there’d be a decent size breakthrough sometimes would be a frustrating couple of months with with no real progress. But if I graph it and look backwards, I frustration melts away because you can see a steady progress from that to 15 to 13 days back at the beginning to even being able to get under 130 and 100 meters and in all out and, you know, not not too shabby. But the story after after a barren 2020 racing season. The story takes sort of a little interesting twist. I had now been training like nonstop training block for 18 months, I guess, and was heading into the 2021 season and and hoping that that races would actually happen and and they seemed like they would and lo and behold we get to June and, of course, I’m in the upper Midwest so training outdoors here is a very little bit of a limited time period during the year. I’m not super hardy and cold water, even with a wetsuit on. So you kind of get July, August, early September as as reasonable swimming temperatures outdoors. So by the time the first race came up in June, I had had precious little time out here.

The, the prior season because everything was canceled. I just never really went out of my way to swim outdoors. So probably had a couple of swims and open water in 2020 but in in almost none to be honest. And so very little practice for almost a year and a half. June, I do the obligatory couple of swims and open water. And my pool time in June, I had had precious little time outdoors. The prior season because everything was canceled. I just never really went out of my way to swim outdoors. So probably had a couple of swims and open water in 2020 but in almost none, to be honest. And so very little practice for almost a year and a half. And my pool times are fantastic. I’m, I’m nailing really good 100 repeats 200 repeats 400 repeats, all at really healthy paces, low 140s, even upper 130s for the full like two 3k swim in the pool. And I go to my first race after probably one or two open water swims, and I wasn’t super impressed with the times and open water.

But I just sort of wrote it off as well I’m just taking it easy I’m just sort of getting used to the, to the open water. I get to the race and I have just a terrible race. I’m expecting probably 28 27 at worst and I come out of the water barely better than 30 minutes, which puts me back to where I was back in 2019, even 2018 I had, I had a like just under 30 minute pace. And so here I’m thinking I all this work with with effortless swimming, I’m doing super well in the pool, and I show up at a race in early June in 2021 and I have a horrible, horrible race horrible time. And of course, it’s a compounded by I, it was the our state championship was like, I wanted to be a big fish and a small pond. And I finished in second place in my age group by 25 seconds or so. So if you know if I, with all, with all reason I could have easily taken a few minutes off of my swim which would easily have vaulted me into first place in age group would have been nice.

So that was the beginning of the frustration and I, I had a few weeks between that race and the very next race. And I decided well I need to get more open water practice something that’s just haven’t I haven’t done it in a couple of years and are a couple seasons and it just need to get out there. So I have a few more sessions in open water. There’s not structured at all there I’m just going out there to go out there and I’m swimming back and forth from one one place to another nothing, you know nothing fancy nothing, nothing structured at all. And I show up for the next race, sort of writing off the first one is a bit of an anomaly maybe didn’t go hard enough, taken it too easy. I was trying not to get gassed at this in the swim legs so that I had a good bike and run. And the second race was even worse than the first one, and not by a small margin. I got out of the water in the second race and then 34, which, and I immediately reached out to you afterwards and I said I don’t I don’t think I can swim that slow in the

pool if I try. My legs would sink. It would be, I’d be looking like a, you know, a beginner swimmer if I if I tried to go that slow in the pool. And so I was, I was super frustrated I didn’t know what it was I I’m, I guess analytically inclined as a as a genetic makeup. So I said I’m just going to isolate single variables I’m going to figure out what what it is. If swimming is all about stroke rate and stroke and distance per stroke it’s got to be one of those two and now there are lots of variables that go into each one so start to pick apart things that could be impacting one or the other so I tried all the natural things I tried. Does is the does the wetsuit matter wetsuit no wetsuit no difference I came out with terrible times either way. I went to the pool and I tried citing in the pool thinking well it’s the citing that’s slowing me down lifting my head up every once in a while. I would cite once or twice per length in the pool absolutely no difference in the pace between those lengths and the ones where I didn’t cite choppy water smooth water didn’t make a lick of difference.

I, I tried, literally everything. And I was, I was one step away from actually no no lie, measuring my pool to see whether it was short. That’s getting desperate. Yeah that’s really desperate right. I did not go that far because what happened next was you. Well first of all I reached out to you and you gave me a couple things to think about and try and frankly nothing worked. It was the same, same result of course you’re in a bad position because all you’ve got to go on is what I’m telling you verbally you can’t see me like you see me when you’re coaching me over the internet with my pool swimming. So, I didn’t really have a whole lot of expectation was more out of desperation like is there anything I can try. But, coincidentally, at that same time, you were publishing an eight week faster freestyle course. And I was so beside myself and, and by the way to set the context there was a race coming up that’s our USA triathlon age group national championships and two seasons ago, I had surprised myself by qualifying.

And I went I had a terrible race like embarrassingly bad race, and I was, I was dead set on getting there this year and at least proving that I belonged. If not, having a really good race. So, I’m, I’m rapidly approaching this race day that where I want to redeem myself for a very poor performance two seasons ago. I’ve put in an abundant amount of work across all three disciplines, and my swim is falling apart it’s going backwards. So nothing seems to be working, and then just purely coincidentally, you publish the eight week faster freestyle program. And I just decided on the fly I’m going to pretend not actually I’m not going to pretend I don’t swim well in open water. I’m going to treat it as if it’s a different sport. And I’m going to wind the clock back to three years ago when I first got started with you and say, I’m, I’m a terrible swimmer, I can swim but I can’t swim well. Just apply that to open water. So I took your course week one, two, three, four, I had about four or five weeks in between race two and that in the age group national championships.

And I just said, instead of going to the pool, two times three, four, five times a week, whatever, whatever I could do, I was going to take advantage of every decent weather day and go open water swimming. And I was going to do every one of those workouts that are prescribed in that program in open water. Where there were prescribed distances I would either use buoys that mark the swim area and and just choose like one buoy two buoys three buoys depending on length or I would even count strokes if I didn’t have buoys to go with. But I essentially did those structured workouts in open water. And I think in hindsight it was the first one that probably really turned the light bulb on. It was apparent by the time I was through that first block relaxation and breathing that there was something about the context of the open water that was very different than the pool pool is very controlled pool is very calm.

The visual cues are all the same. They’re burned into my memory from going back and forth lap after lap after lap. You know just when to turn your head back. You, you use I use lane dividers to make sure that I’ve got one goggle in the water and one goggle out. There’s all these cues that you get in in the pool that you don’t have an open water and what I believe was happening to me was just sort of starting over redeveloping all those cues redeveloping comfort in the water redeveloping relaxation. I started with terrible breathing patterns. I was getting short. I was getting gassed doing whatever one K a half a K in open water and you know and then in the pool, a half a K or a K even at an aggressive paces and nothing to even get me my heart rate up. So, clearly going through even just week one made this huge difference because it allowed me to be bad again and be okay with being bad again, and sort of start over and rediscover how to get comfortable in open water versus the pool.

And I could feel from week one and going into weeks two and three I could just feel how much more calm. How much more comfortable I was in open water how much less the chaos of open water would disturb me. And I’m here to this when I was just frustrated as all heck, you know that every everything that was like sort of slightly different from one day to next and open water would would bother me and it would disrupt me. If there was a little bit more chop than the previous day if if the water wasn’t as clear because of turbulence kicking up the sand on the on the bottom. It was, it was just chaotic and frustrating and was really debilitating to my ability to relax and just focus on the stroke. So, I start to see a little bit of progress, you know some days way better than others it wasn’t like I snapped my fingers and all of a sudden was hitting my pool times again. I’m not not even close to that but slowly but surely I could feel myself calming down. I could feel myself rediscovering each of the steps that you’ve walked me through over the last three years.

I could feel myself redeveloping those skills but specifically to open water developing new cues developing a new sense of comfort in the pool and really feeling my body again in the water. Again, looking backwards I think well I was I was in the water and I was moving my arms but I had no sense of my body in the water whereas in the pool I can. I’m so hyper focused on on what the water feels like on my right thumb or we’re going over my knee as I swim you know you get that laser focused on certain feelings in the pool because the you’re so used to the stimulus around you but in open water it felt like somebody was just sort of blaring something in my ear or shaking me like a like a rag doll and and when the environment is that chaotic. You lose the ability to focus and so anyway I made it through week four of the eight week faster freestyle program. I showed up for age group national championships, and I had a fantastic race, it was still slower than the pool, but it was way faster than my previous two races.

I was out of the water 2748, which is about a 150 pace. So, I guess compared to the pool I’m still almost 10 seconds, somewhere between like eight to 10 seconds off of, but I think a decent race pace would be if I was in the pool, but I was thrilled. I was almost six and a half minutes better than a 1500 meter swim a few weeks prior by any by any measure that’s a fantastic improvement in that short of period of time. I had another five weeks to go before I did my first half Ironman. So, up to this point it had all been Olympic distance and true to form decided like I’m going to be crazy and move up to the next distance and I so I signed up I had signed up for a half Ironman and I wasn’t expecting anything miraculous I hadn’t like I continued to focus on the mechanics and the basics in open water. When I got to the half Ironman. I didn’t set my expectation, any different than I’m going to do what I did at the age group race plus maybe seven minutes.

I just, you know, I figured I would be roughly the same pace as age group national championships. And race starts. It was a four at a time start every couple of seconds. So I dive in. And I go out kind of aggressively. It was in a protected bay in in Lake Michigan. So there was in the there was no wind that day so it was other than the washing machine effective swimmers in front of you behind you into the side of you. It was perfectly smooth water. So that had definitely had that going for me. I started fast. My goal was to start fast and cut back just a little bit and then just kind of cruise the rest of the way. I just kept going fast though I felt great. I was, I was cruising along the buoys were like flying past me. I had started in a self seeded spot of about 35 to 37 I think, thinking that I would be right around there for my finish time. And I was passing people like they were treading water.

And I knew I was going fast. I didn’t feel like it was even work. I was just splitting people down the middle. It was a blast. I was just on. It was like I was on top of the water just gliding. And I got out of the water and 3334 that 1900 meters was faster than the than the worst 1500 meter race just like a month and a half prior to that, not not a faster pace, a faster total time. 34 something at 1500 meters. And that’s when I got abundantly frustrated and and reached out for help. And then to go from that to an absolute better time of 3334 at 1900 meters, I just got out of the water, like I had hit the lottery. And it’s such a great feeling to get out of the water with a good swim time, but it’s, it’s even that much better when you’ve been struggling with open water swimming, essentially all season long. And you haven’t had a real quote, good or great open water swim for them for a long time.

So I got out of the water and I had a great bike leg and running was the running was probably the the weakest leg of the race. But I’ll tell you that 3334 I kept saying to myself as my legs got more and more tired on the run, please don’t waste a good swim, please don’t waste a good swim. It kept me going for quite a while. I eventually faded a little bit on the run, but I ended up doing well in my age group and, you know, it was a great first half Ironman and age group wise or relatives my peers and age group. I came out of the water eight out of 123. And if you had, if you had asked me if that was possible three years ago, I would have just laughed out loud. I can I can swim in a forward motion but you know I was three years ago I would have said if I can get out of the water mid pack, I’d be totally happy. So I don’t know maybe maybe nobody fast showed up that day and my relative placing was was a fluke, but to finish that high relative to age group was was just icing on the cake.

It felt like a great swim it was, you know, it was obviously a relief based on my my summer performances. But it really did. It was like an a shot of adrenaline for the rest of the race and ended up ended up with a great half Ironman result to show for it really really happy with it. So that’s kind of the story. Yeah, that’s that’s awesome. I and I think that feeling of when you’re passing people and the buoys that you go and pass them fairly quickly and like you feel like you’re just you know you you’re on top of the water you’re swimming fast and nothing can stop you like that is that’s one of the best feelings that you can get when you’re you’re swimming so no wonder you felt like you’ve been shot with adrenaline coming out of the water that race. Well, and, and when I first started triathlon three years ago. One of the first problems I had was the very common problem I understand of people going too fast breathing too short end up you end up hyperventilating in the water right I’ve had that problem multiple times

whether in a just an open water training swim or in a race. And so my reaction to that has always been start really slow. Start almost like you’re doing a catch up drill in the pool, go really slow don’t don’t let the turnover, get the better of you don’t let the adrenaline of the race get the better of you don’t want to go outcast and go back on that now I think that was probably less of a problem of going out too fast it was more of a problem of not being relaxed in the water. And so, so really solving that this time well I’ll prove it I’ll prove I solved it next season but if I’ve solved that problem, then I’ll end up having much better swim times that are much closer to pool times. And if I can, if I can maintain the relaxation, then I can, I can keep a fairly aggressive for me anyway, stroke rate, and not get gassed because I’m, I’m controlling the, the breathing and the relaxation in the water.

And that’s what it comes down to isn’t it like if you’ve done the training you’ve done the work and you have that fitness there, then you can definitely go out a little bit quicker at the start. And then either back it off a little bit as you’re going through the middle of the race but not much, but you can go out with speed and for me when I’m racing and I have a really good race it’s. I’m going out quick but the heart rates kept under control and I’m always mindful of am I spiking it too much if I still got this under control and can I sustain this effort. And when you find that that zone where you are going fast and I think it’s that easy speed that a lot of some coaches talk about where you’re going fast but it feels pretty easy that’s what you’re going for at the start of a race and it sounds like you hit that. Yeah, I think I did. I checked my, my Garmin data afterwards of course and I was holding a pretty high heart rate, which surprised me because it didn’t feel like work at all.

It took maybe 400 meters for the heart rate to elevate and then, but then I held it from there for the rest of the race and I wouldn’t have designed it that way. I’d go out at this heart rate but the the ease with which I was swimming, I literally felt like maybe a slightly hard workout but not. It didn’t feel like an all out race. And yeah, it was it was phenomenal and it’s the kind of race you just want to bottle up and keep in your memory for a long time and keep referring to it as as the right way to do a race. Hopefully I can, I can break that one out next time I head out to the course and looking back at a couple months ago when you’re frustrated with the times you’re getting open water to where you were recently with a really good swim. What what lessons have you taken from that? Well, one open water swimming is different. You got to treat it as different. You’ve got to practice it a lot.

It’s not. I think that the approach I took in prior years was just do it a few times to get used to it. To make sure that you don’t, you’re used to constant swimming and without the brakes at each wall. I will completely turn that on its ear each season from here on out. I’m going to, I’m going to essentially move my training to open water as much as possible in the summer months leading up to races and, and instead of just, you know, going out and swimming a solid 2k, go do intervals in the, in the water, go swim whatever, count strokes, do something, but, you know, do your work out in open water and really get used to it and get comfortable with it. Make it feel as comfortable as the pool and, and test yourself in all the conditions because you never know what race day brings. So for sure that’s, that’s lesson number one. And a quick note from our sponsor. This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Form Swim Goggles.

With these goggles, you don’t have to look at the pace clock anymore or be one of those swimmers in the pool always grabbing for their watch. With Form Smart Swim Goggles, you can see all of your key metrics while you’re swimming. Distance, pace, stroke rate, they’ve got it all. And the swim data is displayed on the goggle lens and you can customize the display to see the metrics that you want to. And I was worried that it was going to be distracting, but you can literally see through the display, the metrics are always there, but you have to choose to focus on them. It’s really impressive. And it makes hitting intervals or any kind of specific training much more manageable and achievable. And the goggles track it all, it’s automated. So from the time you start your session to the end of the swim, you don’t have to press any buttons in between. It automatically tracks everything. Form also works with a bunch of the best pro athletes out there including Lionel Sanders, Sarah Crowley, Hannah Wells and the Olympic champion Usama Malouli to name a few.

These form goggles are for all types of swimming too. One pair of goggles and you can use them in the pool, the open water, you can use them in swim spars and endless pools too. So the same pair of goggles can be used in all of these different environments. The battery life is incredible too. One hour charge is 16 hours of swimming time battery life. And you can have the display on either your right or your left eye. The goggles themselves come with anti-fog solution that’s used in dive masks, so it’s great in terms of quality. And there’s a protective case with a nifty drainage solution. So after you swim you can store them safely. And while the goggles connect to the Form Swim app on your smartphone too, they will sync with the Form app and then you can review all of the details of your swim. And you can see what other swimmers are up to in the Form Swim community as well. I’m a big fan of these goggles.

I was really impressed when I used them and I use them for the vast majority of the sessions that I’m currently doing. To find out more about the Form Swim goggles, go to formswim.com. And you can use our coupon code effortless at checkout and save $15 off your order. Back to the podcast. Lesson number two is never be too arrogant to refuse to go back to basics. Or maybe said more positively, always be humble enough to go back to basics. I thought there for a minute prior to the frustration, you know, I’m not a bad swimmer. I can do, I’m age, I’m 57 years old, I can do all out, 130 in the pool, easy. I mean, not easy. It’s hard work, but I’m, you know, it’s not a, it’s not a terrible time in the pool. I’m feeling like a real swimmer. Real swimmers don’t have to go back to lesson one and do relaxation and breathing, right? So yeah, a little humility goes a long way. So maybe those couple of terrible race results were just the humility injection that I needed to get me to get back to the beginning.

That’s, that’s what stood out to me was just being willing to go back to basics. And I think of tennis players as an example of that. It’s like when you’re playing tennis, it’s just, it’s a couple of shots, but they have those fundamental shots just drilled down and drilled down. And with really solid fundamentals, then you can work on more intricate parts of tennis or swimming, whatever it might be. And, but without those, those basics in place, then you’re not going to be able to build upon them. And the thing with breathing and relaxation that first week that, that we’ve got there, it’s, I think it’s people look at that and go, I can breathe, you know, I feel relaxed in the water. So a lot of times they’ll just either skip it or they’ll just get a browse over and go, okay, cool, got that. And they won’t actually go through it. But even for me, like I’ve had, when we, you know, when the pools are open a little while ago, there’s been times where I’ve focused on my, on my breathing and had a really good training session and just gone.

Wow. Like I was a couple seconds quicker per hundred. It felt great. And I was, that was a really good training session. And, you know, I’ve swam for like nearly 30 years now. And it’s just that stuff, it really can make a difference, but it’s hard to sometimes bring yourself back to those really basic things, especially like just breathing relaxation. It’s just so simple. Right. Right. I think the other thing I’ll take away from it is I need to learn to like open water swimming. It’s been more of a chore and not necessarily a pleasant one. And some of that is the, the frustrating performance, but I feel more in command when I’m in the pool. It’s a more comfortable environment. It’s obviously a safer environment, but I, I feel like I have more control over the workout and the pace and pretty much everything. And you get into open water and it’s, it’s a little bit cold or it’s a little bit choppy or it’s a little bit windy or whatever.

And, and there are just a few things that sort of knock you off that comfortable pedestal. And I have to keep going out and doing it. I have to make myself do it every, every reasonable weather day. I should be out there in the summer. And maybe I should even stop being such a wimp and go out in some slightly colder water temperatures really early in the season so that I’m not showing up on race one with two swims under my belt. But I really, I think I would benefit a lot from just a lot more work in open water. That’s where I raised. So I should do more work there. Yeah. And, yeah. I think that can certainly help. I think I, I think back to my first open water swim was when I was about 13 or 40 years old as a teenager, having only some in the pool. And I never learned to sight. I never learned about like going around billies or anything like nothing. It was just like, oh, there’s a, there’s a team triathlon down at Blue Rock Dam.

And we’ve chosen you to be the swimmer. I was like, okay, cool. I’m a good swimmer. You know, I’m going to go out there and snatch it. And I remember a guy that I used to train with and race with way faster than me in the pool. He, he actually beat me and he was like in this team that was formed to be like, you know, to win the event. He was in the tent was planned to come second, but he beat me and I was really filthy about it. So, and I was like, oh, I don’t like open water swimming. And then I started coaching adults and then we started to do these open water swims when I was maybe 19 or 20. And I was like, okay, this is actually pretty fun. But it took me a couple of years to actually learn how to do it properly. I can see that I’m not close to liking it yet. I’m, I’m getting close to being able to tolerate it and know how important it is to practice it and results are really helpful there. But I really need to spend this next season getting to like it and feeling in command of it.

And then I think really, really good things happen. Obviously I’ve got a long fall and winter to work out in the pool. And so I’ll keep working really hard there. Try to take a few more seconds off of the 100 meter pace. And when, when the water gets to human temperature in probably June, I’ll be back out there with a wetsuit on trying to learn to like it again. They’ve got, they’ve got like thermal wetsuits as well. You can get and you’ve probably seen like the little hoods or the thermal. I would need one. Yeah. Yeah. Especially when you add, I imagine it’s really cold. Yeah. So I figured I would probably have to do a Celsius conversion here for you. But I think, I think it’s like, it takes until maybe mid June to get above 15 Celsius. Yeah. Yeah. You’re being soft. Oh, I’m very, I grew up in Florida. I used to bathwater temperatures. So I can’t, I can’t take the cold. I would need all of the, I need head to toe neoprene to keep myself in the water when it’s that cold.

Yeah. But one of the, one of the things that I’ve started to do probably more when I’m surfing than anything, because I’ve done a whole lot of open water swimming recently. I do the same thing when I’m swimming open water and the conditions are like really windy and choppy. And it’s like, it’s hideous. And you can, you can take it one of two ways. It can be either like, like this, this sucks. Like what am I doing out here? Or you can take the approach of like, isn’t this wild? This is just like, I can’t live them out here in these conditions. And I was out surfing the other day and the, like it was, it was piercing down rain. It was really strong, cross shore winds. There was so much bump. There was like me and one other guy out there. I could hardly see the shore and it was just like, it was all over the shop. And I was like, I was going to go in. I was like, no, you know what? I’ll just stay out here and enjoy being out in the, in the ocean in such wild weather.

And it was like, I found it pretty fun when I sort of had that attitude. So this is more for myself on anything too. But it’s just like, yeah, when it, when it’s not desirable, you can sort of have that. It’s like a Steve Aaron approach, right? Like everything’s just like, isn’t this awesome? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I find one of one strategy I really need to pull the trigger on to an employee is taking my watch off. Especially when the conditions are bad, you know, you’re going to have terrible looking time compared to everything else. And, and you’re out there to practice. You’re out there to work on, on, on form amidst the chaos of the, of the water conditions. So just leave the watch behind. I can’t bring myself to do that. But, but maybe next time around when the conditions are really bad and I’m forcing myself to go out, I’ll, I’ll give that a shot. Cause the, the, the mental. Sort of mental drain of constantly thinking to yourself, oh my God,

this time I’m going to, I’m going to pull up at, at halfway through before I turn around and the time’s going to suck. That’s a huge mental drain. And it, it’s yet another thing that is keeping you from focusing on mechanics. So I feel like if I could just, if I could just get over that hurdle of not, not measuring one of my workouts, it would be really good for me in open water swimming. I could, I could just, you know, make up the time and the distance to put in my logbook. Yeah. Yeah, that, that’s right. I, I, yeah, I rarely ever, if I do ever take my watch out when I’m swimming open water, I won’t look at the pace at all when I’m swimming. Cause I know it’s going to be probably 10, 15 seconds slower. And sometimes if I’m with the group will stop and that sort of things. So I just, I did not worry about time out there. Yeah. And maybe you could go like that in between step where it’s like, take your watch out, see what time you leave at like,

say it’s seven 30 in the morning and just see what time you get back at. And you could jump on Google maps and, and measure where you, where you’re swimming. Well, or, or I could, I could, I use one of those, those orange inflatable buoys attached to my waste, um, floatation devices when I’m in open water, I can just put it inside that so that I’m not tempted to look at it or start and stop it. So at least I get the measurement done, but I, I’m not at least mid race. I’m not worried about what the times look like. And I’m not, and I’m not going to be frustrated halfway through. I need some mental strategies to get me past my hangups about, um, uh, anal retentive measurement of all workouts. Like, uh, need like a 12 step program. I think. Yeah, exactly. I was thinking about giving up like, what if I gave up coffee for even like a week? And I was like, no, I couldn’t do it. I did not have that. No, that’s not on the witty.

Nope. That’s not on my list. I’d sooner give up my watch than coffee. Yeah. That’s right. I’m definitely addicted to it. If, if I can’t even do it, give it up for a week. But, um, yeah, it sounds a bit like you’re, um, like a watch, but, uh, I really appreciate you sharing that on the, on the podcast. I know you’re not alone. The funny thing was when you sent that message, uh, like the message about the poor times in the open water and just trying to figure it out. I had one, probably two other people that same week, uh, who was stroke analysis members sent similar things. And I’m like, they just returned to racing and been a while out. And there was like bad times. As well. So you weren’t alone there. So I think this is really relevant to probably a lot of people who are, who are listening to this. And, uh, it’s always good to hear how someone, you know, had a really good, um, run improved your times and then, you know,

drops back down and then it, but then it came back up. And it’s like, kind of like in the analogy I’ve heard for investing in, like in the market, right? It’s a, it’s going up a mountain with a yo-yo. So it’s not always going to be upwards. It’s going to have ups and downs, but the overall run is going to be, it’s going to be in a trajectory. And, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s what you’ve, you’ve done, which is fantastic. So, uh, thanks very much for sharing on here. And what’s your, what are you looking at now the next six to 12 months? What’s that sort of look like for you? And what are your goals with you for me? Yeah, I’m going to, I’m going to do the, uh, a couple of Olympic distances and probably another half Ironman next season. And I don’t have them picked out yet, but, um, I just want to keep getting better. I’ve, I’ve got a stretch goal in mind on the Olympic distance to, to take about 10 minutes off my time, which will put me in some rarefied air in my age group.

If I can pull that off. So I’ve got a, a plan that I need a few minutes in the swim couple, maybe a couple minutes in the swim. And most of it I need to get back in the run, but I’m just trying for like just continuous improvement. Just keep chipping away. Um, at, at all three disciplines, but mostly the swim in the run. Um, I think that’s where I have the most room for improvement. Uh, and I’m swimming, I’m having a blast getting better at it. It’s, uh, it’s fantastic. Sort of watch that, that trajectory rise. Uh, and the pace is decline. And I, I don’t think I’m anywhere close to what I can eventually do. Um, so I’m just going to keep, um, working on form, working on stroke count, working on, um, um, um, um, um, um, stroke count, working on, uh, some, some upper body flexibility. Just, just trying to do all the little things that we’ll keep adding up to improvement and, uh, knock on wood. Uh, this time next year, I’ll have some more great stories to tell about good

race performances. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I think you can definitely do it. And I agree you’re, uh, not, you’re not even near your, um, your limit or your capacity of what you can get in the, in, and out. Thanks again for being on the podcast. Oh, thank you. It’s been fun. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post [Case Study] What To Do When Your Open Water Times Are Slower Than Your Pool Times with Prescott Balch appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Our guest today is Ben Kent who had recently made some big improvements with his swimming time. I like to get people who has gone through some of our programs and mage improvements just to show that it is possible and with the right focus and know how you can really make changes to your times by improving your technique.

00:54 Swimming Background
01:50 They Told Me I Could Not Run Anymore
02:38 Doing The 5 Day Catch Challenge
04:58 I feel Like Going Slower And Swimming Easier
06:46 Contrast Drills
08:00 Motivated After Seeing Improvements

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Yeah, I feel like I’m swimming slower and sort of easier. And then when I’m getting to the wall and touching and I’m seeing stuff in the 120s, low 120s, I don’t know where that’s come from. 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. My guest today is Ben Kent and I wanted to get Ben on the podcast because you’ve recently had some really big improvements in your swimming and I like to get people who have gone through some of our staff and made improvements just to show that it’s possible and that with the right focus and know-how, you can really make some changes to your times by improving your techniques. So welcome to the podcast, Ben. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us. So tell me a bit about your background. Like what’s you’re doing triathlon? How long you’ve been doing that for and what’s your swimming background as well? Yeah, so basically I’ve been doing triathlons for about two and a half years. I broke my legs probably five years ago in a dirt bike accident and it was sort of like when I was going through the rehab, everyone was like, oh, you won’t be able to run or do anything like that. So it was just one of those

things that sort of put me put me more into it and did it. So but as far as as far as swimming, like just swimming as a kid, nothing sort of yeah, nothing to anything. And then I went, well, once I broke my legs and had to get in the pool, that was the only thing I could do there for a while. So just started swimming and all took off from there. And so did you start doing triathlon because you broke your legs and you were just like stuff that I’m going to show you? Or is it more just it’s just something that eventuated from wanting to get fit and get back into being active? Yeah, a bit of both. When everyone was sort of saying I wouldn’t be able to do anything like that. Yeah, stuff you are, I’m going to do it. And then when I got all the plates out of my leg, I signed up for a off-road triathlon just for something to focus on like while I was rehabbing and not getting too out of shape. So yeah, I ended up doing that.

Yeah, that’s awesome. I like that sort of attitude, you know, just to show people that can be done. And when you sent me a message on Instagram, like you said that your pace was around 145, 150 had been there like per 100, it had been there for a while. And then you started going through the catch challenge and through some of those drills and exercises. And you sent me a screenshot of your Garmin watch and I think it was maybe 136, the first one. And then the final one you sent me was 124, like 100, your fastest 100. So what’s changed in that time? What did you adjust with your stroke to see those improvements? Yeah, well, yeah, I obviously signed up for the five day catch challenge. I hadn’t really been in the pool for two or three months over winter and thought now is a good time as any to sort of give it a try and try to change the stroke. So signed up for that. And yeah, probably the biggest I opened was the wrist entry. I was trying to outreach and try to reach as far as I could outside

the water and then pull all the way back. And the very first sort of drill, putting the hands in under the kickboard, I was like, oh, this sort of makes a lot more sense. So yeah. And then yeah, I went from previous PB was a 137 that was back in 2019 when I was swimming all the time training for 70.3. And just the other day ended up doing a 120. So Oh, really? Wow. It’s all happened pretty quick. So that’s awesome. And with the entry, so when you were overreaching above the water and probably landing with your elbow first, I imagine, was that something that you just thought you should do or you heard from a coach or someone like where did where did that come from? Had you had any instruction before this? No, there was no no instruction. And basically, when I first got back in the pool for rehab, it was just swim just hop in the pool and swims as far as far and as fast as I could. So

basically did that for two and a half years. And then it’s only been the last like two or couple of weeks really that I’m sort of concentrating on technique. And what’s, what does it feel like for you now? So that 120 compared to say the 136 two years ago, how does how does it feel when you mean what’s the difference? Yeah, I feel like I’m swimming slower and sort of easier. And then yeah, when I’m getting to the to the wall and touching and I’m seeing stuff in the 120s, low 120s, and I don’t know where that’s come from. And previously would have been the Garmin skipping out of 25 meter length and I could get those vines, but now I’m doing it doing the whole thing.

That’s awesome. I do find that often people feel like they’re going slower because they’re more relaxed, they’re more composed. But when you’re in that frame of mind and when you are in that way, you tend to just move so much better and you tend to hold the water so much better than when it’s really panicked and rushed and that sort of thing. And it sounds like if you were overreaching above the water, that’s possibly what was happening like you’re just spinning the wheels a lot before. Do you, does it feel like your catch has changed at all? And have you done any drills to work on that? Or is it just all a matter of changing the entry that’s really made a difference for you? Nah, I’ve done the rest of the drills on the five days and when my arms were going in the water, they were sort of facing up and not down and bending the elbow first and all that kind of stuff. And obviously with the drills that you get us to do, doing it the bad way and the good

way and sort of now the mental cues of where they should be and what they feel like if I’m doing them wrong. So you feel like you’re a bit more aware of when it’s right and when it’s wrong? And do you feel that way because of those contrast drills in the catch challenge? Or just because you know what you need to be doing now? Yeah, more of the contrast drills. I sort of previously probably knew what to do or what I should be doing and didn’t know what that felt like. And now I sort of know what shouldn’t be feeling like through the water. Yeah, that’s good. And for those listening, one of the contrast drills that we have people do is just like a front kick drill where you’re faced down with both arms in front and you have your, one is just have your hands up

like high so the fingers are up sort of near the surface and you’re putting the brakes on and then one where you’re in the right position which is about underarm depth and it’s, yeah, they’re just about that awareness around knowing whether you’re in the right position or not because very few people are going to have a coach looking at them every session. Yeah, most, most of them is a training on their own and on the same. So you just don’t get that feedback. And the only feedback you can really have is that awareness or that proprioception of what you’re doing in the pool and you’d need to know whether or not that’s the right thing. And what does it feel like when you go to the pool now? So are you more motivated to go to the pool when you’re seeing these improvements? Yeah, definitely. Sort of while I’m at work, I work 12-hour shifts and I’m just like, yeah, I can’t wait to get to the pool after work. And on me days off, it’s, yeah,

previously it was sort of, yeah, I’ve got a swim now, I’ll get there, but now it’s like, yeah, straight up straight straight to the pool and just want to, yeah, want to keep seeing these improvements. Yeah, that’s, yeah, that’s great to hear.

Like in anything, I think, whenever you see that improvement and you know, you know what’s, what’s possible, you start to get that bit of belief, that bit of hope that, yeah, I can really make a difference here. And that’s what’s motivating and that’s what’s inspiring. And what’s, what have you got coming up? Is Basso going ahead? And yeah, is there anything on the calendar for you, race-wise? Yeah, we’ve got a Bumbry OD coming up in, in a couple of weeks. That got cancelled back in February, so they moved it to October. So got that. Basso, yeah, it is going ahead at this stage. I haven’t signed up yet, trying to get it past the wife. So, and then we’re, oh, my father, father-in-law and sister, we’re going to team up and, and do the rotto swim. So,

which is also being good, getting them down the pool and being able to sort of explain to them what they’re doing wrong as well. So. Oh, that’s really cool. Have you done that before? Have you done it? No, I haven’t done it before. So, yeah, it’ll be good. Yeah, I did it a couple of years back and yeah, awesome swimming, especially it’s a real, it’s a real community thing in WA, isn’t it? Like, it’s just everyone knows about it, heaps of people have done it as a solo duo or like trio, even like, you know, team of four, and yeah, just a really cool event. And I don’t think we’re going to be able to get over there this year. I’ve got some, some friends and some swimmers that want to go over there and do it, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen, but certainly for the WA contingent, it’s going to be, yeah, another good event because I did, I did run it earlier this year, didn’t they? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did it. So, yeah, just trying to, trying to get

an entry to that. I think it’s sold out in, in 10 minutes this year. So hopefully, hopefully we get an entry to it. Yeah, and that opens soon, doesn’t it? It’s like October or November or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, fantastic. Well, Ben, thanks very much for, for being on the podcast and looking forward to seeing what happens with your times over the next few months and just seeing that improvement because it’s still early days, which is exciting and there’s so much more improvement available and it doesn’t, doesn’t mean it’s always just going to continue to drop like that because that’s a pretty significant improvement. And you might, might go on that roller coaster of maybe the times regress a little bit, but then you’ll continue to improve and so on. But yeah, that’s, that’s unreal. And I appreciate you sharing your improvement on the, on the podcast. Yeah, no, thanks for, thanks for having us. And yeah, hopefully

someone can get some of this and sign up and get their times coming down. So yeah, awesome. Thanks. And yeah, all the best for the Bumbly Try. Yeah, thanks, mate. Cheers.

Thank you so much for joining us at Bumbly Try. Thank you so much for joining us at Bumbly Try.

The post How One Stroke Change Lead To A 16 Seconds PB with Ben Kent appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Our guest today is Neil Agius who recently broke the World Record for the Longest Non-Stop Swim in the Ocean which is 125km over 52 hours. Join me as Neil talks about his incredible swim.

01:53 After The Swim
02:47 How Much Time To Train And Prepare For The Big Swim
03:33 Week Structure/Scheduling
04:16 Managing Emotions And Energy
06:26 Strategy For Dealing With Long Swims
07:26 Swimming Conditions
10:29 Cadence And Conserving Energy
12:15 Raising The Level Of Capacity
13:34 The Team
20:47 Energy And Spirituality
22:28 Self Realization
24:47 Turning Negative Into Positive
25:50 Race For A Cause: Wave Of Change
30:43 Getting Back To The Water
32:42 Future Swims

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Wave Of Change

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Yeah, yeah, no, it makes such a big difference and also then like kind of playing around with other things like up through the training and everything I got stuck hundreds, hundreds of times by jellyfish like it’s and then it’s always like a jellyfish and then I kind of started thinking so when these jellyfish come into contact with me they release all the energy that they have into me. So why don’t I channel channel that energy into pushing me on and making me stronger rather than making it an issue you know so really trying to take turn negatives into into positives. Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to episode 199 of the effortless swimming podcast. I’ve got a special guest today, Neil Adjus. He recently broke the world record for the longest nonstop swim in the ocean which is 125 kilometers over 52 hours.

So Neil first of all congratulations on an incredible swim and you actually broke the record of a friend of mine and someone who I actually used to train with Chloe McCartle. She held the record at 124 kilometers so you bested her by a bit over a kilometer but an incredible swim. So this all happened in July so fairly recently. So how do you feel a couple months later after doing such an incredible swim? I’m still trying to really process it. A lot of things have changed. A lot of people recognize me in the streets as well so it’s learning how to be in that space as well, because it’s I’m not such a person who likes a lot of attention on myself but it’s good because gives me a chance to grow and learn from it as well. So I’m from the island of Linosa which is an Italian island to Malta which is where you’re from. So, and you’ve done a few big swims in the past like you’ve swim around Malta which is I think 70 kilometers.

And then you did the Cicely to Malta which was 102 kilometers. And so did you get much publicity? Did you get a lot of attention then in Malta or did this completely change it for you? Yeah, no it did definitely. For me it was really much I was just wanting to swim around Malta and that was kind of my thing. Do that and I’m done and I’m done from swimming and I’m just going to move on. But so many things happened throughout that swim that it became really really interesting of how much can I actually challenge myself, my body, my mind. And before I knew it I was about to start to swim from Linosa to Malta which was 125 kilometers. And leading into the swim how much time did you give yourself to train and prepare for it? I mean the training is really really mild training throughout the year and then the real stuff starts from January so I give myself a six month period. And this is mainly because the training gets so intense that you can’t do it for so long.

So a lot of swimming at night, lots of hours, six, seven, eight, ten, twelve hour sessions. So that can only go on for a certain period before you kind of start to break down mentally as well. And there’s a lot of sacrifices that come to it. If you’re doing a ten hour session then you’re not going to be very active to the rest of the day. So you need to plan out your schedule well and pre-plan everything. It sounds like how did you actually structure your week? Did you look at it say on a Sunday or on a weekend to go out? This is where I can fit my training. This is where I can work, spend time with the family. How did it work for you? For me I do most of the pool training during the week so from Monday to Thursday and then on Friday and Saturday I’d go in the sea and it was a build-up from doing like two, three hour swims one week, then the week after would be one, four hours, then two by five, one by six, two by seven, one by eight, two by nine, one by ten.

And it finished up with three, twelve hour swims one consecutively. Wow. And how did you manage your emotions and your energy during that time? Because I train for a 20 kilometre swim which is nothing compared to 125 kilometres. And I remember being pretty tired, pretty exhausted a lot of the time just with that kind of training. So for you, how did you manage that? I really have a really nice good recovery for us. I recover quickly so I get to move into space quite quickly and it’s not the first time that I’d have an eight hour swim and then rest for a couple of hours and go and go and work because kind of I’m trying to balance both wells at the moment. Yeah, and so we’re talking before the call, you’ve got a swimming business, like learn to swim. Yeah, learn to swim from six months up to adults, fitness and some athletes, like I’m training somebody to swim around Gozo in a week’s time. So that’s pretty exciting. That’s like our sister island which is 37 kilometres and he doesn’t come from much of a swimming background.

So to get into ready for this challenge was exciting. That’s awesome. Is that the first person that you will have coached to do some longer swim like that? Yeah, but I’m my own coach as well so I prepare my own, all my programmes and all my stuff as well. But yeah, giving it to someone else, it’s the first time. Yeah, that’s really cool and I mean the experience that you could draw on based on your previous swims would give them a lot of confidence going into it I imagine. Yeah, and let’s talk. It’s a good balance between the physical side and also the mental side because when you’re in the swimming for so long then you have a lot of time to dwell in your thoughts and you can start spiraling very quickly about how tired you are and how difficult this is and how there’s a period where it’s going to be at night. So it’s really dark and you need to be ready to understand what you’re getting yourself into and prepare yourself from more angles.

Did you have any sort of strategy for dealing with that? I had a friend of mine who did the Lake Taupo swim in New Zealand which is 40 kilometres or 42 kilometres and he said one of his strategies for occupying his mind was to retrace certain roads that he like his childhood roads and he found that he could get quite a few hours to pass just trace like pretending he was driving down these roads in his head. Have you got something like that? What I do, what I did is I’ve created like tools and skills that I use when I’m in certain situations like I do a lot of meditation and work a lot with energies that are available to me because it’s a completely current neutral unassisted film so I can’t touch the boat, cannot hold on a floaty while I’m during my break while I’m eating so I try to use the sun for energy, the moon for warmth and connect with these natural sources that are available at that time.

Let’s talk about the swim itself. So what time did you start the swim and in terms of the water temperature and the conditions and that sort of thing because we’ve had quite a few swimmers who have done some reasonably cold water swims but without knowing too much about the area, it’s a little bit warmer over there, isn’t it? It’s not really an issue with the warmth of the water? To be honest, being in the water for 52 hours it does become an issue especially at night when you’re low on energy and the cold does start to kick in. It’s about an average of about 22 degrees Celsius. I’m not sure if you guys work in Fahrenheit but it’s about an average of 22, 23 degrees. So I try to really manage the warmth with my food intake so every half an hour I’d stop for a minute so I have to drink a little bit and eat a little bit to keep me warm and so I don’t need to eat too much if I don’t stop for five, six hours then I need to eat a lot and then I can get an insulin crash

and so that just really keeps my level really constant and steady. And so what time did you start the swim? Yeah I started at 6pm. 6pm, right and so was there a certain strategy for that or was this just about the conditions being all right? No it was a strategy to get the first night out of the way while I’m fresh, while I’m really alert and won’t be able to lose myself too much but going if I have to do another longer swim like that I think I’d start in the morning because I ended up not sleeping for about 65 hours by the end of it so hallucinating and it was quite intense but thanks to the team I had around me and we managed to make it to the end because the current was really intense in the first. It was meant to be for four or five hours but it ended up being for the first 16 to 20 hours so I swam the first 100 kilometres in 42 hours and I had swam the Sicily-Monta swim which is 100 kilometres in 28 hours

so I lost 14 hours and that’s how I ended up swimming for so long. It wasn’t really in the plan for me to swim for that long. Yeah and did you know the current was strong? Could you feel it? Did the team let you know it was just? No, no I just used your swim. No, no you could feel it but I had done some rough water swimming before and what I’ve learnt is that you really don’t fight with the waves you let them push you around, throw you around and you need to keep that constant speed of what you would usually be swimming at so if you’re swimming at which is usually what I would swim is like a 1 minute 50 per 100 for the entire swim I need to swim at that pace and then with the waves I was swimming at 3 minutes 100 as a point Wow and what about your cadence? Is there a certain cadence that you were just trying to stick to? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll be checking myself as well where I’d be swimming around 42, 43 strokes per minute, not more

If I’m doing more than that then I’m expanding too much energy I saw a video of I think it was from the swim or maybe it was your previous long swim but yeah, like the stroke in your style was just really long every stroke, a fairly low cadence and just very minimal energy exerted and obviously that works so well for the distance and the time that you’re doing and is that something that you had to change from your pool swimming background? Is it something that you worked on developing to be able to conserve energy? Yeah, it’s something that I had to change from the pool obviously because in the pool even if it’s the longest distance you’re swimming at a much faster speed but what I really learned how to do is really use my hips to really get as much momentum from something that doesn’t create lactic acid and also I adjusted my pool under the water so it wouldn’t be that perfect with that bent elbow completely it would be more with a slightly straighter arm to get less strain

onto my shoulders really so I can do more rotations

Did that come from having an issue with that in the past or is that something that you just knew you wouldn’t be able to sustain without perhaps getting injured or having some shoulder pain as you were swimming? I think it was just from experience that I kind of realised that if I’m doing a perfect stroke then I’m actually putting more strain on my shoulders so it would make more sense to just put it lightly off not so perfectly aligned and that will give me a lot more in distance when I’m swimming so long

And throughout the swim were there any times where it looked like maybe you’re not going to make it or where the team was a little bit concerned for you in terms of like your state of mind or like how you were feeling or how you were swimming did anything like that arise over the 52 hours? Yeah definitely it happened in the very beginning the first night it was really rough and wild to see so the energies will be moving around will be a lot more darker and a lot more normal to what we’re used to so I was feeling a bit uncomfortable in the water and not too happy but together kind of we raise each other’s level and each other’s capacity where I kind of keep them going by them watching me do this swim continuously there they go for their rest through their break and then they wake up and they find me still there so they’ll be like I can’t be tired this guy’s still swimming so they raise their level of their capacity

and they do the same to me you know they push me more and I push them more and together we manage to do these and accomplish these swims. And who’s on the boat as you’re doing the swim? Yeah so I have a pretty big team it’s a team of 22 people and they’re on three separate boats so I have three sailing boats and one and one rib and the team is so big because when you’re crossing from one country to the other you need to have a protocol and a preparation for everything because if something happens you have no access to anything you didn’t prepare yourself for so I had three doctors who could perform a small operation if needed and they would be on a roster as well so they can’t remain awake for the whole time because if something happens they need to be alert and ready to take certain decisions and then I had the rib next to me that’s where the my team the closest from my team come on it and they’ll be at the driver the motivator and the feeder

and these have a roster of only two hours each maybe sometimes three and they keep changing because they cannot be on the boat and looking tired and feeling tired because then they start to take energy from me so every two hours they would change and someone new and fresh will come and so I keep taking their energy and that’s why they get so tired so quickly so there’s a whole massive time isn’t it? Yeah there’s a lot of detail we really need to go down to the really last detail to be able to be doing this for sustain it for so many hours and then there’ll be the chef to cook for the whole team and then there’s the observers to making sure that everything is done legally for the documentation and the world record to to count which I know you mentioned that I am the world record holder but we’ve just submitted a documentation which should take a few months to be confirmed before it is actually my world record away from Chloe’s so we’re still waiting on that

but we only submitted it now it’s like a little mini thesis it’s a little book with every detail of every minute of every moment with the current with everything with there’s a whole it’s a whole book How long did that take to to prepare and with this did you have to I imagine you’d have to look into everything that they need to ratify the swim like there must be there I guess there’s some sort of format to follow for that that you had to figure out before you left Yeah yeah we contacted them before and they gave us all the things that we needed to to basically rules abide by and obviously he’d already said it’s always good more information go over and above because that gives us a better understanding of what of what happened so there’s details of down to every single medicine that the doctors gave me if it was a panadol over my headache aloe vera for my nose for the for the salt exposure menus of the crew what I ate every 30 minutes how many strokes every minute photos

it’s like a whole like a little work of art you know that they they created the team and documented everything amazing it’s like another marathon swimming itself that’s a huge man works to put that together and they’ll be three of those and they’re going taking it in shift as well so there’s people driving other people from the rib to the sailing boats so those will be changing as well that somebody has to drive them from the sailing boat to the rib that’s next to me so everyone is there for a reason and with one of them not being there the whole system collapses basically because then people have to do more than one job and then they are they can’t handle it it’s too tired these guys are coming not as prepared as I am I always tell them I have the easy job because I’ve trained for what I’m going to do and I just put one hand in front of the other they have to do all the worrying for me I don’t need to think about anything even the food it’s it’s the

the meal plans that I have are all preset so I prepare the meal sets of what I want this this that the other this this that the other and so I don’t need to think about what do I want to eat right now it’s not what you want to eat it’s what you’re given you eat it you move on and you keep going for your next 30 minutes well that’s the thing isn’t it you don’t want to be thinking about the crew or the boats you just want to be focused on your job and did you have someone who was sort of the the commander who was in charge of all of all of that so you could focus on your swim yeah yeah there’s the Gordon was the guy in charge now he’s guys like he’s such a perfectionist and does his job so so perfectly and I’m like the kind of opposite of him and so we kind of meet in the middle I remember before the Sicily swim he’s like we need to start planning I’m like oh we just grab a boat three of us can go and we’ll cross from Sicily to Malta

and we’ll do it and he’s like that’s not gonna work you need to have a setup you need to have a team you need to so yeah it really wasn’t for Gordon it would be not possible to to do these swims even applying for permits to be able to cross from one country to the other the entry because of COVID needed to be checked we had COVID test to take with us and everything so it was a whole really big big project a quick note from our sponsor this episode of the podcast is sponsored by form swim goggles with these goggles you don’t have to look at the pace clock anymore or be one of those swimmers in the pool always grabbing for their watch with form smart swim goggles you can see all of your key metrics while you’re swimming distance pace stroke rate they’ve got it all and the swim data is displayed on the Google lens and you can customize the display to see the metrics that you want to and I was worried that it was going to be distracting but you can

literally see through the display the metrics are always there but you have to choose to focus on them it’s really impressive and it makes hitting intervals or any kind of specific training much more manageable and achievable and the goggles track it all it’s automated so from the time you start your session to the end of the swim you don’t have to press any buttons in between it automatically tracks everything form also works with a bunch of the best pro athletes out there including Lionel Sanders Sarah Crowley Hannah Wells and Olympic champion Usama Malouli to name a few these form goggles are for all types of swimming too one pair of goggles and you can use them in the pool the open water you can use them in swim spas and endless pools too so the same pair of goggles can be used in all of these different environments the battery life is incredible too one hour charge is 16 hours of swimming time battery life and you can have the display on

either your right or your left eye the goggles themselves come with anti-fog solution that’s used in dive masks so it’s great in terms of quality and there’s a protective case with a nifty drainage solution so after you swim you can store them safely and while the goggles connect to the form swim app on your smartphone to they will sync with the format and they can review all of the details of your swim and you can see what other swimmers are up to in the form swim community as well I’m a big fan of these goggles I was really impressed when I use them and I use them for vast majority of the sessions that I’m currently doing to find out more about the form swim goggles go to formswim.com and you can use our coupon code effortless at checkout and save $15 off your order back to the podcast and you mentioned you’ve mentioned sort of energy a few times with the with the with the sun and the moon and giving

and taking from your team and is this something that that sort of you become more aware of or you’ve sort of tuned into more with all of the ocean swimming that you’re doing or is this something that you have have sort of you know noticed for a long time where’s this come about the spirituality comes from from home really really trying to I always find it really important that in the beginning of every day you give yourself 30 minutes before you start work before you pick up your phone before you do all these things to just connect with yourself and being that that’s quite space and that’s from that quiet space where you don’t have any interruptions you get a lot of growth and understanding of what you need and how you need to be and then also I do meditations with with music and it’s strong very profound prayers from the chance from the from the tribes from the the Amazon and the South American traditions and then when I’m in a very dark place they play this song from

the boat and so it reminds me of my meditation reminds me of that quiet space and it’s that slowly brings me back to being in a good space. That’s unreal and and you can hear that in the water. No, it would be one minute while I’m on my break where I they play it and it’s instantly takes me back there and then I’ll be going over that for the for the next swim the next 30 minutes as well. Is there and from doing all this long distance swimming has there has there been things you’ve realized about yourself for the the way you’re you’re living your life anything that you’ve sort of realized from from doing this open water swimming and that you’ve you’ve changed how you approach life or perhaps what you do on a day to day basis yes definitely I think each time I do such a long swim it changes me completely as a person you know you come out with new lessons new teachings and new understandings of yourself and

and new ideas that you kind of take into your daily life for example I really like there was a point where it was about midway through the swim I was really feeling my shoulders really tired and I like started dwelling in these thoughts and like I’m not even halfway there how my shoulders already hurt for me how is this possible and then something else happens that catches my attention and all of a sudden you’re no longer thinking about your shoulders and they’re no longer hurting you so what if we can take that in a to our daily daily routine of how powerful is our mind where we get stuck on certain things and make that thing a bigger thing when we just kind of try and move on from it then it kind of disappears and it’s no longer it’s a non-issue yeah it’s so true isn’t it like I found myself the other day actually like so we’re in Melbourne we hold the record for the longest lockdown which is which is quite frustrating I found myself just getting really annoyed about it

and and then I think I like another few hours later I went and caught up with a friend just got chatting and you kind of just forget about it and just that change of change of what your focus is on immediately like it changes your mood and so you know the minds are very powerful thing and if you can control it and steer it and harness that like you were mentioning it’s it’s a very you know powerful thing because I think you know mindset is probably a huge component of completing the swim that you did like physically absolutely but you know for me I think it would be mindset over anything else because 52 hours and staying awake for that long it’s um that’s a massive achievement yeah yeah no it makes such a big difference and also then like kind of playing around with other things like I’m through the training and everything I got stung hundreds hundreds of times by jellyfish like it’s and then I kind of started thinking so when these

jellyfish come into contact with me they release all the energy that they have into me so why don’t I channel channel that energy into pushing me on and making me stronger rather than making it an issue you know so really trying to take turn negatives into into positives I like I like that approach there’s a lot of jellyfish in the bay here in Melbourne at the moment and a couple of friends have posted about it so I’ll have to remind them next time they complain about running into jellyfish and imagine doing it at night getting bitten by jellyfish at night you can’t see the next one coming you know so um yeah it’s it’s you start to get a little bit unhospitable in the water but I’m not saying that I’m looking for jellyfish to stick them on because they give me energy but um try not to make such an issue about a non-issue okay they heard yes kind of get over it move on yeah yeah that’s it and um and you also did the swim to

um raise awareness um well for for a cause and for a charity so would you like to talk a bit about that and did having that that cause in mind make it easy because it felt a little bit more sort of it was a lot felt a bit more selfless as a as a thing to do like is that something that really drove you to to want to create this swim and make it non-negotiable that you um you know just word you’re going to make it forget others of how much it hurt yeah there’s a lot of little things that that add up to me have wanting to carry on going and the the environment is one of them I started a foundation wave of change um that first started to it was just kind of okay let’s do this so when everyone’s looking at me I can pass on a message that will lead to growth and development from from everybody who can listen to it and from there then we really started to get people on board to really want to make changes in their life behavior patterns to just what are

they buying how are they buying how much are they using you know change replacing products with more sustainable ones um we we do have quite a problem with litter in Malta and the use of plastic is is excessive and then when everyone’s by the sea they leave them their cups of ice cream or or packets of sweets or whatever it is lying around and when it’s windy it all gets blown into the sea and this is kind of deteriorating our our wildlife and we see it as it is today and our grandparents will say oh when we were younger we could see all these things and now we can’t see those things and then our next generation are going to see even less if we’re not going to start taking action and there’s not going to be anything for our children to see yet I’m sure you know about the the Great Barrier Reef how it’s the it’s deteriorating and the the wildlife is is dying and there’s not going to be anything for for anyone to

to enjoy and to to see because this is something that everyone should be able to to enjoy in life but unfortunately soon it won’t be if we don’t start making changes and did that come about because of what you you experienced at home was it just something that there’s clearly obvious from living in in Malta or is it um was there a certain event or anything that sort of sparked this idea the kind of when I was training for around Malta I had it was a 24 hour swim plan so 22 hours so there was going to be swimming at night and I had never really swam at night and on my first night swim I basically was I jumped in the sea with friends at night just kind of jumped in and out but never goggles cap you know a bag full of food ready to go for a long swim and I was really impressed by how amazing it really is just putting one hand in front of the other so quiet nobody around and it was really special and then that moment I swam

into a plastic bag I didn’t know that what it what it was at that point but kind of engulfed my head and I think I lost about five years of my life I got really really really big fright there and it was kind of like a sign for the ocean putting that bag there for me to be the voice of the of the sea to give it a voice to let them they’re there suffocating in plastic and they don’t have a voice we need to be their voice yeah that’s um that’s a big one isn’t it and I think I mean recently so in February I moved down to the coast and it’s um I think when you when you’re closer to nature and for me being a swimmer especially close to the sea I think you become a lot more aware of those things and you kind of want to protect them you want to make sure it’s there for a very long time your connection with the ocean grows the more you spend time in it the more your love and understanding of it grows and then when you’re

swimming you’ve got goggles on in your swimming you could see what’s underneath there you know um there are some places in Malta where we even find fridges and cookers and and all sorts of things that people dump into sea you know because it’s the easier way out yeah yeah that’s why and um and I’m guessing it’s probably even um you know more so because it’s such a it’s such a small island is it like there’s you know I know here in Australia it’s a massive country lots of free space and sometimes if you go out to the to the country or to the bush you’ll see mattresses you’ll see refrigerators dumped like you know by just next to the next to the trees and stuff so I imagine it’s um that’s the sea for if you guys in Malta yeah pretty much they they dumped them wherever really they try and kind of avoid the cost of spending the money to do it illegally so they kind of just drive with a truck and chuck it wherever it is the easiest

and um and so since the swim have you been able to return to the pool and get back into it or is there was there a bit of time out where just like I don’t want to look at the water or yeah I don’t want to spin the answer at all not really don’t want to look at the water but I haven’t swam yet in the sea um I went for like leisure swims with friends or whatever by the day by the beach but I don’t actually do any training for up to eight to nine weeks because I want my body to fully recover my mind mentally and my body needs to fully 100% recover before I start training for the next one because if you don’t let that happen then you are not being sustainable for this to be your thing for a long time I have a few swims that I really want to want to accomplish over the next few years and if I don’t and I jump back into it I feel like I’m recovered but am I really recovered I need to be every nook and crank and every muscle

has to be fully fully fully recovered before you start your next cycle of training yeah that’s it’s so important and I was listening to the Australian coach Dean Boxle who I don’t know if you saw him at the Olympics when Ariane Titmus won the 400 free but so he became pretty well known but he was talking about when he got back from the Olympics so here in Australia there’s a two week quarantine period where they basically go into isolation for two weeks and then they can go back into you know the normal world and he was saying that like with his swimmers there was no set date for them to return to the pool and for him to return to coaching they were just going to kind of play it by ear and just like they just needed time to relax and to just like yeah and just kind of let normal life happen and then when he started to sort of feel alright it’s time to get back into it they’re ready to go but because the Olympics is such a huge preparation and so much effort and that’s

four years or five years now of practice goes into it you need that down time you need to balance it out and for you for those upcoming swims are they things that you’ve mentioned to others or are these ones just in the back of your mind you know what you’re working towards they’re in the back of my mind I don’t think it will be me trying to break this world record again for the next two years but then after that I’ll definitely try to swim over 150 maybe 160 kilometers that’s what my next goal will be but in the meantime I have some cool swims that I want to do but I can’t really mention just yet but yeah something really different what people aren’t doing since I’ve never been done before so it’s really exciting what the future holds I wish you all the best for those swims and fingers crossed the ratification goes through for the world record and I don’t see why it wouldn’t so it’s been great having you on the podcast

and where can people find you on Instagram and some other places yeah they can check out my Facebook page on Facebook which is nilajuice or it’s nil.adjuice on Instagram maybe I’ll send you my links to the pages so you can upload it with the video yeah excellent we’ll put that on the on our website and make sure to take when this episode goes out so Neil thanks very much for being on the podcast and congratulations once again it’s a massive feat and I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve got in store I’d like to pry further into what you’ve got in mind but I know you’re not going to share that but you can invite me back when it’s announced yeah I definitely will yeah looking forward to it so yeah thanks so much Neil and all the best yeah thanks Brent thanks for having me all the way from Australia and a real pleasure talking to you and it’s a pleasure to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to

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Today, we are talking about the 5th and final Core Principle of Fast Freestyle: find your rhythm and timing.

00:36 The Dancing Part Of Freestyle
01:13 Kick Timing
04:35 Use Different Types Of Kick
10:33 Serape Effect
13:35 Hand Speed
14:07 Split Tempo
17:54 Drills
19:22 8 Week Faster Freestyle Course

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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 the Effortless Swimming Podcast. We’ve talked about the five core principles of fast freestyle in previous episodes. And we’re now up to core principle number five, so the very final one. So core principle number one was breathe, deep, and relax. Core principle number two is find your balance. Core principle number three is rock, return, and align. And then core principle number four is develop an effective catch and pull. Now the last one is find your rhythm and timing. So to me, this is like the art or the dancing part of freestyle. It’s putting it all together in a way that suits you well. Because as you know, there’s so many different types of freestyle. No two swimmers generally look the same. There’s differences, particularly among all the elite swimmers, there’s so many differences

in sort of style and technique. But they’ve got all of these fundamentals that we’ve covered in the past four episodes. So finding your rhythm and timing. This is really about making sure everything comes together. And the first thing here that we generally want to try and do is your kick timing and coordinating your down kick and your catch on the same side. So one way that this often gets explained is that you want to kick down on your, say, left foot as your right hand enters the water. So the opposite sides of the body. Now that’s 100% correct. You want to kick down on your left foot while your right hand enters. So that can be one way to think of the kick timing. But another way to think of it, and I find this a little bit easier to tune into, is you want to try and coordinate the downward kick on your left side with the catch on your left side. Particularly for sprinting, look, you’re probably not going to be able to feel it.

But for more middle to long distance swimming, you’re going to be able to feel for it. Because sprinting is a little bit different. The ratings up, the kick is fast, you’re not going to be able to feel for it there. But for anything that’s kind of like a 200 or 400 meter event or longer, then you can kind of tune into this sort of timing. So when you get the downward kick and the catch happening at the same time on the same side, that can really get things to work together. Because one thing that we see with swimmers that are a little bit less experienced, a little bit more in the beginner end, is that often the kick is working independently of the arms. So things aren’t sort of timed very well. But how we can swim fast for very little effort is if we can coordinate the timing of things. So one of the ways to do it is to get the kick timing to happen. So what happens here is that when the downward kick happens on your leg, so this is when

the foot moves from up near the surface to down. So when that happens, that downward flick of the foot kind of sends this energy through the leg up to the hip and sort of up to your core. And it gives that little bit of stabilization for you then to feel as though you’ve got something to pull against. Because when you’re in the water, obviously it’s liquid, there’s nothing stable there. You’re not grounded. But it’s that downward motion of the kick that transfers that little bit of sort of energy, gives that stabilization through the hip and the core to then feel like you can sort of pull against it. And so that’s when you see someone who’s just like really in tune and they’ve got this nice rhythm happening. That’s one important factor to that. So there’s a couple of ways you can go about developing that. And one way I find to sort of do that is to just focus on one side only to begin with. So the way you might approach it is you might do, let’s say it’s like 1050s with

20 seconds rest in between each one. And all you’re focused on is just trying to get the downward kick and the catch to happen on let’s only your right side to begin with. And when you do get it, you’ll feel it. You’ll know when it’s happening together. So you’ll notice a big difference in it. And when you’re not quite there, you’ll probably feel a little bit disjointed or things just aren’t coordinated very well. So that’s the first thing is the kick timing that we want to get. Now, the other thing that we look for here or the other thing we want to start to develop is your ability to use different types of kick. So we talked about this in corporates one number two and we said we talked about a two-beat, a four-beat and a six-beat kick. So I think it’s really useful, more so for middle to long distance swimmers, to be able to change the type of kick that they’re doing. So a six-beat kick you’d consider to be like a constant kick or

a continuous kick where there’s not really much of a pause happening there. It’s just like a steady kick and that’s what I’d say probably most people tend to use, especially when they first start. And it’s a good thing to be able to do because when you want to really pick up the speed, a six-beat kick’s gonna allow you to do it. It can be a little bit more tiring than a two or a four-beat kick, but it’s definitely a good thing to have, especially when you’re trying to pick up the pace and for particularly open water swimmers or competitive pool swimmers. It’s what you’re going to need to have to be able to bring home the last 50 or the last 100 or 200 of your event is a six-beat kick. You’re probably gonna want to increase it to a six-beat kick if you weren’t using it because it does allow you to swim at a higher top end speed. So six-beat kick’s important. And the reason it’s called six-beat is because it’s basically three kicks

to one arm stroke. So with both arm strokes, so left, right, there’d be six kicks happening in total. So that’s the first one. Now the other two kicks, a two and a four-beat kick, can be really good for middle to long distance swimming, especially in the open water or especially if you’re wearing a wetsuit when you’re competing or when you’re swimming. Now the reason for that is a two and a four-beat kick, obviously you’re kicking less and the kick can be what uses a lot of energy for people, where the heart rate really can cause the heart rate to come up. So with an easy two or four-beat kick, then you can sort of conserve your energy a lot better than if you’re using a six-beat kick. So a two-beat kick is probably the easier one to start with and that’s where you do one kick to one arm stroke. And it’s particularly easy in a wetsuit because you’ve got that buoyancy of the wetsuit and most people don’t kick much at all when they do have a wetsuit on.

So it’s easy to sort of just get that feel for a two-beat kick and the way that you can sort of time it is like what we mentioned before. You can either think of it as when your left hand enters, you could kick with your right down with your right foot, or you could think of it as when your right foot kicks, you want to go through the catch on your right hand side. So just sort of doing it that way. And there’s going to be a pause there. It’s going to be like left kick and pause, right kick and a pause, left kick. So it’s not that continuous, like a six-beat. Now a four-beat kick is one that I find can really take some practice to get used to. But it’s something that I’m a big fan of, especially for most of the adults that I work with. And I’ve really tried to develop this with a lot of the summers that I coached inside the stroke analysis membership where they send in their videos because for the majority of them, they’re doing some sort of triathlon or open water racing.

And a lot of them are either using like a two-beat or a six-beat. But this four-beat kick, I find for most people, can allay to be a little bit, have a slightly faster speed than a two-beat does. But it uses less energy than a six-beat kick. So it’s something that I’ve tried to develop with a lot of swimmers and we’ve found it to be quite beneficial. So a four-beat kick is basically, it’s almost like a hybrid of a two and a six-beat. So the way that you might think of it, it’s one kick on one arm stroke and then three kicks on the other arm stroke. So the timing, the way I think of this, if I’m doing it myself, it’s a one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. So there’s a little bit of a pause in the kick and that pause often comes in when we’re getting the breath. So for me, I would usually breathe on my left hand side. So I’ll have the one kick happen when I’m breathing to my left and my right hand’s out in front.

So I’m getting this kind of like, it feels like a bit of a glide. It’s kind of, it’s some right hand’s reaching forwards and I’m going one and then two, three, four. And then I’m back on my right hand out front, one, two, three, four. So the four-beat is a really good thing to try and develop, to give you another option there. Now, you’re not going to be typically, you’re not going to be fixed with using just a two-beat or just a four-beat or just a six-beat. It’s probably going to change. For me, when I’m training, it changes depending on what we’re doing. So if we’re doing like a descending set or a set like where we’re getting basically faster as we go through, let’s say it’s like a 10, 400 set. And we’re going the first four at like 60%, the next three of those at 70, then two at 80, and the last one at 90% or closer to max. Then I’m going to probably change the kick as I go. I’ll probably start with like a two or a four-beat kick

for those early ones. But then as I get towards the very last one, I’m going to be using, you probably like a combination of like a four-beat kick. And then I’m going to bring the six-beat kick for the last like a hundred, essentially. So it’s going to change depending on the speed and the effort that you’re doing. But it’s good to have those options there to give you a few more gears to use. And that stuff, it’s a little bit more advanced. So you might be listening to this and maybe you’re not quite there yet. You might want to work on those other couple of principles. But if you are there, it’s certainly something that can give you a lot more options when you’re swimming. Now the other part of this core principle is the Serapa effect and the hip drive. So the Serapa effect is kind of like this. The way I’d explain it is kind of like you’ve got this elastic band almost running from your rib cage on one side of your body,

diagonally through your core and it connects that with your pelvic girdle, kind of like your hips. And if you were to sort of look at it, it’s almost like this ribbon. So two bits connect to the hips or the pelvis and then it sort of comes up and it runs around your rib cage. So that’s this band of muscles that you use and they sort of work together. And so where you would often see this is like when someone’s pitching a baseball and they’ll really sort of, they’ll rotate their hips and their shoulders and they’ll load up this tension through that band of muscles. And then as they start to throw the ball, they’ll get this snap back effect and it’s those muscles shortening or contracting and they get a lot of power that’s derived from the hips. So that’s the Serapa effect and it’s in use in swimming as well. Now again, it’s one of those things that you can’t really, it’s very hard to see because it’s happening internally

but the way that you know it’s happening is when you see someone who’s got this beautiful sort of rhythm and timing to their stroke. So developing that Serapa effect is a little bit more advanced but it’s something that you can basically allow you to get a lot of power for very little effort compared to if you’re not getting it. Now the way that I would sort of think of this is am I getting it or not or can I feel for this Serapa effect? The way I picture it is it’s like when you’re reaching forwards and you’re on your side, you’re getting this lengthening through your, like your, almost like your hip flexor it feels like, through your core, up through your torso and kind of through your shoulder. It’s like this lengthening, like a rubber band expanding or getting stretched. And then as you go through the catch and the pull, you’ll feel this, you’ll feel it sort of contracting and those muscles will shorten and when you sort of time it well

and you don’t try and overpower it either, you just kind of let it find its rhythm. That’s when you feel that Serapa effect. So it’s this lengthening of your, of those muscles. Feels like a rubber band getting stretched and it’s got this tension built up and then it can release. So that’s what we’re going for. And there’s a couple of drills which I’ll talk about in a moment which can sort of help you with that but it is one of those things that’s a little bit more advanced and depending on sort of where you’re at, you may not wanna, you probably don’t need to think too much about that yet until you’re probably at around that 130 to 140 per 100 pace is probably when we’d start to consider that for most people. Now, the other one that we look at here and we touched on this in core principle number four is hand speed. So that’s slow to fast movements. So we talk a little bit about in core principle number four because it’s certainly a factor

but here we can start to consider it a little bit more. So that’s where when the hand enters and you’re reaching forwards, it’s gonna go through that part of the stroke a little bit slower than it will through the back. So it’s that gentle acceleration through the arm movement under the water that can help sort of get that timing right as well. The other thing that we can look at here is like a split tempo. So one way that you can increase your stroke rate

is to, it’s basically, your stroke rate is how long does it take you to complete a stroke or a stroke cycle? Now, one way that you can shorten that stroke cycle is to recover your arm over the top of the water a little bit faster. So while you will still like, you’ll still pull through the water a little bit quicker, we don’t wanna rush that part of the stroke too much because then you’re probably gonna feel like you’re spinning the wheels and you’re slipping a little bit. So what we can do instead to shorten that stroke cycle is to recover the arm over the top of the water a little bit faster. So let’s say for example, okay, your stroke rate is 60 strokes per minute, which would be one second for each arm stroke. So your left arm’s one, your right arm’s two, and so on. Now, if you were to shorten your stroke cycle, so let’s say it’s one second per stroke, let’s say you were able to come over the top of the water,

so one tenth per second quicker, that would mean that it’ll take you point nine of a second to do your left arm, point nine of a second to do your right arm. So you’ve effectively gone from, you’ve reduced your, or you’ve basically increased your stroke rate by what are we there, like 10%, so you’ve gone from like one second down to point nine. And all you’ve done is increase the speed at which your arm comes over the top of the water. Now you’re probably gonna find that your distance per stroke hasn’t decreased at all from that, maybe a little bit, but hardly at all. And so that’s one sort of factor that you’ve got to play with to then look at your stroke rate or your cadence.

The other thing with split tempo, there is that with a lot of swimmers and especially good distance swimmers, we see, and a good example of this is Katie Ledecky or Gregorio Paltrenieri is very good at this as well. You’ll see that they’re kind of faster on one side, like let’s say their left side, compared to their right side. So, and that develops this sort of, more of like a loping freestyle or galloping sort of freestyle. So that’s another thing that you may wanna consider developing in your stroke. So the way that I would teach it or picture it is it’s like on one side, you feel like you’re reaching for a little bit longer and you take a little bit more time on it. And then on the other side, so let’s say your right arm’s a longer one, your left one’s gonna sort of move through that a little bit quicker. It’s gonna start the catch a bit sooner and you’re not going to spend as much time in that reach phase of the stroke.

So it’s like, it’s almost imbalanced. And that’s not a bad thing. I’ve heard coaches say you should have an even stroke, like left side, right side’s exactly the same. But again, you just don’t see it at the elite level with all swimmers. With some, absolutely. Like if you look at Ariane Titmus, she’s a very even, very balanced swimmer and she breathes that way. But if you were to try and get Ledecky to do that, then it would really impact her stroke. She breathes to the one side only and she’s got that little bit more of a galloping stroke. So it just depends on what kind of swimmer you are, what sort of suits you best. So just that’s that individuality. That’s that dancing. It’s that arc part of the stroke and it’s about finding what works best for you. And so really good time to practice that stuff is in training, particularly in a set where you’re getting the chance to sort of push the pace a little bit. Now there’s a lot of drills that we’ve sort of got here

inside the membership to develop all this sort of stuff. Some that are quite unique. You might not have seen them before. One of my favorite ones for sort of developing this cross connection through the body and getting things to connect is fiddle-faddle drill. Now this is where you put one fin on. Let’s say it’s on your right foot and you’ll put a hand paddle on your left hand. So on opposite sides, you’ve got one paddle on, you’ve got one fin on. That can sort of help you feel this connection through the body or through the stroke. So I quite like fiddle-faddle drill. Another really simple one is freestyle with butterfly kicks or dolphin kicks. So you do one arm stroke with one dolphin kick and that really sort of gets you to feel for that hip drive and that connection through there. It kind of gets you to feel that Serapa effect a little bit. So there are two of the drills that sort of feature inside the training plan here and the membership.

And there’s a whole bunch of other ones as well that you can use and that are quite good. So I hope you enjoyed the five core principles of fast freestyle. The link here for the podcast, I’ll put a link where you can sort of have the summation of each of these principles and look at that for sort of reference there. And this is a good way to follow or a good structure to follow if you’re not sure where to start with your freestyle. Now the other thing that we released, I released this about three weeks ago, was the eight week faster freestyle program. And it follows the five core principles but it’s just got a really easy to follow structure to it. So week one, kind of work on that breathing and relaxation and it’s got a suggested warmup and then there’s three sessions to do to sort of help work on that part of the stroke. And then week two is the same thing but we progress through each parts of the stroke. So it’s what most of our members

are going through at the moment is this eight week faster freestyle course. So if you’d like to get that, it’s only available inside there for the swimming membership but it’s got all the drills and training plans there to develop your freestyle. And what we’re finding is that across that eight weeks you’re gonna find some extra speed, some extra time in each of those couple of weeks. And the thing that often happens is that people sometimes get overwhelmed. There’s so much to think about, there’s so much to focus on but with a sort of simple step by step process to follow, you don’t have to think too much about it. You can just keep it really simple. It’s really one thing a week. And then just as you go through that eight weeks probably you should buy the end of that. You’ll find yourself feeling pretty good and that speed will come up. I’ve got no doubt about that. So you can check out the eight week faster freestyle program

just inside the membership there if you’d like to. I’m also gonna put a 20% discount link to the membership if you are not a member. So I’ll put that coupon inside the show notes as well. So you can check that out wherever you listen to this. And yeah, I hope you enjoyed it. Again, just if this is useful to you and you know someone else who would enjoy it please share the podcast and I’d love it if you could leave a review on the iTunes store because it helps us get in front of more people. So thanks for listening. I’ll see you next week with another podcast episode. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post The 5 Core Principles Of Fast Freestyle (#5 – Find Your Rhythm And Timing) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s episode, we will be discussing the core principle number four of Fast Freestyle, which is developing an effective catch and pull.

01:40 No Need To Overpower The Catch
03:07 Teaching The Four Key Positions
04:00 Start Of The Catch
06:00 High Elbow Catch
07:35 Power Diamond Position
10:20 Exit Of The Stroke
11:36 YMCA Drill Progression
14:38 More Drills To Work On Your Catch
15:07 Setup Phase
16:35 Path Of The Hand
17:57 Hand Speed

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Join the Effortless Swimming membership
Effortless Swimming Freestyle Clinic

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 197 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. In the last couple of episodes, we’ve looked at the five core principles of fast freestyle. We looked at principle number one, which is breathe, deep and relax. Principle number two, which is finding your balance. And then the third one, which is rock, return and align. So if you haven’t listened to those episodes, go back and listen to them, because for me, this is the way that I like to analyze someone’s stroke and the way that we like to develop their stroke. And the core principle number four that we’re going to look at today is developing an effective catch and pull. And to me, this is really one of the most important things that we want to do once we’ve got our balance sorted and we’re comfortable in the water.

If you’ve got a good catch and pull, then that is going to generate most of your propulsion. So this is why we focus on this quite a bit. And it can be one of the more challenging things to develop as a swimmer. But with the right things to focus on and the right knowledge, I’ve seen so many people improve this and improve their times as a result of it. So in this episode, we’re going to look at what are those key components of an effective catch and pull. Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re not a member, then I just want to let you know about our Effortless Swimming membership, which has got videos for all this stuff. It’s got all of our drills and it’s got all of this laid out in a way which you can follow it and you can develop this as part of your stroke. So you can find that on our website, EffortlessWing.com, if you’d like to check it out any further. Now with developing an effective catch and pull.

So to me, the catch, pull and press is like the 80, 20 of your stroke. It’s that 20% of your stroke that can really make 80% of the difference when it comes to your speed and propulsion. And this phase of the stroke is just all about what’s happening with your arms under the water. And sometimes when people are trying to improve their catch, one of the things that we notice is that they try to get to some positions that are quite unnatural and as a result, uncomfortable for them. So when people think of a high elbow catch, sometimes they think of that as being the elbow should be near the surface and you’re trying to get your hand and forearm completely vertical. So a really kind of awkward position for most adults at least. Now, that’s not sustainable and it’s not strong. So what I’d like to encourage you to do if you’re listening is to get a good catch. It doesn’t mean you need to get to positions that are going to hurt your

shoulders and that are going to feel really uncomfortable as you’re going through them. So there’s no need to overpower the catch and there’s no need to try and swim like Ian Thorpe or Michael Phelps or anything like that. We just want to get a catch that’s effective and that’s the end result. And for most people that I’ve worked with, I’d say with their current mobility. So if you do have some limitations there, yeah, it’s going to make it a bit harder. But for most people, they can still get a pretty reasonable catch with their existing range of motion. Now, one of the things that we started to teach a couple of years ago was the four key positions to a good catch and pull. Because when we’re working with them in clinics, we found that it was difficult for people to remember the different positions that they should be in throughout the stroke. And when we were teaching it, there was no sort of clear cut way for

people to remember where they should be through each of the phases of the stroke and people were often overthinking it. So what we did is we started to teach the four key positions. And this is something that I came up with after working with so many people at our clinics. And I think it’s a really good way to simplify the catch and the pull and to remember the positions that really make a difference. Because if you can get into these four positions as you are swimming freestyle, if you can get close to them, then that’s all you really need to do. So those four key positions are number one, it’s the start of your catch. And this is when you’re at full extension out in front of your body. So it’s when one arm is out in front. And what we want to have here is that the fingertips should be about the same depth as your underarm. And there’s a very slight downwards angle through your arm. So it’s almost straight in the water.

So your hand, your forearm, your upper arm, it’s almost straight in the water. But there’s just a very slight downwards angle. This is the most efficient position to be in when you’re reaching forwards with your arm and this is when you’re going to be able to start the catch really easily. Now the mistake that most people make here at the start of the catch is that they’re either too high in the water or they’re too low. So some people will have their fingertips up near the surface, they’re palm facing in front of them. And we call that putting the brakes on. It’s going to slow you down because it’s increasing the drag and it’s going to take you that little bit longer to get your fingertips to point to the bottom of the pool, which is what we need to happen as we go through the catch. The other thing that people sometimes do here is they go too deep. Some people will be well below their shoulder or underarm depth with their hand.

And again, it just increases the drag and it doesn’t give you as much room to set up the catch. So if you can get the starting catch position right and think of that as when one arm’s out in front, you’re rotated on your side a little bit and your fingers ideally should be below your wrist, slightly below your elbow. If you can get that right, it can make a world of difference to the rest of the catch and pool. Because if you don’t set yourself up correctly then it can be quite a challenge to make a change or to get a good catch and pool essentially. So this is why we harp on this quite a bit in clinics. We make sure people are in the right position. So that’s the first position, start of the catch. Now the catch movement is basically from there to when the hand and forearm moves downwards and the fingertips point down. So it’s the part, it’s all out in front of the head, it’s when the head and forearm moves downwards.

Now the second position that we teach here is the high elbow catch. And so with this second position, the way that we define what’s a high elbow catch, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not elbow near the surface. So it’s not like a shallow catch because, again, I can put pressure on the shoulders. Sometimes it can mean you sort of slip through the water. A high elbow catch, we define it as if we’re looking side on at someone swimming freestyle, if we were to draw a line from their shoulder to their fingertips when their fingers have sort of finished tipping downwards, we’d want to see the elbow above this imaginary line. Now, obviously that’s a little bit hard to visualize when you’re listening on a podcast. But you could think of that as it’s like an elbow forwards position. Or we want the hand and the forearm to be somewhat vertical when it’s in this position here. So a high elbow catch. Now, it doesn’t need to be extreme.

You don’t need to have your arm at almost 90 degrees here, if you’re thinking of like an elite level catch. Because most adults that I work with and myself included, we just don’t have that range through the shoulders from sometimes punching over, sometimes from riding a bike a lot, sometimes from sitting down. So we don’t often have that range through the shoulders to be able to get like a 90 degree catch or a completely vertical catch position. So all we need to do is be somewhere in that high elbow range. So that elbow somewhere above that imaginary line that we draw from your shoulder to your fingertips. So that’s the second one is a high elbow catch. The third position that we want to get to from there is what we’d call the power diamond. Now, this is when, again, if we’re looking from the side of someone swimming, we’d want the shoulder, the elbow and the hand to pretty much line up on top of each other.

So and the reason that we want that is that would mean that you’ve got all that surface area of your entire arm basically pressing straight back behind you. So shoulder, elbow and hand completely aligned underneath there. Now, it’s not going to happen exactly that way. And if you look at sprinters and slow it down, it’s a little bit less that way. But certainly for distance swimmers, we see that pretty much being the case for most of them. So that’s what the power diamond looks like from the side. But from the front, if someone was swimming towards me, what I’d be looking for there is that when their hand is passing underneath their shoulder, we’d want that arm to make a triangle on the side. So it would look like a triangle on the side. So that means the elbows out to the side, the fingertips are pointing down. Now, if we had both arms in that position, it would look like a diamond, hence the power diamond.

And the reason we call it the power diamond is this is a really strong position for you to be in. So we don’t often want to overpower the catch. When you can apply a little bit more force is when the hand is close to under the shoulder, because that’s a much more comfortable position for the arms and the shoulders to be in. So that’s the power diamond. Now, the mistake a lot of people tend to make here is that they’re too deep and too straight. So there’s no diamond happening there at all. Their arms just completely straight in the water or close to it. So if you can get those elbows out to the side of it, keep the fingers pointing down, then that’s when you tend to get a better hold of the water. And there’s a drill that I quite like here that I’ll sometimes give to swimmers if they’re pulling completely straight with their arms. And it’s just called power diamond kick. And that’s where you’d ideally put fins on, put a snorkel on.

And you’re kicking with both arms in that power diamond position. So your hands would be underneath your shoulders, your elbows would be almost flared out to the side. And you just kick in that position, get a feel for what it’s like to be there. And that way, when you start to develop that awareness around the position and how it should feel in the water, you can then start to get into that position a little bit when you’re swimming. So that’s the power diamond. And for a lot of the feedback I’ve got from people who weren’t aware of that position, you didn’t know about it and then they’ve started to make that changes. A lot of times people really start to feel like they hold the water or feel the water when they start to focus on that, if they weren’t aware of it beforehand. So that’s the feedback I’ve got from quite a lot of people, particularly those that have gone through the five day catch challenge.

Now the last position number four is the exit. So the hands should press back just past the hip, keep the palm of the hand facing behind you pretty much the entire way through the stroke. It can turn into the body at the very last moment to help the hand exit the water. But ideally just keep that palm facing behind you all the way until the very end when it can just turn into the body. So that’s the exit. The other thing we want to have happen here with the exit of the hand and the arm is the elbow should be the first thing to exit. Some people will push too far back, where they’re almost pushing all the way back to their knee and the arm is completely straight, the elbow is kind of locked out and sometimes they get a little bit stuck there and you don’t get much out of the last part of your stroke. There’s not a whole lot of propulsion available there but that said, we don’t want to finish it short. So still press back past the hip, don’t come out before the hip

but just make sure that you’re not pushing back too far and putting too much emphasis or power through the very last part of your stroke. We want to finish in the right spot, we want to keep that palm facing behind you but like most things you can go too far with it. So they’re the four key positions which is the start of the catch, the high elbow, the power diamond and then the exit of the stroke. Now knowing those four positions is great but then being able to get into those positions is even better. So we came up with a drill progression called the YMCA drill progression which has got three drills that will take you through those four positions. So the very first drill is called YMCA drill and in that drill you’re basically kicking for five seconds in each position. So you’ll kick for five seconds at the start of the catch, five seconds in your high elbow, five seconds in your power diamond and then five seconds with your hands at the exit

and this is with both arms and we’d usually do this with fins on and with a snorkel on. Now the reason for this is similar to what I mentioned earlier is we want to get familiar with and get the feel for what it’s like to be in those positions perfectly because in this drill, everyone, no matter how bad a swimmer you are, how new you are to the sport, everyone can get into these positions with enough practice and enough refinement and then if you’re familiar with what it feels like to be in those positions you’re going to start to make those connections when you swim. So that’s the YMCA drill and again this is something we came up with a couple of years ago just to simplify the catch and the pull and we’ve had a lot of success with this and that’s why we continue to use it and we do it at clinics and in that YMCA drill and if you haven’t seen it you can look it up on YouTube, I made a video about the YMCA drill

if you haven’t seen it, so just look up Effortless Swimming YMCA drill and that will come up on YouTube if you haven’t seen it and then we’ve got this full progression inside the five corporates who was training in the membership and in this YMCA drill, one of the things that people find a bit uncomfortable I guess is positions number two and three. So as you’re going through these four positions, the start of the catch that’s easy to hold, it’s kind of like your front kick drill and then as you move into the high elbow position where you’re kicking with both arms out in front in like a high elbow catch you start to feel a bit of resistance on the arms and then when you get down to the power dome you’re feeling that oncoming water really pushing your arms back and it’s a lot of resistance or a lot of drag created there and so people go, oh that’s not very comfortable and so they let the hands move back but if you can just put up with that resistance

that gets created in positions two and three as you go through the YMCA drill that’s really going to help you develop that feel for those positions and then the exits fairly easy then you come back underneath and start again so that’s the YMCA drill then the next one is basically like a one-arm version of it so you’ve got one arm in front and the one arm is going to go through those positions except you will just kind of pull through at the end and then the last drill is called YMCA Exhalerate plus a stroke so you’re kind of going through the one-arm version of it and then a full stroke and that’s in order to basically make that connection from the drill to the full stroke so that’s one drill progression that I’ll give people if they’re working on their catch now the other drill progression is a couple of drills that I’m a big fan of we go through slow doggy scoop, doggy scoop, single-arm scoop and then there’s another one called catch kick

where you’re basically just kicking with your arm in the high elbow catch position so again they’re on the membership if you’re looking for them it depends on the swimmer I’ll either give them one of those two drill progressions to help with it now there are another couple of things that help here with your catch and pull and I’ve found most people aren’t taught this when they either learn to swim or if they’re getting lessons and that sort of thing so the first thing is that the catch phase of the stroke shouldn’t be the power phase so as you’re going from full extension out the front to moving the hand forearm down think of that as the setup phase so that movement is overhead where it’s out in front of the head and so we’re not that strong through that movement compared to the other part of the stroke as you’re pulling down underneath your body so we don’t need to overpower that section and secondly if you do force it too much in the catch

you’re not going to move as well so it helps to be a little bit more relaxed to be able to get a high elbow catch position because if you try and muscle that it’s a lot more difficult to do that so the catch is the setup phase then the pull and the press so that sort of last two thirds of it that’s a bit more the power phase that’s when you can apply a bit more power so if I see that someone’s really like they’re not moving well through the water it looks like they’re slipping a little bit one of those causes can be they’re overpowering the front end of the stroke so when you jump in the water next time one thing that you might try is just easy through the catch phase then just increase the power a little bit once you’ve moved through the catch and just see if you can notice a difference there now the second thing is the path of the hand so I know that a while ago, a couple of decades ago they used to teach quite a long S-shaped curve

as your hand’s moving through the water and this would sometimes cause people to go too far out to the side come too far back in and just have too much side to side movement through the catch and the pull so the path of the hand that we’ll normally see at the elite level is it’s like a long S there’s going to be a little bit of out sweep in the beginning meaning the hand comes away from the center just a little bit and then it will come in towards the center so there’s a little bit of an in sweep so it’s like a really long S-shaped curve and the other way that we’ll describe this is it’s like tracing the outside line of your body so if you’re looking above at someone swimming the hand will almost trace the outside line of their body so let’s say the left hand’s pulling through it’s going to come out a little bit wider as it passes the shoulders and then as it goes past the shoulder it’s going to come in a little bit

and sort of trace the side part of the body there so a couple ways to think of it and this will sometimes feel as though you’re almost pulling through straight now the hand’s going to naturally curve it’s naturally going to sort of find the point of almost like most resistance almost pressure if you do it correctly so even if you feel as though you’re pulling straight you’ll have this natural curve which is kind of what we’re going for now the third thing here that can really help improve your catch and pull is the hand speed so your movements and swimming should be slow to fast meaning that particularly at the front as you’re reaching forwards as you’re going through the catch you can go through that part of the stroke a little bit slower than you do through the last part of the stroke as you’re pressing back past the hip so what we want to see is a bit of exhalation from the catch through to the pull and then the press phase at the back there

so if you slow it down that little bit out the front when the hand’s reaching forwards and going through the catch and then you speed it up a little bit as you go through the pull and the press then you’ll typically feel like you’re holding the water better you won’t slip as much and you’ll just have a better hold of the water the whole way through and that will generally lead to better distance per stroke so how far you’re traveling with each stroke that you take and that’s a really important factor to swimming faster so slow to fast is what we’re usually looking for and even with sprinters someone sprinting a 50 freestyle they’ve still got that slow to fast it’s not as obvious and they’re obviously not going as slow through the reach and the catch they’re pretty quick through it still but no matter what distance you’re doing no matter what speed you’re doing there’s always that element of slow to fast so it’s not like you’re turning the pedals on a bike

at a constant speed no, it’s a little bit different than that so slow to fast can really make a difference there and like all the other things that we’ve talked about you can go too far with it so don’t overdo it where you’re like really slow at the front and then you’re really ripping hard and fast at the back no, just it’s like a dance you know, you wanna find that rhythm you wanna be able to wanna be able to just do that within reason so that’s the catch in the pool developing an effective catch and pull and if you haven’t already been through the five day catch challenge that we’ve got I’ll put a link in the show notes here and to me that’s the best 10 bucks that you can spend to work on your catch and pull and we have had so many people take sometimes like a lot more than five seconds off their 100 meter pace going through it that’s just gonna give you a really simple plan to follow and give you some structure around developing the stuff

and I go into quite a bit of detail with it and it’s just and you don’t need to do it within the five days you can do it over the course of a week or two weeks whatever you’d like to do there but go and check out the five day catch challenge if you haven’t already been through it so I’ll put that in the show notes so that’s corporate swim number four the very last one is about rhythm and timing it’s like putting it all together and being able to dance when you’re swimming so if you look at a good swimmer everything’s well timed, everything’s efficient and so that’s what corporate swim number five is about which we’ve got coming up in the next episode so thanks very much for listening if you did enjoy this episode I’d love it if you could leave an iTunes store of you and it just helps us get seen by more people and I’ll see you in the next episode thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster

more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

The post The 5 Core Principles Of Fast Freestyle (#4 – Develop An Effective Catch And Pull) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Today, we are talking about the third core principle of Fast freestyle which is Rock, Return And Align.

00:36 Rock v.s. Rolling
02:15 Return
03:24 Correct Entry
06:08 Align

Join the 5 Day Catch Challenge:
Join the Effortless Swimming membership:
Effortless Swimming Freestyle Clinic

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to this episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. Today we are talking about the five core principles of fast freestyle, which is a concept that I came up with a couple of years ago to give a bit of structure on how we like to analyze and then develop freestyle technique. And the last two episodes we’ve looked at core principle number one and core principle number two, which is breathe deep and relax and then finding your balance. Now core principle number three, which we’re going to get into today is rock, return and align. So I’ll explain what I mean by those three terms. So rock means we want to rock side to side instead of rolling side to side. So a lot of times people think that they should roll or rotate up to 90 degrees like

all the way on their side when they’re swimming freestyle, but it’s just simply not the case. When you look at elite swimmers, they’re really just rocking gently side to side. Typically if you measure it front on, the most they’ll rotate through their shoulders is about 30 to 40 degrees at a maximum. Now there are exceptions. There are some swimmers that will rotate a little bit more than that, but it’s generally in that range and typically it’s about 35 degrees, give or take a little bit. So you don’t need to roll all the way onto your side. And if you do, you’re probably slowing yourself down because if you were to rotate to 90 degrees completely on your side, it’s going to take you a lot longer to get back to the other side. So it’s going to reduce your stroke rate. It’s going to make it hard to get the rating up to a place where you probably want it to be. The other thing with that too is that all the way on your side, it’s very hard

to get a good catch because it can put your shoulder in a position where it’s quite difficult to get a high elbow catch, which is one of the important parts of the stroke that we want to develop. So when you do only rock to 30 to say 40 degrees, then it’s much easier to get a better catch with that. So that’s the rock part of the rock return and align. Now the return part of this is the recovery over the top of the water. And the reason we’ve named it return instead of recovery is because we want to be a little bit purposeful with that arm coming back over the top of the water. Because if we’re too lazy with it, if there’s no purpose to it, if it’s just a little bit of a passenger along the way, then you’re missing out on an important part of the stroke. So when you do come over the top of the water, you’ve got basically you’ve got that momentum of the arm swinging forwards and you’ve got gravity working for you.

So if you can bring the arm over and return it out in front of you in a way where there’s that little bit of purpose to it, you’re going to get full use of the momentum and the gravity and you’re going to get this nice drive into the water where you can then reach out and extend and get that little bit of drive when the hand enters and you’re reaching forwards. Where the opposite of that would be if you’re just very, if you’re too slow with it and too gentle with the entry, then you’re going to miss out on those two things. So that’s why we’ve called it returning your arm over the water. Now the other factor there and something that we’ve really seen in our five day catch challenge that’s really made a big difference with people is that when you do return your arm over the water, we want to make sure that we enter correctly and the correct entry is it should be fingertips first. So the finger is the first thing to go in and the elbow is above the water.

So if we’re looking, let’s say side on above the water, if I was coaching and I was walking along the pool deck watching someone, the way I’d want to see their hand or their arm entering the water, it would be like a triangle, their arm would make a triangle. So the fingertips would be in first, the elbow would be slightly elevated and then that way when you enter with your fingers first and then you can just straighten the arm, two things will happen. One, you’re going to remove a lot of the bubbles as the hand then extends forwards in the water. The other thing that we often hear with a really nice entry is that we hear this little slap of the elbow, actually hear the elbow sort of slapping upon entry, whereas I used to think that you should spear the water. So the hand should, everything should follow the fingertips in. So your hand, your wrist, your forearm, your elbow, I thought everything should sort

of spear in and follow it behind it, but that’s not really what happens. It’s actually just as long as we get that entry position right, then the arm will basically just straighten and you’ll hear that elbow slap down. And as I was saying earlier with the five day catch challenge, that’s the first thing that we work on. I’ve had so many people, more than pretty much any other part of that five day challenge, had so many people say this actually made a huge difference to my times and we’ve had people take two, three, four seconds off their 100 meter pace just by changing their entry. And I think the reason for that is a lot of people either entering too close to their head or too far out in front. And when they, when they do that, they collect a lot of air. They bring this air down with them into the water. And so they haven’t got much water to pull against. So it’s just like, it’s a lot of air bubbles basically as you’re going through

the pool. That’s the first thing that happens. And I think the second thing as well is sometimes they just will rush the catch. They won’t get that entry forwards where you’re actually reaching forwards in front of you before you start the catch. So they’re kind of shortening their stroke and they’re not quite getting that nice sort of glide or distance per stroke. But when they make that change, they get the entry right. Then that’s where we often find a big improvement in time. So I just wanted to mention that because we’ve seen so many people just have big results with that change. Now the last one, so we’ve got rock return and a line. Okay, rock we’ve talked about. Gentle rocking side to side, 30 to 40 degrees rotation through the shoulders at a maximum. The next one is return. So bring down over the top enter with a little bit of purpose. The third one is a line. And that means that when you’re reaching forwards,

so once the hand’s entered and you’re reaching forwards, we want to align the arm and the hand with the shoulder. Now you might have heard me talk about this before as swimming on train tracks. So whenever that hand enters in front of you and you’re reaching forwards, we want to follow the train tracks. So these imaginary train tracks in line with your shoulders. Now it doesn’t mean that when you pull through that you’re pulling straight through on the train tracks. We’re not referring to that. It’s just the reach forwards part of your stroke once the hand has entered the water. So we want to align with that. And the reason for that is if you do stay aligned there and your hand and your arm, it’s all in line with your shoulder when you’ve finished reaching forwards. If you look from above, you’re in such a long streamlined position that you’re gonna really minimize the drag that you’re gonna reduce the drag compared to if you were crossing over the center

or if you were too wide. So we see with really nice free styles that 90% of them are typically following these train tracks. Now, yeah, there’s some exceptions. You look at Paltranieri and look at a couple of other swimmers that do cross over, but the majority of them are straight. So that’s what we wanna aim for. So if you get those three things right, then that’s gonna set you up really well to then work on the next part of the stroke, which is the catch and the pull. But we really want to make sure we get in the right rotation. We’re coming over with that arm in the right way and then that we’re aligned out in front. Now inside the Effortless Swimming membership, we’ve got a couple of drills. We’ve got a recommended warmup for developing this part of the stroke and some of the drills that we do are side kick. So kick on side, usually wearing fins, I find is quite useful. Now this kick on side or side kick drill,

that’s a great one. It’s simple, but it really practices that what we call like the base position. So the base position of when you’re finished reaching forwards out in front. The other hand is by your side and you’re rotated to about, let’s say like 35 degrees on your side. So we do a little bit of that side kick drill and there’s a lot of nuance to that drill as well. Like in the video we talk about making sure you get your opposite shoulder out of the water because that’s how we need to be in order to get the arm to recover over properly. So we’ve got side kick drill. We’ve got kickboard press down drill, which is like a recovery drill just to make sure that you’re coming over the top of the water easily and relaxed. And then we’ve also got some front kick drill just to work on that alignment, that swimming on the train tracks. So that’s core principle number three. So I’ll put a link here or in the podcast where you’ll be able to see our five core principles

and get a little bit more details on them. And then if you’d like to get the videos and the drills and some structure to developing these, check out the Swing membership where we’ve got a lot more details with each of these things. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I’ll be back very soon with core principle number four. Now we get to work on the really exciting stuff, which is the catch and the pull. This is the 80, 20 of the stroke, that 20% of the stroke that can make 80% of the difference. And this is where we see some really big improvements and big gains with increasing your propulsion, which is that other element of speed. So these first couple principles are really just about minimizing drag. The next one is about increasing propulsion. 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 5 Core Principles Of Fast Freestyle (#3-Rock, Return And Align) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.