Effortless Swimming

In today’s episode we’re looking at Core Principle Number 2. This principle is all about minimizing drag. Here are the three things that we covered on this principle.

01:46 Proud Posture
05:06 Taut Core
9:00 Effective Kick

The 5 Core Principles Of Fast Freestyle:
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Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Welcome to this episode of the Effortless Swimming podcast. Today’s episode, we’re looking at core principle number two, which is find your balance. So a couple of years ago, we came up with the five core principles of fast freestyle, and this was a bit of a structure on how we analyze freestyle and how we like to teach it. And following this sort of structure gives you a bit of a roadmap on ways you can sort of check what you need to work on with your stroke, and it doesn’t always sort of follow this pathway for everyone, but it does give you a pretty good guide of those things that you want to have in place first, like an order of operations. Now last week, we looked at the first principle, which is breathe deep and relax. And there we basically just looked at making sure you’re breathing correctly, you stay relaxed as you do it because you move so much better, and you can, you can swim so much easier when you are relaxed and when you’re breathing

comfortably. Now in the second principle, find your balance. This is all about minimizing drag. So the two ways you can generally swim faster is to minimize or reduce your drag and increase propulsion. So put simply, it’s those two things, adjusting those two things, it’s going to make you a faster swimmer. And if you were, let’s say you had the best catch in the world, and you were the fittest person in the world, but your hips and legs were dropping down a long way, it would be so hard to overcome that drag that gets created there, that wouldn’t matter that you had the best catch and that you were super fit, because you’re going to be quite limited with the speed that you can swim at because of that poor body position with the amount of drag that gets created there. So really the, you know, the most important thing we’ve got to do first and foremost is look to minimize drag. So when it comes to finding your balance, we want to

have our head, hips and heels near the surface. So when I’m coaching there, the three things that I want to see at the surface or near the surface and basically just being horizontal in the water. Now, the three things that we sort of like to cover here in this principle is number one, proud posture. Number two, a taut core and number three, an effective kick. So with the first one, a proud posture, we really need to have this in place first to help us be horizontal and be balanced in the water. Because if you’ve got poor posture, and we mentioned this briefly last week, but with poor posture, think of that as rounded and hunched over, then you’re not going to breathe very easily and you’re not going to sort of be in a very strong position to go through your catch and through your pull. So we need to have good posture. And so I would picture that as someone standing tall, so they’re long through their spine, they’ve

got their chest out or chest forward, or you could think of that as like a lifted sternum and they keep their neck long. So almost like a sort of soldier standing tall or any Jones would say it’s like a superhero or Superman posture. That’s how you want to be in the water. And the other factor there is you need to make sure you’re looking in the right direction. So a lot of people get taught to look straight down when they swim. But I find sometimes this can cause people to bury their heads too deep. So with majority of people that we coach, we want to have them have the top of the head just out of the water. And the eye is looking about one or two meters in front of them. So a head position looking at a maximum about 45 degrees forwards there. So not directly forwards, we’d consider that 90 degrees if you’re looking straight out in front of where you’re going. So 45 degrees is about half that. Now there’s nothing wrong with looking straight

down, but just make sure you’re not burying the head too deep. But I think for the majority of adults, they should be looking slightly forwards. Because when we look from the side, if I’m analyzing someone’s stroke and we look at their overall sort of posture, we want to see this kind of continual line. If we look at the like their spine, we want to see this sort of it’s not a straight line, but it’s like a gradually rising. If we start from the hips or the tailbone, it should be just a gradually rising line as we go through their upper chest, up to their shoulders and then up to their head. We don’t want to have this sort of big kink in the back of the neck when the eye is looking too far forwards. Or conversely, we don’t want to have this sort of nice, slowly rising line through the spine and then it goes down when we’re looking at their head or the neck because they’re looking too far down. So this very gradually rising line, if

we’re looking side on at someone swimming. So that’s the first thing is proud posture. Now the other thing there is when we do it, make sure that you’re not really stiff and tense with it. So when I go through the clinics with people and we’re working on the posture, sometimes people, they go a little bit too upright and a little bit too stiff. And that means that they don’t move as well. So in swimming, the key to moving well is to relax. So with your posture, get in a good posture, but don’t go really rigid or don’t try and overdo it too much because it’s going to impact how well you move. Now the second one is a taut core. And this is something that is a little bit sometimes harder to show because it’s all happening internally and it’s not as easy to sort of see when we’re looking at it. But the way I would sort of picture this, it’s like you’re lightly bracing your stomach. So if someone was going to just give

you a light hit in the stomach, a light punch in the stomach, you’d just, you’d brace your core lightly. That’s kind of how we want to hold our core when we’re swimming. Now the other thing we’ve got to do as part of that is we’ve got to squeeze our, or squeeze, like engage your glutes, you’ve got to switch those on a little bit. So it’s kind of like you’re squeezing your butt cheeks together very lightly. And that will keep the midsection of your body quite straight and quite taut. And the best way that I sort of heard this described was you want to swim from the inside out. And what they mean and what that means is inside out, meaning like your core and your hips, that’s the center. And if you’ve got a little bit of, a little bit of tautness or a little bit of tension through there, then you can connect everything up, your extremities, your legs, your arms, everything can get connected through that midsection. But if that’s loose and if that’s

like a wet noodle and it moves around everywhere and there’s no form to it, then you’re not going to be very well connected through the stroke and things are going to be acting independently. So we need to make sure we get this taut, this taut core. So that’s that’s the second one. And it can feel like a bit of a challenge if you’re not there yet, but with enough practice and sort of focus on it, generally we find it takes a couple of sessions to really get that happening. But even recently, like I’ve had a lot of swimmers who I’ve worked on this with inside our stroke analysis membership and and it’s improved their body position significantly, especially the engaging the glutes, switching those on a little bit.

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Now the last one here is just an effective kick. So depending on like what type of swimmer you are, depending on what you’re training for, your kick might not be about getting propulsion. It might be more about balance and timing. Now, if you’ve got a good kick, you’ve got nice sort of loose ankles and you can point your toes really well, then you might be looking to get some propulsion from your kick or if you’re doing say shorter events. But if you like a lot of the adults that I teach and that I coach that maybe don’t come from a swimming background and they might be doing triathlon or open water swimming, wearing a wetsuit. Look, you’re probably not going to get a huge amount from your kick. So what we need to do there is make sure we’ve got an effective kick. So there’s a couple factors that we or a couple of things we want to get in place to make the kick effective. And so first of all, we don’t want to slow you down.

And one of those things that can slow you down is having your toes pointed to the bottom of the pool because that’s going to increase the drag. The drag is created by your foot. So we generally want to keep the toes pointed mostly behind you within within reason. Depending on what your ankle mobility is is like. The other thing is we want to make sure that the the kick is reasonably reasonably small. So I like to picture. Imagine you’ve got a bucket at home, just like a typical bucket that you’d have in the garden, something twice that size, roughly. That’s roughly the size that your kick should stay in. So if you think about kicking in the bucket, that’s about the size of how big your kick should be. Because if you let your legs come much wider than that, then you’re going to be increasing your drag. And that’s going to to slow you down. So keep the kick relatively, relatively small, not tiny, but relatively small. Now, the other thing is that we

obviously want the heels to break the surface every couple of kicks. But the one that

the one that I find can really make a difference to people is we want to make sure that we’re kicking from the hips and not the knees. And you might have heard this before, but the difference there is if you’re kicking from the knees, it’s kind of like you’re running or like you’re riding a bike in the water. There’s just a whole lot of bend coming from the knees. And particularly on the upward kick, right? So that’s when the foot is coming upwards towards the surface of the water. If that’s happening, all from a bend in the knee and not from a lifting lifting a leg from the from the hip or from your like your glute, then you’re probably kicking mostly from the knees. So you need to make sure on some of the upward kicks that the legs coming up somewhat straight being lifted from the hip or from the from your glute. And if you look at this slowly, we’ve got some footage inside our membership in this in the corporates will number two

videos where we go into a bit more detail with this where you’ll see that the leg with a good kick, the leg will come up almost straight on some upward kicks lifting from the from the hip. And then on the downward kick, that’s where the knee will bend. And with that bend in the knee, it flicks the foot down. And that’s where you get this nice little flick of the foot. And you get that little bit of propulsion. So how you kick can certainly make a difference with not only your body position, but just making sure that it doesn’t that you’re not slowing yourself down with with how you’re kicking there. Now, there’s obviously things like a two and a four and a six beat kick. We don’t normally worry about that or look at that yet. We keep that to corporates will number number five, because it is a little bit more of an advanced technique to try and change your the type of kick that you’re using. So first and foremost, we just want to

make sure that we’ve got an effective kick. And so inside of our membership in the five core principles training, there’s a couple of drills that we use, like hand behind back drill to help with posture. We use the front kick rotation drill just to work on keeping that core sort of taught and switched on and keeping that together as you rotate side to side. And then we’ve got a couple of kicking drills with with fins on. We’re working like kicking front on your back on your left on your right. So in multiple directions to develop your kick, and then just a little bit of swimming to work on keeping the posture in place and keeping the core switched on and that the glutes switched on. So and with that in place, you typically find that you can do pretty well with your balance in the water. Now there are some other things that will sort of factor in there if you are still sinking after that, including sort of how you’re breathing or how

you’re going through the catch in the pool. But this can sort of set you up really well. And so in the next couple of principles, we start to work on those those other things. So I’ll be back in another few days with the next episode on core principle number three. And if you didn’t enjoy this and you are looking for a bit more detail and a plan to follow to develop this, then you can check out the effortless swimming membership. That’s where we’ve got all of this in detail with the drills and the suggested warm up that you could do as part of your session to start to make these changes in your stroke. So I hope you enjoyed this core principle number two, find your balance. I’ll see in another couple of days with 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 (#2 Find Your Balance) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

01:45 Use Your Diaphragm
02:29 Breathing Exercises Out Of The Water
03:42 Box Breathing
04:04 Relax Your Chest And Upper Back
05:38 Having The Right Posture
06:52 Letting Go When You Exhale

The 5 Core Principle Of Fast Freestyle:
Join the 5 Day Catch Challenge:
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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.

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. In this week’s episode, I want to cover the five core principles of fast freestyle, because I realized that I hadn’t actually done a podcast or done a video on our five core principles. And this is like the foundation of how we teach technique. And this is really the structure that I like to follow when I’m either analyzing someone’s stroke or giving feedback. Because if you’ve got some sort of framework or structure to follow, it keeps things a whole lot more simple, and actually gives you a bit of a framework to follow to even for yourself to be able to look at what opportunities are there in your stroke to find some extra speed and make it easier. So of the five core principles, I’ll put a link to where you can find these on our website. It’ll give you a bit of a break down. And then for more details to go into more details and give you the drills and the ways to improve all

of these things. There’s a training for each of these modules inside of our membership. So if you remember, you’ll be able to see that inside. So the first principle, number one is breathe deep and relax. Everything really comes back to breathing. If not breathing, then nothing else is really going to matter. And we see it really with beginners where if they’re tense and they’re panicked, then they never really move well and they’re never never able to relax in the water. So if we can get our breathing right first and foremost, that’s really the foundation of them building upon a right being relaxed and comfortable in the water. So some of those things that we look to cover here, making sure that you use your diaphragm when you breathe and your diaphragm is this dome shaped muscle at the base of your ribs. And when you are using your diaphragm to breathe, you’re essentially getting more oxygen in with every breath. Whereas when someone’s panicked, they tend

to have this short shallow upper chest breathing. So they’re never quite breathing deep. Now when you’re swimming fast or you’re sprinting, look, you’re obviously not going to use your diaphragm as much, not going to be breathing as deeply. But just generally, we want to try and relax with our breathing, use our diaphragm. And sometimes that can feel as though you’re breathing into your belly instead of your upper chest. So I think a good way to approach this can really be doing some breathing exercises out of the water, even if you’re like at the desk, if you’re driving the car, just practicing breathing deep. And so one of the ways that I would often do this is by by closing my mouth, inhaling through my nose and taking five to 10 seconds to inhale. And I’m trying to expand my belly and let my ribs move outwards. So moving outwards to and that’s kind of an indication that you’re using your diaphragm when you’re breathing. So I’m trying to expand

that as I breathe, inhale through my nose for five to 10 seconds, and then slowly exhale for five to 10 seconds out. And so that’s a really good way just to practice that deeper breathing. And then when you get comfortable with that, it’s easier to take it into the water. Often I’ll sort of practice this on the way to the pool. So if I’m in the car, listen to a podcast or listen to music on my way to training, I will do 30 seconds to 60 seconds of just some breathing exercises, either like five seconds in five seconds out, or like box breathing, which can be like five seconds in, hold at the top for five seconds, exhale for five seconds, and then hold at the bottom for five seconds. So that’s box breathing. So some of those exercises can be a really good way just to kind of reset, lay to focus, and I find it’s it’s good to do pre training. The other thing you need to really do here to breathe well, is you’ve got to relax relax

your chest and your upper back. So let’s say that your upper traps are really tense and your shoulders are up near your ears. It makes it harder to breathe comfortably. So I’ve really got to relax through the torso and the upper part of the body to allow that breathing to happen a whole lot easier. And some of the members that I’ve worked with recently who are stroke analysis members and they’re sending in their videos, some of them we’ve noticed have been quite tight and tense through up through their shoulders and up through their upper back. And so what we’ve been working on with them is getting them to to relax that having their shoulders in the right position and just basically getting them to to relax that upper part of the body. And so we’ve done some done a couple of drills to help them do that. And like one basic drill you can do if you feel like maybe you’re hunched over and your shoulders are up near your ears, like

everything’s really tense. A good sort of basic drill you can do to get like your posture right is your side kick drill. We’ve got one arm in front, one arm by the side. And then have your shoulder near your cheek as your lead arm. So your shoulder near your cheek as you’re kicking on the side. Now what we tend to find that people are doing here is that instead of that they’ve got their shoulder almost like right near their ear up too high. And that’s when you find your upper traps are probably getting used. And it just leaves that poor posture. So that can be a good way to just kind of get this better posture happening. Now that the next sort of point there is making sure that we do have the right posture. And so you might have heard me describe this before. That’s like being tall and proud or having your chest forward. Or you might think of that as like a superhero sort of posture with this kind of posture. You are so much

stronger through the movements in swimming compared to if you are hunched over and rounded. So we want to number one make sure that we’re using our diaphragm to breathe. Number two, make sure that we’ve got the right posture when we’re when we’re swimming. So think of that tall and proud posture. Now sometimes when like we do this at clinics and people go from rounded posture to good posture. Sometimes they’re a little bit too upright, a little bit too tense with it. So like anything in swimming, we want to stay natural. We want to keep things really sort of normal. And so when you’re swimming, you don’t want to go into any positions that are sort of too much outside the range of your normal range of motion. And so if you’ve if you’re trying to do you have good posture, but you’re really like you’re really forcing it in your tense. That’s not how you’d be just generally. So keep that good posture, but keep it quite a normal

keep it quite normal compared to how you would would typically be. Now the other thing that we sort of want to get used to is letting go when we exhale. So what I mean by that is we don’t want to when you’re exhaling when you swing, you want to be able to breathe it out and just feel this instead of like it’s a really sort of calculated or really sort of drawn out breath. No, you want to basically just get rid of that air that you’ve got in your lungs as you’re exhaling. So it will be quite quick. And the reason that we want it to be fairly quick is because then you can return your face back into the water so that your head’s not off to the side for too long because if your head’s off to the side for too long, then it can make it a little bit hard to get a good catch with that arm that’s out in front. So let’s have a look at those points again. We’ve got number one, we want to use the diaphragm. So feel like you’re

breathing deep, using that your belly will kind of expand, your ribs will sort of come out a little bit to the side. So use your diaphragm to breathe relax your chest and upper back, keep a good posture, breathe into your belly and let it go when exhaling. And there’s a couple of exercises that we normally do in the water to help people get used to this. And we’ve got these inside of the membership training. But one of my favorite ones is sink down drill. So when you get into the pool, the way you can do sink down drill is take a breath in and then slowly exhale. And over that time that you’re exhaling, you’ll find that you’ll start to sink in the water. Now, maybe not straight away. You know, some people have got, they float in the water really well. So you might find that you’re right up near the surface. And it’s not until you’ve completely exhaled all of your air until when you start to finally sink back down into the

water. And the reason that we want to do that is if you can get comfortable just being in the water and relaxing and not sort of worrying about air, that relaxation will translate into your swimming. So after you’ve sort of sunk down, you might find yourself sitting on the bottom of the pool. Alright, then when you’re ready, come back up. Take another breath, slowly exhale, find yourself sinking down, relax, and then sit there for a little bit and come back up. Because with newer swimmers, we tend to find that they just, they don’t want to let go of that air or they don’t want to allow themselves the time to actually sink down because they’re kind of afraid of what’s going to happen or taking water in. So that can be a really useful drill to do even if you’re an experienced swimmer, that sort of exercise can help you just sort of get tuned into being in the water. So I quite like that drill. So that’s core principle

number one. It’s breathe deep and relax. And so inside of the membership there, we’ve got a warm up that you can follow. So I’ll run you through it now. So at the start of that warm up, we typically do 200 freestyle with fins on, we exhaling from the nose. We do six sink downs, 425s of side breathing drill. So this is a drill where you’ve got a kickboard in front, you’re breathing to the side and you’re trying to just keep half your head in, half the head out. And then after that, we do 650s of breath control, where you’d be breathing every third stroke for the first 25 and every fifth stroke for the second 25. So breath control drills can be really good for having, for helping you relax when you’re maybe short on air. Because if you can swim for say 50 meters, where you were doing breathing every seven, or let’s say it was every nine, right? That means that you’re swimming really efficiently because you’re not using a lot of energy or

effort to swim. And it means that you can get comfortable kind of holding your breath and being in control of your breath. So those breath control drills can be really good for for that. So a warm up like that can help you work on core principle number one, which is breathe deep and relax.

In the next episode, we’re going to look at core principle number two, which is find your balance. It’s all about body position, being able to make sure you’ve got your head, hips and heels at the surface and minimize or reduce drag, which is the most important thing that we’ve got to do in swimming. So tune in for the next episode of the podcast, which will cover core principle number two, find your balance. Hope you enjoyed this episode. See you next week. Thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post The 5 Core Principle Of Fast Freestyle (#1 Breathe Deep And Relax) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Frank Sole who is a fellow coach from Arizona and the author of “The Five ‘B’ To A Succesful Triathlon Swim. Reading through his book, I found so many similarities about how we coach. I want to get him to the podcast because I think there will some good discussion about it and I would love to learn from other coaches.

01:14 Coaching Approach
03:16 Working With Masters And Triathletes
04:31 When Do You Expect To See Results
08:34 The Ability To Relax
15:11 Teaching The Right Posture
20:14 It’s Always About The Swim But It’s Not Always About The Water
24:57 Either You Got Or You Don’t?
34:53 Multitasking
40:58 SR X SL=Velocity
52:41 More Mentally Tired Than Physically Tired
56:39 Opportunity To Improve
1:01Even Out Of Chaos Comes A Blessing

Soleswimsolutions.com
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Effortless Swimming Freestyle Clinic

But I say this to athletes all the time, each and everything we do in life is done better from a state of relaxation. So there’s a certain amount of relaxation and tension that goes on simultaneous. 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 Frank Sol who’s a fellow coach out of Arizona in the state. Frank, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Oh, Brent, real good be here, my friend. Good to be with you. So I think you sent me a copy of your book, The Five Bees to a Successful Triathlon Swim. And reading through it, there’s so many similarities about how we coach. So I want to get into that today on the podcast because I think there’ll be some good discussion there. And perhaps just see how you approach coaching because I love to learn from other coaches.

And take what I think I could work in my own coaching because I look back at my coaching career over the last 13, 14 years. And it’s just a mishmash of all these different coaches I’ve heard from. Some stuff I’ve come up with on myself, but it’s just you gather all this knowledge. So where did it all start for you? How long ago did you start coaching? Oh, that’s a great question. It’s been 20, 23 years. I was a young swimmer, never a great swimmer. But went back to my local YMCA and started to volunteer. And I was helping, believe it or not, I was helping with mommy and me classes, teaching aqua fit classes, the typical YMCA minnow and guppy and shark classes. One day I was teaching a bunch of young kids how to swim and the head coach for the Red Bank YMCA from New Jersey came up to me and said, hey, look, when I get back from Nationals, I’d like to talk to you about coming on as a coach for my team.

And that was it. I just was hooked at that point. And literally like you started, I started to absorb as much information from every coach, every book, every website I could possibly get. And I think the biggest compliment is what you said. You take this mishmash of different philosophies from different coaches and you make them your own. You’re not reinventing the wheel.

I always like to say 15 by 100 is on a 20 second break is not proprietary coaching, right? I mean, we all, you get what I’m saying there. So I coached for them. I’ve coached high school programs on the New Jersey Shore where I grew up on the Jersey Shore. We had club teams every summer. I coached a club team. So I’ve been around it for a long, long time and then active in swimming and triathlon for easily that many years too.

Yeah, fantastic. And over the last, I’m not sure how many years it’s been for you, but it seems as though primarily now working with masters and a lot of triathletes. That’s like your brain butter these days. Is that correct? That’s correct. I do occasionally get young swimmers, parents will come to me if they’re on a swim program. They want me to do a video stroke analysis very much like you do. They’ll send me some video and ask me to critique their stroke. Then I ask critical questions are, you know, if they’re younger, you know, there’s no difference between sprinters and distance. These young kids are swimming. But as they’re getting older, is the swimmer looking to specialize as a distinast lead or a sprinter? And I do whatever I can to assist them and to help the swimmer fine tune. But my brain and butter comes working with triathletes

and master swimmers looking to improve in their swim stroke. Yes. And that’s how I started was coaching a master’s team for sort of nine years. I think it was and loved it and loved working with adults. A lot who did swim as kids and were very good as juniors. And then have continued on as master swimmers and done well at master’s comps. But then obviously also those that have learned to swim as an adult. And so I think for your approach with someone who didn’t learn to swim as a kid, they might have had a couple of lessons here and there, but primarily coming to it after 30, maybe after 40. What’s your approach there in giving them the skills that they need to be able to learn to me? And what do you sort of preface it with? Like, how do you let them know how long it’s going to be until they start to see results and all those sorts of things? Because it’s quite different, isn’t it? So working with someone who didn’t learn to swim as a kid.

Yeah, there’s virtually it’s like night and day. And I agree with you. So what I will normally do is I’ll get in the athlete in the water and I will ask them just meet me for 15, 20 minutes. Now, I know that’s taking time, but I do that for a reason to see what their commitment to level is to the process. I get them in the water. I watch them swim. And you know, within a few strokes, you can tell what’s going on. I always try to point out something positive immediately. You know, I’m an ex teacher. So we try to sandwich that kind of bad news in between something positive and, you know, finishing it up with something positive. But the reality is I make it very, very clear that they come from, if they come from a non swimming background, they’re going to have virtually no kinesthetic feel for the water. Their breathing is going to be horrible. They’re going to want to muscle themselves through the water. And I take this approach to tell athletes going,

listen, I realize you may have a triathlon to do in three to four months, but to get really good at this, you’re going to need to be at this for a couple of years. And you got to be, I tell them to brace the three P’s, be patient, be persistent and practice perfectly. What I mean by that, Brent, is practice it as perfectly as you can on that given day. If I can get that commitment from an athlete,

this almost sounds arrogant and bold, but I can assure you we’re going to get that athlete to be a good swimmer. We’re not, we’re not qualifying for, for Kona world championships or getting out of the water in their age group in fifth place. But the fact of the matter is they will start to become a swimmer. And I tell athletes, you got to think like a swimmer, act like a swimmer, project yourself as a swimmer. Because there’s this, this bind body, I get very deep into the mind body relationship. Because you, as you know, working with non-swimming adults, they get into the water and you can get frustrated, very easy, very, very easy. So I asked them to be patient with it, embrace the process, live through the process, take the time that it deserves to develop. And you’re going to start to see the results. So I start to work immediately as you, you made reference to my book on their breathing. I find that there was, let me back up, just this weekend,

there was a major triathlon here in the Flagstaff area, Mount Man, which they, it’s claimed the hardest triathlon, this part of the, of the United States. And it is, it’s at elevation, seven plus thousand feet. So guess what? Your breathing is going to be off. So I work with a lot of athletes on breath work. I also have a certification as a breath coach. So it’s absolutely critical that they work their breath just as well as they do their swimming and create a feel and a breathing rhythm to the stroke. When you can do that, I think we’re on our road to having a successful swim. And I think when, when people turn up to the pool, you can, for me, like I used to, as a coach on deck, I’d sort of watch people arrive at the pool and you can tell those swimmers that have been doing it for a long time and they’re confident and they’re comfortable, even just the way they walk into the pool. It’s very different. And then those swimmers that are perhaps learning,

they’re a bit newer, they walk in differently. So I think it all starts with that, that mindset and that approach as you go into it. And look, you’re not going to walk in there with the confidence of Michael Phelps when you’re new to it. But just, I think that mindset’s really important. And that mindset can then help you relax. Because if you’re not relaxed, you’re not going to move well. And so it’s, it’s such a critical thing. And I think that being that ability to relax starts with, with how you’re breathing, doesn’t it? Because when people are a little bit afraid of the water, they start to breathe shallow and breathe a bit faster. And so if you can just start with the more relaxed, the longer breaths, using your diaphragm a bit more, it’s, everything can follow on from, from there. So what, what sort of breathing exercises or what sort of stuff you have them do to help with that breathing, to kick them off?

And a great, great question. And I’ll follow up with the point that you made about being relaxed in my book. And there’s a, I forget the author’s name who said this, but I say this to athletes all the time. Each and everything we do in life is done better from a state of relaxation. So there’s a certain amount of relaxation and tension that goes on simultaneous, even sitting there watching the Olympics and watching the great swimmers that came out of Australia this year competing at the Olympics, you know, right alongside the United States. The reality is they look like they’re, they’re just muscling themselves through the water. But you and I know better. There’s a state of relaxation engaging the muscles that need to be engaged and oxidizing those muscles accordingly. One of the very first things I do is I’ll have an athlete stand there in front of me and I’ll have them stand there with their hands at their side.

And if they’re struggling to breathe and they’ll tell me that, hey, listen, you have to 50 yards, I can’t even breathe. I got to hold on the wall and I’m just struggling. I’ll have them and stand there and I ask them to take a nice breath in through their nose, preferably through their nose. And immediately I get to see if they are a, what is referred to as a vertical breather or a horizontal breather. Vertical breathers are breathers who breathe through their mouth or their nose and their lungs, their chest fills up and their shoulders and neck get all tight versus breathing horizontally. That means breathing out through the lower diaphragm, right, because we have this two diaphragm peer system, breathing through the lower lobes of our lungs. And I teach them to put their hands on their lower two ribs and start to exercise those ribs in and out. So we’re breathing literally, and if you can see this, it’s they’re breathing out through the side.

Now I was fortunate enough to have a coach years ago and every Wednesday night we would go out to the Jersey Shore and swim and he would have a stand there with our hands on our wetsuit and he would have us breathe out under our armpits, expanding our side of our bodies, explaining that all this fascia and ribs and everything that protect the lungs. Then we wrap it in a wetsuit in neoprene becomes very, very challenging to breathe that way. So to be able to teach athletes to expand. So what I will have an athlete do, and this is an answer directly to your question, is breath work outside of the pool? It’s a kind of oxygen advantage, Wim Hof type of exercise where they’ll lay down very rapid breathing only through the nose, in and out through the nose, exhale in, exhale out, and on the 20th exhale, they hold the exhale for as long as they can. So it is what is referred to as a, you’re creating a hypercapinic condition

where you’re elevating carbon dioxide, lowering oxygen, teaching the body how to work in that in that position and in that condition. And it is the best way to train that elevation without going to elevation. And I’ve had nothing but tremendous feedback from athletes who will take the time. Now, full disclosure, I’m just being honest with you, I probably show this to 20 athletes, maybe, maybe one or two will actually follow through and do it.

And it’s just, it’s mindset too, Brenton, like you went before, is how we think outside of the water and the ancillary things we need to do to get better at swimming. So those are the things that I do. First of all, I see if there are a vertical breather or a horizontal, I want them breathing horizontally, not vertically.

And then I give them breathing drills outside of the water. I have a t-shirt on the back of it. I coined this years ago. I say this all the time to athletes. It is always about the swim, but not always about the water. Me, and you know what I mean, I hope you know what I mean by that is that it’s the things that we do outside of the water that prepare us for a successful swim. I loved your last podcast about the mobility. I couldn’t agree with, I was with you 100% on that whole discussion about a more mobile body. Breathing helps in that respect. Supports the spine, hips, rotation, all of that. Everything starts with proper breathing. So I hope I answered that question for you. Yeah, that’s great. I remember going to a, it’s like a breath control course. It was kind of basically like myself or you would run for swimming, but it was for breathing to do with surfing bigger waves. Run by a guy called Nan Baldwin over here

who’s, he worked with a couple of the Australian Olympians, this past Olympics, and he’s worked with surfers like McFanning and Steph Gilmore. And I remember when he was demonstrating some of these

ways to breathe and how he wanted to breathe, he did that same thing, just trying to get the ribs to expand outwards this way and come back in that way. So I think breathing is so important. And then it all, it kind of goes hand in hand, almost to posture after that, doesn’t it? Where with the right posture, you can breathe so much more effectively. And again, it’s like these two things which most people and understand, they wouldn’t give too much thought about when it comes to swimming. It’s like, you get in there, move your arms, move your legs, it’s going to move you forwards. But with the right breathing and the right posture, that sets you up and gives you that foundation to then build upon. Because when you see someone who’s got poor posture in the water, sometimes their head’s really dug down deep and their shoulders are rounded, you are not strong, you’re not going to be able to breathe well in that position.

So are there any cues or how do you teach the right posture for people?

And that’s a great point. We know that the relationship between posture and breathing are critical. All the great minds who are coming out with a lot of information now, the white papers are out there, that if you are breathing correctly,

they’ll say to you, before you correct your posture, correct your breathing first. So that is something, and I’m going to be honest with you, there was a course that you ran years ago, five, six, seven years ago, in assessing postures. I took that and you should be so happy, your ears should be burning because there isn’t a day of the week that I don’t go by and use some of that posture adjustment and assessment when I’m working with my athletes.

I’m a real big fan of Greg Cook and I’m sure you may know him as one who came up with the functional movement screening. So I’ll take them through that and then I will go through some, whatever I need. Hey, listen, if it’s outside my realm of specialty, I will send them to a PT, to a physical therapist, as we call them here in the States,

and work with a physical therapist to make the corrections because like you said, once I get an athlete in the water and I’m watching them go through their stroke and I’m watching their arms recover out of the water, I could basically, without even doing an assessment on the athlete, you can almost tell that they’re back that are scapular, the thoracic region, it’s locked up like a bank on Sunday and they’re never going to proceed

as a better swimmer if they don’t get the mobility. So to answer your question directly, I will do an assessment on an individual if it’s out of my range of specialty. I will suggest they go see someone who really is an expert in stretching and mobility, a physical therapist, but I will give them some very, very basic stretches to start to open up through the pec major and pec minor, open up their shoulders a bit, open up through the ribs.

I’m a big fan, I talk about it in my book. I am one of those coaches who believes that every swimmer should be doing yoga. That’s just me, whether you actually go to a studio or spend 10 to 15 minutes in your own studio home, living room, bedroom, going through a range of motions would only serve the swimmer, pure swimmer and or triathlete or an open water endurance swimmer so much better in that perspective because the incredible nature of our bodies to work with in sync with the breath, the mind, the body are chemicals that are changed when there’s stress and inflammation in our bodies will all create problems in that realm. So that’s a great, great question. I evaluate that. I will direct the athlete the best way that I know how to get them to be able to become more functionally mobile in the water. Yeah, I think it’s and a little bit goes a long way with mobility and yoga because there’s people that can be so busy with

if they’re training for triathlon and they’re working, they might have family as well. They can be so busy and the last thing they want to do is go, all right, so I’m doing three sports now I need to add in yoga as well but five to 10 minutes a couple of times a week I think can be that’s better than nothing and for me, and I spoke about this on the podcast with Jeff Grace who runs swim specific yoga he was like before training in the mornings provided I wake up with enough time I’ll just do a couple of yoga moves five minutes before I leave and those sessions I’m so much better off for it because it just loosens up the hips and your back and your shoulders and I noticed a big difference there and it’s particularly through well through the shoulders obviously but I think through the hips as well you know I’ve worked with quite a few people recently where when we’re looking at their kick that you got your torso here and their legs

their quads are down there because they just don’t have that range through their hip flexors and it creates so much drag and just if they could get that up it is free speed it’s no extra effort and it’s just really going to take the breaks off for you so there’s all these little things like that where we see that you can have better a better position in the water and it’s just going to be so much easier and you think of what it can take to say drop five or 10 seconds per 100 with the amount of extra training it might require but you’ve got all these little opportunities like better range of motion to be able to to do that and it doesn’t take any extra training to be able to do it so I think with a lot of summers you know you’ve got that opportunity to to find those little things that they may not have even thought about before

and it goes back to what we were I was saying before it’s always about the swim but it’s not always about the water so again stealing a line from Greg Cook one time I remember him saying at one of the certifications I heard him say

more isn’t better better is better so I get it coach right you out of work out you need to bang out 2,500 meters

what if we spent 10 minutes on the deck prior and I give a lot of my athletes this wonderful shoulder mobility routine to do and I tell them if it took you five minutes to do before you got in the water it took you one minute too many you should be able to get this done in about four minutes and what it does it starts to open up the shoulders open up the wrists and the forearms and four minutes could make a substantial difference in the way you feel in the water and going back to feeling the water better awareness kinesthetically feeling what the body’s going through and you said it so appropriately if I can keep the body and I’m paraphrasing what you said if I can keep the body more hydrodynamic and keep the border paying attention to fluid dynamics free speed man and go holy crap the wall just caught up on me why? because you’re moving more efficiently through the water so I ask athletes to become more mindful of that

my first chapter in the book is all about belief and it’s probably the longest chapter because it’s about being more mindful

one of the I have to share this story with you because I think you’d appreciate it one of your capadres from Australia Mr. Paul Nukum I had the privilege of being coached under him a few years ago out here in the States and we all stood on deck one day every coach and every triathlete we had our big bulky garments on and he kind of looked at us and said so something like how many of you blokes have a garment on and what are all the pride in the world we’ve got our garments on we’re triathletes and we’re coaches he said take those bloody things off and learn how to swim from feel so I will write specific workouts for my athletes send them over to the pool do a warm-up and then I want you to do 2100s on a 20 second break strictly by feel

trust your breath trust your feel how does the body move through the water and then just give me the final time and then we can make some rough estimates but you know as well as I do open water swim unless you’re stopping for feeding Ironman half-hour you can’t look at your watch you have no you have no clue unless you’re trusting how you’re feeling in the water trusting your breath listening to the rhythm the connection between breath and movement breath and movement movement and breath they all have to work in sync so I will ask athletes from time to time take that bloody garment off I’m not only throwing garment on there you know a Timex or any other brand you swim with Apple and and just swim for the sake of swimming I have a tendency to I write blogs all the time I wrote a blog on that it’s probably one of the most comments I got positive and questioning like how am I supposed to know how fast I’m swimming that’s the idea

we don’t want you necessarily to see this we want you to feel this so I do coach feel a lot I was told as a young coach one time by a ruffled coach he told me you can’t teach feel either they’re born with it or they’re not and I’m going based on that I’ve made it my life’s mission to teach feel in the water I just believe that that was erroneous information and it was just an old guy sharing his thoughts at a big meet at a at a at a summer meet and I’ve made it my life to teach people how’d that feel oh you felt it on your forearms great do it again how’d that feel that didn’t feel good change it up what do we need what didn’t feel good oh so

I try to get them to self-coach themselves and answer their own question before I supply information and I believe that in my mind that’s that’s the sign of a of a coach because that’s how I was coached and I try to bring that along is because on race day that’s all they have is themselves out there right and hopefully you’re in their ear talking to him going no Brendan told me to do this he told me to do this so I got to do this so again I hope that answered that question directly but that’s that’s that’s how I approach this I love it I’ve had a similar thing I can’t remember who it was from but it’s basically like yeah you can’t you can’t teach feel and this and that and I was just thinking like well that’s that’s kind of the easy way out it’s like and and that’s kind of the approach that I’ve

of coaches that I’ve seen that I want to steer away from you know there’s lots of great coaches out there that I look up to and I learn from but there’s also some coaches that I’ve seen where I go I don’t I don’t want to have that approach because as an athlete if the coach is saying like you’re never gonna you’re never gonna have feel for water you’ve either got it or you don’t it’s like we’ll give up already you know that’s that’s it so um that and it’s like it’s just simply not not true because when I’ve run clinics in the past often after some of the progressions that we’ve we’ve done people have gone oh this is great I can feel what I’m what I’m trying to get in the catch and I can feel it on my forearms my hands and it’s like I’m moving through the water better and it’s like it’s it’s possible so I just yeah that that really annoys me that

that whole thing where people are saying you’ve either got it or you don’t it’s yeah it’s it’s the easy way out I think as a coach I I I agree with you and and I I’ve never run from a challenge and and I like that about coaching is just taking taking what has been

for a better term gospel over the years and adjusting and tweaking it we were we’ve seen it we’re we’re seeing it at this Olympics we’ve seen all these little nuances and you know Rowdy Grains was I love the fact that he at one point was

congratulating the amount of club coaches and their input to what we were seeing at the Olympics this year and I’ve never heard that before it’s always you know coach so-and-so from the Olympics it’s coach Cohen so from the Olympics but you you and I both know that all started early early early on with some really good fundamentals and tweaking this and tweaking that going God have that feel man let’s why don’t we just let’s let’s point that center finger down a little bit just drive that shoulder up and take that hand out a little bit more to the yeah let’s do that and see how that feels works great doesn’t work let’s go back to the drawing board so when you can take that approach and again I go back to triathlon and I get the idea that somebody signed up for an Ironman I get the idea that they signed up a year ago and it’s a year out from Ironman Arizona I’ll use for example and then they come to see a coach like me six months out from Ironman

and then I just have to ask them point blank on where the heck you been where you been

we missed the most incredibly important months of developing technique and feel for the water we need to start building your endurance and now I’ve got to get you technically sound and build endurance at the same time

the ones who see it and the ones who get it Brenton it’s absolutely amazing I if you don’t mind I’ll just share a quick story with you I worked with a gentleman his name is Justin Ironman Arizona two years ago before the virus hit and he got out of the water in a one hour 18 minutes now you and I both know it’s a very respectful time for an Ironman of one hour and 18 but he came to me and I wasn’t even his coach but he found me he came to me and said I really I really want to crush this swim I want to qualify for Kona this year he went to court of lane got out of the water in a 105 and guess what that time difference he sent him to Kona because he had a solid bike and a solid run already he knew that five that 12, 14, 15 minutes that gap there was the deciding factor but here’s what happened I told him what he needed to do he did it he did it religiously he did it fundamentally how I asked there was great communication between me and the athlete

always doing more underwater video and I know you do the same as I do giving him feedback sending him to him going okay we’re right on target here but we need to adjust this let’s try this drill let’s do this, this and this and he got it done and I truly believe maybe I’m naive that if anybody who goes from a 118 to a 105 and under

this Justin did it anybody can do it I just believe that again there are coaches telling me I’m a little naive in that respect but I do believe if you’re patient enough persistent enough and willing to do what’s necessary it could be done and done successfully and that is just me being around the sport for all these years and seeing we get in the water we get in the water we get in the water we swim, we swim, we swim, we swim and I said to one athlete one time I said my friend you are really getting very very good at doing it very very bad because from a habitual standpoint his neural muscular memory and his neurons are just firing in the same way and when I try to show him something he just reverts back to the other way because this

is just wanting to swim versus taking the time to do it the proper way and becoming really good at it so more isn’t better I just try to tell athletes from time to time I’d rather see an athlete get in the water and bang out you give me 1600 ideal yards versus 24 so-so yards I’ll take that 1600 pure yards or meters any day of the week my friend

yeah that’s great when you get a result like that and the belief that someone would get from that result as well to see you know 30 minutes is massive you try and take that off on maybe the run or the bike it’s like wow that’s um and you know in comparatively too as a percentage of the overall you know swim time that is huge and one thing that I believe is really important for people to understand as well we had some Amy who came to one of our clinics earlier this year and she did did an Ironman I think there’s maybe three four months after it and she she took off let’s escape me now but quite a quite a significant chunk of her swim time from her previous Ironman and she had to persist for it was a good six weeks or seven weeks where she wasn’t getting faster she wasn’t feeling like things were like improving but then all of a sudden it clicked and it came together but she she trusted

coaching enough she trusted herself to put up with it and and to persist with these changes in her stroke even though she wasn’t seeing the results yet and then it it happened and I think it’s that it’s so easy to just give up after two or three weeks and go now this isn’t working and just go back to normal but if you can just persist as you’re saying and and be consistent with it that you can really get it get a huge amount from it and that consistency and seeing the water to his his huge we were talking earlier about the lockdowns here in Australia and Melbourne I hadn’t been able to coach for I don’t know five weeks now and so I hadn’t been able to swim much because our pools were closed and so all I was doing was just surfing every day and my like I’m a I learned when I was 18 or 19 and the last like month that I’ve had surfing every day sometimes twice a day my surfings improved dramatically and it’s just that consistency and coaching as well

like just getting a few you know tips here and there and so I took that and and thought well this is like okay this is kind of exactly what what we need to do with it this one is is make sure they’re in the water enough and they’ve got just a couple of points to work on and and then they’re going to see those results

critical I I think you just hit the nail on the head also when I send an athlete to the pool I want them focusing on one potentially two things because psychologists will tell you multitasking is something that’s been sold to modern society but we’re really not good at because I don’t want them thinking about their kick thinking about their catch thinking about hand entry hip rotation pick one thing two things and focus on that because you know as well as I do with if if if something is a on a major let’s say hip rotation if they’re swimming flat you fix that all these other little details simply fall under this big tip detail and all of a sudden like Amy and you get to know their personality I don’t know who Amy is but I can probably if you and I had more time I would tell you some of her personality traits and Brenton I think you’d tell me right on right on right on very patient buying into the process gift can easily get frustrated

I got a gal here back in the States her name is Teresa crushing it crushing it crushing it for about five six weeks frustration frustration frustration left arm dropping pressing down shoulder pains and I just you know in my younger coaching days I would have said oh my god what am I doing wrong what do I need to do here and I said you know let’s get that let’s take two days off give the shoulder some time to heal I sent her to the pool swam one day without her watch then we started to go through some some systematic drills found what worked she’s right back to where she was and swimming better now than she was prior to what I like we I refer to as her her meltdown but like you said

trust the process trust the coaching know that these are simple laws of physics if I abide by these laws of physics I have to swim well being hydrodynamic adding the right amount of pressure not trying to beat the water up not trying to muscle the water and all of a sudden it starts to come together the biggest challenge I have sometimes is getting the athlete to buy into that process because you and I both we probably have said this athletes all the time come on dude embrace the process man embrace the process it’s going to come together but you’ve got to be patient with it so I plead with athletes and I will say this with with all the confidence of 23 years of coaching if you do what we’re talking about here any of athletes who are listening to this you have to become a better swimmer again like I said you’re not we’re not talking about podium finish but if you’re a typical two minutes and 15 second out of the you know per hundred

you have a chance to drop that hundred time under two minutes substantially like that if you abide to these simple laws of physics and that’s what I tell athletes that’s what I write about and that’s how I

create my whole philosophy around my coaching and when I work with athletes some of them some athletes buy into it some are looking for quick fix or one athlete says well don’t you have a little hack for me no no yeah I do have a hack for you it’s called freaking hard work that’s the hack for you other than that I don’t have a hack for you so it’s something that when you get the right athlete in the agreeing to that particular philosophy boy it’s it’s magic you know what I’m saying yeah it’s it’s great to work with those people that that are willing to to to follow that it’s it’s a really enjoyable process to go through with them and I I was going through it was creating this last week so in our membership we’ve just I’ve just finished the eight week faster freestyle course so we’ve got our five core principles which are somewhat similar to your five five B’s and those those five core principles I’ve put together an eight week course

just to have some structure around developing those things in the stroke and the last one that I put together last week was the was stroke rate which was was weak eight and one of the things that if you’re more of the engineering type mindset or mathematical mindset the one of the ways that you can figure out what you need to do to swim a certain pace is just look at this the speed equation you got like distance per stroke you like stroke count and just stroke rate and by sort of adjusting those couple of things you can see what the resulting time would be if you increase your rating or increase your distance per stroke and you can sort of figure it out that way and so it’s and that’s what you’re saying in terms of it’s all just it’s all physics you know it’s all just there is the science behind it and you can think about it that way and I think when we’re coaching most people aren’t probably looking at it that way we need to be a little bit more

perhaps they need certain cues or they need analogies to help them with understanding these things and taking it on board but you have got that side of it where you can look at it from the pure speed equation and you can show someone all right you’re swimming 50 seconds a lap it’s taking you 40 strokes to take this lap and your rating’s at 65 strokes a minute so you know we can show them what what they can do there to to do it because I think there’s probably a lot of people out there who’ve never considered that part of it as well like all right I’m pushing off on the wall I swim 50 meters but how does that that make up and so the way that you can adjust it is all right to increase your distance per stroke or reduce your stroke count it’s that’s the technique that’s reducing drag increasing propulsion then you got your stroke rate and being able to perhaps hold a faster stroke rate without sacrificing too much distance per stroke and that’s really the

the art of it and that’s finding that sweet spot which certainly can take some time but for those that do are more inclined to think about it that way that’s a really fun thing to sort of look at and and show the opportunity that’s available to you to find some extra speed yeah agreed and and I just explained to athletes the simple equation SR times SL equals velocity right stroke rate times stroke length

the one thing a one little thing that I do is when when I’m evaluating a swimmer whether it be through video stroke analysis and or on deck is I’ll look at their and I usually use the right arm their point of entry and point of exit off the lane line which will tell me in many respects how well they’re grabbing and holding water and driving their body through the water if their point of entry and point of exit’s really narrow that means that their stroke rate’s going to be higher and if they do not have the aerobic engine for that they’re going to get exhausted but on the other side of that coin you and I both know there’s tons of articles about talking about gliding as this this evil

you know like a gift from the devil himself and swimming that if you’re over gliding it’s horrible but if we noted during the Olympics was the first time ever noticed right behind each swimmer when Ledecky was swimming and and she’s right there with that young lady from Australia they were strong they were showing stroke length right per stroke right 1.46 meters so all of those things like you said so elegantly really become critical so when you could take the science and the feel

and create that gut intuition in between all this man you got yourself one hell of a swimmer because then they could take that science and say okay the science can’t lie if the science won’t lie here physics won’t lie this is what it feels like this is what I need to do to improve so there’s all kinds of little tricks and I agree with you and I’m a big fan of the tempo trainer I will use that with some more

refined athletes I won’t give that to a newer athlete because they will just take that to the umpteenth degree and try to you know well what do you mean I’m only 48 strokes per minute I want to be 55 strokes per minute I’m going oh easy there cowboy it ain’t happening like that but my refined swimmers know that if they’re at 70 strokes per minute and I want to bump them up to 71 to 72 just let’s let’s just be real real cautious about this and move this along

very very smartly and it will come together so again that always goes back to that patience I always go remember the three Ps yeah I they’ll look at me yeah coach I get it pace and we’re not a patient society anymore we want we want it like we want things like that you know I want to get out of the water in an hour flat I get it I get it well not at a 215 pace it’s not going to happen but trust the process so Brent and that’s what I tell athletes be patient trust the process yeah it’s uh talk about not being patient I got in yesterday morning for my first session back after I don’t know if it was two or three weeks because we can swim here in regional Victoria and I just I just wanted to get in and get back to my usual paces and times and that wasn’t happening it was oh man it’s frustrating but I just wanted to get straight back into it even though I’ve been out of the water for a for a while so I completely understand the want to just have things happen

that happen quickly but I know in the back of my mind it’s going to be another maybe I don’t know two or three weeks of consistent swimming to get back to at least where I was so yeah it’s just being being able to accept that and then just go about your business and and wait until you’ve gone through that that time period now just with your with your five p’s so here really I’ll read them out for people who are who are listening so number one is belief number two is breathing three is be relaxed four is balance buoyancy and body position and then number five is biomechanics so uh I find it interesting this is kind of a similar approach to what I would often take is you’ve kind of got all these things and the very last one’s biomechanics so yeah there’s so much that goes into it now

what I want to go on to number four which is that the balance and buoyancy and that kind of thing because it’s something that a lot of people struggle with is good body position stopping the legs from sinking what are some of those causes those main causes that will have someone sit low in the water or struggle to feel like they can stay afloat yeah and basically when I when I’m with a new swimmer I have no hesitation in getting into water and demonstrating for him and as I shared with you before we went on I mean I still swim I five six days a week if I can’t get in sick if I get in less than five days I’m a little jittery so before we got on today I got my swim done and went upstairs did my weights and so the reality is that

balance

is such a critical piece if you are not staying long and sleek and hydrodynamic in the water you’re going to swim you know with your with your hips down so what I try to to establish with an athlete is getting them to swim from their center of balance and their center of balance is right at the sternum right below the navel is their center of gravity and I always like to say God is ultimate wisdom made us that way so we don’t keel over every time we take a step or we walk off a curb think about the fact that our glute muscles our hamstrings our quadriceps our calf muscles the largest densest the dense muscles in our body and if you’re an athlete that means your bones are stronger your capillaries and your blood vessels are stronger you have more muscle and you’re going to sink so you’ve got to be able to create this relationship between your center of balance and your center of gravity and I’ll get into water and then demonstrate

I’m simply and full disclosure I robbed this from coaches years ago just kind of leaning into the tea of the chest and slight it brings up the hips now we know in the world of Olympic swimming a lot of triathletes want to get into water and mimic what they do with their kick and you know as well as I do you can’t swim 1.2 miles or 2.4 miles like that and still feel like you’ve got legs for the bike in the run so what I’m trying to tell athletes is we do not want to necessarily depend on our legs or our kick to help us elevate our hips and elevate our body but the kick is substantially helps in that rotation and helps to keep the body up but I get them and I’ll spend a lot of time in the water with them simply doing what I like to call plank drills simply arms out in front superman position leaning into the water looking straight down like they have a tennis ball under their neck and just this very very very relaxed kick then what I’ll do is

move to like four strokes no breath showing them that they can apply strokes and still maintain the integrity of the body Brenton I’m sure if if you would agree with me I got into water today rotation leaning into my armpit pressing the temple down I felt my hips come up I felt like I moved through the water that much quicker it’s something that every swimmer has to constantly make that adjustment on it’s not all of a sudden you just shut the brain down you’ve got to have some sort of internal gyroscope going whoop dropped hips what am I doing wrong make that correction open water becomes even more critical

the year before COVID I think we’re all losing track of time I’m standing on the deck of the ferry boat outside of Alcatraz

overlooking the water right before they blow the horn to jump in the waves and the current that particular day was extraordinary and all bets are off you’re trying to maintain some segment of balance and buoyancy in this in this washing machine but you’ve got to be able to be able to do that in those environments if yours is going to be successful and yes I got out of the water and no one had to help me out and pull me out but the fact of the matter is in a pool I’d like to say we’re in a petri dish we’re in this beautiful refined 25 meter 25 a 50 meter pool swimming we have virtually no waves or no disruption to water so we need to learn those body positions in that environment and take it out into the open water environment so

again I hope that answered the question but I get into the water I demonstrate years ago what we would do is I would take a piece of kickboard if they really were sinkers I would take a kickboard and I cut it up into segments quarter half three quarters full kickboard I’d stick a piece of it right under their under their quadriceps and see if it helped to elevate them I would take a half a piece see if that elevated and then just get them to feel the pressure on their chest this kind of relationship between the sternum and their head what eight nine pounds for most of most adults and use that as ballast to help to get those hips up but what we don’t people say to me well some coach told me to force my hips up

try swimming like that for for for a mile and see how see what kind of energy you’re going to have because of all that oxygen you’re dumping down into those hips establish balance you got it made so I again hope I answered that question the best way it could yeah that’s great I am yeah very similar in I think how that to approach that and one of the things that you mentioned there is when people try and force their hips up the the initial thought for most people when they’re trying to get the hips up is to stick their bum up in the air but that bends them through their hips and through their their waist and then you know we talk about dropping the legs that’s that’s what it causes so sometimes that it requires that little bit of like core bracing the core squeezing the butt cheeks a little bit to straighten that out and then you can press on the T to to help bring that up and so that’s it’s such a nuanced thing that I don’t think is really natural for

people who are who are new to swimming that when they finally get it they go hi okay yeah that that makes sense it’s strange and I don’t have it all the time this is the kind of the feedback I get when people started is that they it’s like I’m having to really think about it a lot and then I notice when I don’t don’t have it but with more and more practice it becomes automatic and I think of when I’m swimming like it’s I’m not actively thinking about it but I know that I’m sort of adjusting how how I’m how much engagement how much tension through the core and through the glutes that I’m applying through different parts of the stroke and so when I tune into that it’s like okay yeah you’ve got to constantly be using it and so I think it’s a it’s a really important thing for people to to understand to be able to help bring those those legs up because I’ve had so many people who have been sticking their bum up in the air

and wondering why they’re still like sinking basically

and and and you bring up some really good points and I agree with you in in regards we don’t want to overthink it but we when when I’m teaching a brand to adult triathlete or swimmer how to do that I will challenge him I said listen for these next three sessions I want you to get out of the water more mentally tired than physically tired because I need you to think about it which leaves me um I’ll I will never forget this interview one of Michael Phelps gold medals he wins the gold medal he gets out and I think it was down in Rio and the interviewer asks Michael so when you’re swimming the the 53 50 meter free what are you thinking about and he said this and this was his answer I think about absolutely nothing

why all of those things were done at those sets hidden in coach Bowman probably said oh no stop stop at the wall let’s discuss this let’s talk about this feel this do this so when race day comes whether you’re swimming 50 meters or you’re swimming um you know a 10k open water swim event or Alcatraz or your local triathlon it has become more reactionary and what I like to say is your internal gyroscope just takes over and you start to make these corrections you just kind of feel you you know what I’m talking about you kind of feel like oh god I just feel awful a little bit oh I’m not but but make this correction make this correction and you get good at that but that comes with experience and time it just doesn’t all of a sudden one two three it’s there so this is why I love dialogue with coaches like yourself because you trade ideas are going I’m going to remember that I’m going to use that I’m going to apply that in my

coaching philosophy because it works so hats off to you for for this opportunity to be able to openly discuss these these coaching methods and and and both of them I know they lead to success because I’ve seen it and I’ve seen it with my own swimming I’m folder disclosure I’m 66 years old I’m swimming better now I mean I’m holding my I’m holding my hundreds on 141 40 141 142 pace in a yard pool okay I’m proud of that it’s it’s it’s good I feel great but guess what I know I still have more work to do I know I can get under that under that 140 I know I can so that’s my goal and that’s what I work for my friend that’s yeah it’s it’s so good is it like a that’s that that’s half the fun is just trying to find improvement and just to continue to to better yourself and going back to your point of like Michael felt sort of thinking about nothing when he’s racing Ariane Titmus when she was asked you know what what did your coach

Dean Box will say to you before the race and she essentially said like we we’ve trained for this for however many years and like he didn’t didn’t give me any advice didn’t tell me what to think but just you know wish me all the best because she’s going in there she’s not she’s not going in there and coming up with a race plan on the spot she knows what she’s got to do she’s trained for it and then it’s just about switching off all the distraction getting in there and just letting the like letting it become automatic and it’s like when someone is in training and they’re working on perhaps some stuff that they’ve been given by their coach it’s kind of like when you’re learning to drive there’s so much going on you got maybe your mum or your dad sitting next to you you think oh my god how this this whole thing’s moving and I’m just moving this doing well and you’re looking out for all these things you might cross over the

white line and go hang on correct it and you’re thinking about it so much but then when you get into your race you want it to be like you’ve driven for for 10 years and it’s just you could do it while on the phone right it’s just you want to be able to make it automatic and so I think that’s a big part of training is yeah you’re certainly thinking about things a lot and then when it comes race time is we want to have everything just happen you’ve trained for it and you can switch off and all you’re really thinking about is perhaps just the fine adjustment of your pace and your effort and just correcting for you know whatever the race strategy that you’ve you’ve got or you know where people are making groups or packs just all those those little things so it’s um yeah I think in training it’s very much about feeling like you learn to drive a car sometimes when you are thinking about lots of things great and you know

there’s something Brenton that I try to convey to athletes and I remember for myself we I’m sure if we sat here with any great swimmer Phelps, Anthorp, any great golfer, any great basketball player Michael Jordan and if we asked them a point in question as successful as they were were there are certain things they can improve at and undoubtedly I would think that each and every one of them would say absolutely so that is what I love about swimming each and every time I get in the water it’s an opportunity for me to improve as an individual now I will tell you there are times I get out of the water and I’m going have I ever really actually swam before my life because this was horrible but I have a saying with athletes there’s no such thing as a bad swim there’s no such thing as did I learn something from it did I get in the water did I knock out my workout you did something that most people didn’t do today so in that perspective when I think

about it there’s no such thing as a bad swim now yes you and I both know there’s things as bad swims right somebody has a bad swim and a big meat or triathlon but the fact of the matter is what did I learn from that going into it

lack of hydration didn’t sleep well the night before poor nutrition shoulders all jacked up because I was doing weights an hour before so generally there’s kind of rhyme and reason that follow a bad swim and then you go and learn through the process to make the adjustment for the next for the next time you get in the water and when an athlete a triathlete swimmer adult swimmer youth swimmer can take that mentality into their workouts I think they’ve got a major step over everyone else because they’re looking at this from the perspective is continual mental physical emotional and I even like to say spiritual growth I always kid people I get in the water I’m in church my friend it is just such a spiritual thing for me to go back and forth and you know I this morning it was nothing more it was a kind of an easy swim I did a thousand 20 second break right into a 500 swim and people will ask me yes I had my garment on and people will ask me

do you count laps absolutely

how do you do that because it was taught to me years ago as a young swimmer you better you better know what lap you’re on because I know what you’re on and you better be in sync with me and we would be deathly afraid going I think I’m at 450 coach am I right yes you are but you get my point is that I make that an opportunity to get in the water and just and let it go with the intentions of improvement

just developing as an individual and that’s what I love about swimming that’s what I still love about triathlon and that’s what I love about open water swimming in general just to be able to get out there and get

get in water which just feels so natural for me and I’m sure it does for a lot of the a lot of your listeners too I think it’s a massive draw card and thing that keeps a lot of the people listening to this podcast that keeps them coming back to to swimming is that that spiritual aspect of it and I’m for me in my sort of day to day life I just I’m more like sort of I feel like I’m much more about sort of concrete things and real things and so when it comes to airy fairy stuff it’s like no that’s not me but then when I’m swimming or when I’m surfing or I’m in the water that’s like I’m all about it so I think I sort of compartmentalize it for anything to do with the water or I’m all airy fairy in that aspect of life because it’s yeah like after after a good swim whether it’s training session whether it’s a swim in the ocean or just being yeah being out in the ocean it’s just like you know I feel like I could be a

a yoga influencer on on YouTube or something like that it’s just I could come up with all the all the lovely quotes so it’s yeah there’s something to something to being in the water that just attracts me and I think a lot of

a huge amount of swimmers and particularly here we’ve had so many people start open water swimming from last year when the pools closed and and it’s that aspect of it I think that has kept so many of them going even when the pools did reopen there’s been a huge huge growth of open water swimmers for that reason I believe beautiful so even out of chaos comes a blessing right I mean you got all these open water swimmers and so from that perspective and I and I agree with you you you when you when you get in the water and you feel like you’ve done what you needed to do on that particular day you get out of yourself you should be saying to yourself get out of the water and saying well done well done today and and and I congratulate myself all the time I mean all those things so that’s me going back to the mindset saying hey I did this I did something that a lot of people don’t do I’m not the best but I’m getting better because that’s what life is all about

we develop as swimmers we develop as people and we develop as athletes and again if we go back go to the three P’s be patient be persistent the rest of it should take care of itself very nicely some come quicker others take more time but like you said somewhere just a little while ago some will give up and never really

get the the feel of success if they just stayed with it a little bit longer and I believe as coaches you and I as coaches and it’s it’s it’s our job to instill that faith in the athlete go and stay with this it’s in there I always tell athletes it’s in there it’s my job to bring it out but your job to recognize it once you recognize it I bring it out you recognize it we got our something something something very very powerful here so um so from that perspective I agree with you what you’re saying and it was just fun to be able to share little thoughts like that with you from from my own personal philosophy because I believe as a as a good coach I want to I want to I want to if I’m going to tell an athlete you got to get in the water in those days you don’t feel like it was a one day last week I stood on the side of the deck I had uh I think it was 21 2200 meters to swim I’m going I would rather be anywhere else but here right now wasn’t feeling it

I had things on my mind got in and I’m saying why wouldn’t I’ve done this why would I have not got into water today get this done so from that perspective that’s my advice for athletes just get in do what your coach tells them buy into the process one other bit of advice I always tell athletes and you know you’ve heard this before and you’ve said this to athletes all the time going whoa whoa whoa focus on your lane don’t worry about what she’s doing to the left don’t worry about he’s doing it right she swims better he swims better you focus on what you need to do to get better yeah you can learn from those athletes but we can get overwhelmed by what other athletes are doing and it takes to focus on what we need to do athletes like I said the belief systems our ability to breathe and breathe well I tell athletes all time on deck if you cannot demonstrate good breathing for me on deck there’s a strong probability you will not be able to do it

in the water so the breath work outside of the water becomes critical buoyancy balance and body position being relaxed or those if you notice there’s rhyme and reason

then at the tail end I’ll show you how to do the necessary biomechanics but we get those first four under check the rest becomes somewhat easier so

yeah absolutely and Frank the only downside to getting you and I on a call is that we could go on forever yes sir because we just love this stuff so I appreciate you coming on and sharing it’s been a pleasure your experience in coaching and swimming and for anyone who’s listening to this maybe they’re in Arizona or nearby how can they get in touch with you and what’s the website social media that kind of thing yeah I’m on my website is soul swim solutions S-O-L-E SwimSolutions.com and I’m on Instagram the same tag soul swim solutions and I get people to reach out to me and ask questions I’m sure as you do or send a video and ask for input I’m more than happy I’m all about building success in other people’s lives that’s what I am as a coach it’s all about what I can do to see others succeed meet and not only meet but exceed their expectations because if I can get an athlete to do that and then they can carry it over to someone else you and I have created

a nice nice wave you know what I’m saying my friend so yeah absolutely well get in touch with that with Frank we’ll have those details in the in the show notes and thanks again Frank this has been this has been great and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed chatting with you I think we’re probably very similar similar personalities and and types just on different sides of the world so I appreciate it great man I appreciate it my friend thank you very much and you stay well and very good talking to you

The post The Five ‘B’ Method To A Succesful Triathlon Swim with Frank Sole appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Simon Hearn, who is a professional triathlete whom I’ve known for a couple of years now. He turned pro in the last two years and I want to get him in the podcast to talk about that journey and a little bit about his journey in swimming.

01:49 Start Of Triathlon Journey
03:35 Turning Pro
05:54 Impostor Syndrome
08:16 Placing 4th On A Full Distance Ironman
09:27 Swimming Background
14:16 Training Surges
16:42 Prescribed Pace
18:23 The Gap Between Effort Levels – Developing Gears In Between
26:02 As A Physio
30:44 Mobility And Stability Work
37:37 Being Conscious In The Water
39:29 Motivation
41:35 Begin To Be Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

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it’s good just to like give yourself at least a couple of laps where you’re just going way outside anything that feels like that feels acceptable with your stroke and just sort of see what happens with it because I mean I know personally like I’m very yeah it’s I always want to go back to what I’m used to so you’ve really got to kind of be comfortable getting uncomfortable with um with those sorts of changes. 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 and my guest today is professional triathlete Simon Hearn. Simon welcome to the podcast. Thanks Brent thanks for having me on. Well we’ve been friends for I was just trying to think about I’m thinking maybe 2012 but I don’t even know if that’s that’s right um yeah it’s something like that I guess

introduced from other friends isn’t it yeah do we meet yeah so introduced through um through other other friends and sort of met through that triathlon scene and um since then or then you were sort of just doing triathlons it’s something that you kind of just started out doing um and in the last what it maybe two years or so um have turned pro and um and really just starting to make your way up in the in the ranks and so I wanted to get you on the podcast to um to talk about that journey and also to talk about your journey with your swimming because I think that’s something um that I’ve obviously watched along the way and um and have seen what you’ve done to really become a front pack swimmer from not necessarily having a swimming background as a as a kid so I think that’s a that’d be a good thing to talk about and explore what you’ve done to um to get to that stage so for um your triathlon journey when did you start doing triathlon

yeah so I I did my first triathlon with you know borrowed wetsuits and my little road bike and stuff back at the end of year 10 it’s also I must have been probably 16 or 17 years of age and then I enjoyed it and it was one of those things I finished and I’d been riding my bike a bit and running I hadn’t done a whole lot of swimming um but I finished it and I was like oh that was fun like I feel like I could almost do it again like I actually didn’t push myself too hard because it’s my first one and I wanted to just finish um and then and then I focused I really just wanted to focus on school because I knew I wanted to be a physiotherapist and I knew that was going to be getting to so I just ran um through year 11 and year 12 um and then and then first year union I had more time um and I um a duathlon I think back in in Melbourne one of the duathlon races um through at the time well it’s now hall tri club but it was extreme tri club at the

time I did one of their like introductory courses to learn a little bit more about transition and all that kind of stuff um did a duathlon and really enjoyed it and um then I thought wow if I’m going to compete with these guys a little bit at the front of the race eventually I’m probably going to need to get a time trial bike um and then I got the time trial bike so this would have been oh I think probably 2012 like you said probably is when I was really started to to get into it um and then yeah I just I just got into training and enjoyed the training and kind of had a few age group triathlon coaches along the way um and then started taking a lot more seriously probably for three or four years ago um and I was a I was a little bit lost um I wanted to I was kind of winning my age group um and thought maybe racing professionally was kind of the next step um for me and and then I found through some googling and stuff I found that my now

coach um and has been my coach for the last few years David Tilbury Davis um and he’s currently advising guys like Lionel Sanders and he’s just recently started with Bart Arnott’s and David McNamee and my training buddy on the Sunshine Coast here Lockie Kieran um and and the reason why I contacted David was I knew he was someone who um knew what it took to race at the the professional level I didn’t want to I didn’t want to go into the professional ranks if I was going to be just racing on my own um and that comes back to what you said is it’s a big thing in the swim I didn’t want to be coming out of the water on my own um and then essentially doing an age group individual time trial but racing in the professional field I wanted to make sure ready um and so David and I um started working together just before Cairns I think it would have been 2018 which was um one of my last age group races um and then I did

Sunshine Coating Point 3 and that was my last age group race and then I I started doing some open races up here in Queensland um and then my first professional race really probably would have been Sunshine Coast 70 Point 3 in 2019 and I managed to get third I think Brad and Kerry won that day and Steve McCann got second um and I think by that time I I was I was very nervous being my first true professional race at an Ironman um but but I think David instilled a bit of confidence in me um and I’ve done a few of those open races so I knew I had a rough idea of what the level would be and I knew that I’d gotten my swim to a level where I would probably be in a pack out of the water which was my main goal I wanted to be in the race so but yeah so and so you had some um when you turned pro was there any sort of feeling of that imposter syndrome where it’s like oh I don’t know if I should be here or is that something that

you know you made the decision to become a pro because you felt like you belong there I know um definitely definitely had that imposter syndrome one of my first races was um um in Huskison uh two years ago now it would have been and and Craig Alexander won that day and even Joe Skip from the UK he was training in news at the time and he came down to Husky to do the race and there’s definitely that sense of imposter syndrome where I was like oh you know there was excitement for sure because um because I was you know achieving all of mine to race at that level but there’s also that sense of like oh I don’t know if I’m ready for this and and I think coming from where I did in in age group triathlon I’ve always slowly progressed like I started off in the the middle of my age group somewhere and slowly worked my way towards winning my age group and then you know competing in some open races and then trying to win open races and I think

the same thing with the field is that’s where I wanted to be I wanted to you know get get myself somewhere in the middle being the race learn what that’s all about and work my way from there and I mean yeah there’s definitely that sense of imposter syndrome because you look you know I looked up those guys those are the guys that you know I’ve got Crowey’s book and looking at what training sessions he was doing and you know that kind of stuff so yeah yeah I don’t think that ever that uh you’d be you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t feel feel that coming especially coming into the professional level um yeah no matter what sport you’re in I think everyone’s going to have a sense of it and whether it be with work with work or um and I had that you know when I started coaching tours like who is why who am I to give any advice like why would someone listen to me and I still yeah I still feel a little bit of that that today it’s

like it doesn’t really ever leave you know I think unless you’re someone like uh Michael Phelps who’s he’s got a lot of gold uh Olympic medals to his his name it’s like I think a lot of people tend to um to have it and it’s just part of the uh the human condition and when you got your most recent event in Cairns where you placed um fourth effort you know that’s your best result of the full distance I man has that instilled a bit more confidence in in what you can do?

Yeah I think I think this year um a few of my results and my um progression in the professional field has given me um more confidence and a better sense that um you know I’m I’m doing the right things and I’m progressing the way I want to I want to be progressing um so yeah Cairns definitely Cairns definitely helped with that and a few races um at Husky the national long course champs that was another good race he um and even even races like um Hell of the West against guys like Tim Reed and Steve McKenna who you know the top Australian guys um you know rubbing shoulders with them a bit and and and um just having races like that where I don’t feel completely out of my depth um has definitely given me a lot more confidence moving forward yeah. And what about your let’s talk about your swimming so what was your background as a say junior or teenager in in swimming in the pool uh because I don’t think I’ve ever sort of

heard what that what that was yeah I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this um no I was I wasn’t a good um I wasn’t a really good athlete in any sense as a kid I wasn’t bad I was and I always enjoyed sport um and you know I remember going to going to swimming at you know 6 a.m. the school with my dad a few times a week um because I had seen I wanted to try and make the swim team but I made a swim team um but I enjoyed training and um probably you know maybe if I was in a swim squad as a kid maybe I would have done a little bit but but I was just swimming a few laps with dad before school you know so it wasn’t really shit or anything like that so I did a bit of that and I could I could swim okay but so nowhere near I know I swim swim squad now and I see these kids and they’re incredible um but I didn’t have a big background in it at all and then

I picked it up again um probably um really when I started try a bit more seriously like first year uni when I had a bit more time and obviously I knew how to swim freestyle and everything um but I’d have I didn’t have any kind of anything to go off and I remember being things just trying to hit just trying to slowly work my way towards swimming 130 for 100 in a 25 meter pool so I definitely started from you know uh reasonably low level swimmer without hits of experience and then gradually worked my way towards getting faster and fitter and a big thing of that um to be honest with you was working with you um and constantly annoying you and sending you videos and saying you know what I got to work on next friend what’s what’s my next so yeah well it’s and I’m thinking back to the very first video that um I don’t know if I took it or or um Hannah uh took it but um yeah just sort of thinking of your your strike then and and I mean

it’s really just been a a matter of refining kind of what you are doing to make it a bit more efficient and and effective and now I think you like you’ve got a really nice looking stroke especially not having come from that swimming background and it’s obviously working for you because I mean what’s what do you do at cans what would you swim time at cans um so I was in like the front group in in cans the main group um so I think there was Josh and Berger and Max Newman out of the water ahead of the main group I think they did um 46 minutes something like that and then excuse me um our main group so I’m 47 48 minutes something like that um yeah and I was I was I got stuck at the first can a little bit behind a few guys to work my way up so the the start of the swim for me was quite quite difficult um but I worked my way back on to Philips’s feet and and that’s something that um I do train a lot of is

having the ability to kind of surge at a faster pace and then recover a solid aerobic pace which you definitely need for um professional triathlon thing um because you know guys can sometimes accelerate around cans or um for example in the in the cans on um swim on the second lap of the swim we hit um all the age group swimmers and there was a distinct time Mike lost Tim Reid’s feet um and he had to surge through the middle of kind of age group is to get back on to the group so be ready to kind of to surge with him and and stay on his feet to then get back on to the group so yeah it’s um it’s been it’s been a process and I think the regular field and feedback that I’ve gotten from you has just been away from me to go okay for the next few months this is what I’m working um as well as you know training and getting fitter but when I’m training in the water being conscious of okay what’s you know for example last time we caught up

was really my realm just not catching as much water as my left um and and needing to dive that hand um deeper so that I can actually get that elbow up higher and and get a good pull and catch so yeah yeah and it’s I think it’s like those two things go together the technical side of it and you’re obviously you’re putting the work in in the pool which is um which you really need to um to do especially at the level that you’re competing at and how how do you train the those surges that you need to have what what sort of stuff you’re doing in training to a layer to surge and then bring that heart right back down I think um um it’s it’s common out of things like I swim um with the mountain creek swim squad here three days a week and we swim most of the time in our 45 two hours so it’s a it’s a fairly big session and and we’ll do quite often we’ll do like descending so you’re you’re slowly building into the set so you might do you know

you know four four hundreds three or four three hundreds two hundreds one hundreds and then you’re you’re trying to descend each one so the time you finish that 400 quite hard you’ve then got to go back to a 300 and try and keep it a fairly solid aerobic page like that and then my coach David gives us gives me sessions to do um like one specific one that we’ll often do before races is um ascend 800 600 400 200 and out of the thousand is um the first 250 meters is hard race start and then the 800 is 200 600 is 150 and then you’re and then you’re coming back off that race pace into a like a really high high end aerobic pace um just like the start of a races and then um and then recovering in between the 1008 for a minute so you start slowly building up lactate but then you’re learning to still hit a fast pace and come back and recover which I think

and and it doesn’t happen straight away when I first started doing that set with David it would kill me um and then slowly as we’ve kind of worked together over the last three years it’s gotten better and better and my paces have gotten faster and I’m able to hold a much higher pace for that for that effort and do you find now that you’ve got a pretty good sense of what you what time you’re going to do when you come in on the wall have you got a pretty good yeah yeah definitely definitely a lot better than I used to um I’d say for sure and and I think that probably comes with being able to dwell in that perceived effort as well um and I notice when I get fit I can keep you know I can keep the same perceived effort but swim you know two or three seconds per hundred foot and I did you know three or four months ago and is that what your a lot of your sessions pardon me are based off is that um would he would he write the sessions

as um you know perceived effort you know seven out of ten or is it more based off pace where’s it normally fit for most of your sessions um so with david shins um a lot of it is um a prescribed pace so um for example the session that the locky kieran and I did before and there’s quite a bit was um 4k broken up so we could break the 4k however we wanted but we had to hold um one 16 per 100 or below um and then so slowly as I got fit I would try and do more longer repetitions

with less recovery um but david wanted us to finish um making sure that we’d finished the 4k at a pretty solid effort so so we would finish we would always finish with some 100s of 50 years of short recovery and they might end up being a bit faster 116 in the end as we got fitter and fitter um whereas for swim squad we just we just went back to um I don’t know if you’re probably you’d be familiar with the a1 a2 a3 at so kind of like a1 being like an easy aerobic pace a2 being moderate and a3 being a fairly solid aerobic pace and then at like aerobic threshold so we’ve just gone gone back to that model but I always match that up with perceived effort um as well and it depends on how tired I am from the other triathlons that I’ve been doing

and one of the things that I’ve found a lot of uh swimmers that that I work with they’ve often been in triathlon or in swimming for only a couple of years and they are surprised or they think that the gap should be a lot bigger between the different sort of effort levels so often people say oh my max effort 100 is let’s say it’s 130 and my sort of aerobic level is 150 for example and they want to bring that 150 down to 130 they’re like why isn’t it closer to that 130 well it’s like you know for me like if I’ve gone all out 100 I might be a little bit under 60 under a minute from a push but um I could probably hold about 150s from a um you know if I’m just sort of sitting at that aerobic threshold so it’s like yeah there’s going to be a gap between those two effort levels and it’s really about developing those gears in between and it’s not much of a difference like if you look at the elite 5k or 10k swimmers there’s like a two second

difference between like um them sitting comfortably and then sort of really pushing it like it’s very minor and um having people be able to adjust their effort level um for those different paces is a real skill that takes time to to develop yeah uh for sure I think I think the the fitter I’ve gotten the gap has gotten smaller and smaller um like for example probably three years ago before I started with David and it’s probably reflected in my training like I’d probably tend to go towards more like if I’m swimming easy I’m swimming really easy and then if I’m swimming hard I mean like you know 500s like all out with a decent amount of rest and then I think I think what’s happened with swim squad and David’s um swims around that is um I’ve done a lot more of that more um higher aerobic swimming and threshold type swimming which is really brought in the kind of the zones a lot closer which like kind of what you’ve said there um which I think is

what you what you need for our sports um you’re going to need to be able to go out quite hard but then you need out a kind of settling at that higher end pace because if you’ve only swum you know 110 pace and then your easy pace is at 130 and you can’t hold us a space in the middle there you’re probably not going to be able to swim a good you know 2k 4k swim in a race yeah that’s exactly right it’s it’s all about uh being able to sit at that pace for longer periods of time and like you’re training the the body to be able to to do it and uh I had a girl she came to a clinic it’s probably last year now but um she said her her um her times she’d taken off like there’s 10 or 12 seconds per 100 but she wasn’t able to sustain it for more than like three of them and so what I said to her was all right so just try and go from like six seconds quicker than what you were when you first came to a clinic instead of 12 and just you know just train that effort level

that you can sustain it at because while you might be your top speed might be 12 seconds quicker the you know your aerobic threshold is not going to be 12 seconds so just um you’ve got to back it off a little bit and so um I think those just sets where you’re repeating repeating repeating that same sort of those times uh is is what you need and then over time that that pace will eventually come down with the uh with the work yeah and I think it’s it’s kind of surprising sometimes if you do that repetition work where you you know for example for you if you’re sitting at 115 and you’re swimming 115 20 or 30 of them off 120 or 125 for example so a very solid set um and then you know you do that for a couple of weeks or a couple of months of that similar type training you probably find your top end and your capacity to swim a 100 is quite good as well like you know a max effort because you’ve just been able to increase the economy and be able to

increase your engine so which has kind of helped everything um as well so and and it depends on obviously um sprinters in swimming and and in running for example they’re training quite differently to the long distance um runners or swimmers so you have to it’s specific to your sport and what event you’ve got and what’s your goal what your goal is too yeah that’s right I’ve actually been experimenting or playing around with the the form goggles recently so they um they sent me some of the the goggles and I’ve always been a bit old school again against technology um I’m not a fan of wearing a watch in in the pool because I kind of like to be in the moment and just use the stop clock to get my time I’ve been using the form goggles for my longer swims the sprint mines I don’t I don’t like to wear them but for anything that’s got a bit of distance in it I’ve I’ve really been enjoying it because it’s pretty amazing to have that instant

feedback of your split for each 50 you can see what your your pace is and you can see what what your pace is for the effort output now I or the effort level and I think I’d be able to I can judge that stuff well because I’ve swam for a long time and so I don’t think I need the goggles to tell me what pace I’m going at but it’s been really interesting to actually just see those small no those small changes in the times like uh you go for that first 50 and if I’m just sort of sitting in around um you know at an aerobic pace it’s like 37 mid every single time then you pick it up that little bit 36 nine like it’s it’s really consistent so that feedback I think can be really good for someone who might not have their gears dialed in just yet and they’re not sure of um the relationship between effort level and time so I’m actually a big fan of the um the form goggles and I never thought I’d uh say that about a sort of piece of technology in the

water but um they’re actually um really really good have you tried them yeah I tried them um but it would be interesting um it would be interesting to try them and and it would be an interesting experiment say you know for me for example if I’m trying to work on that right hand catching and I could swim to get that instant feedback I could try and swim at 70 not worrying too much about what my right hand’s doing to swing and I could do a hundred and see what I come in on and then and then try and work on the hand pulling and catching a lot better like we talked about and then get that instant feedback so I think if you do it for that specific purpose that could be could be really interesting and try and match it up with the different cues that you’ve been given and try and work on that specifically yeah that’s it that’s a really good example of how you could use them and often when I’m working with someone and we’re not sure whether this

might be the right change for their their stroke you know if we’re like if we look at them and there’s something that we should change but it’s like well it might it might improve you it might make you faster but it might not because there’s there’s a range of what elitism is do and it’s and we want to sort of experiment with that so that’s kind of what I’ll suggest them it’s like in a set of say 10 100s do one with your current technique do your second hundred with that change and just see if there’s a difference in in time and so with that instant feedback I think that’d be a really good way to um way to do it and your um so your background as a physio has that changed or has that impacted on the way that you train on your recovery or avoiding getting injured like has that had an impact at all on where you’re at um so so when I did my first physio um I worked in private practice um for a company

Melbourne and and we they were very focused on swimming which was for me so we would often go really early to the to the pool um during specific times of the year and go and work with these are elite swimmers um and we would go and do like pre-screening for them and um I think for me it was to see like we use specific tests and I think I’ve seen you use some of this stuff in in swimming videos where you’re talking about um the abduction external rotation test you know bringing the arms up ahead with the person on the table so we did a lot of that we did a lot of tests of like external rotation strength internal rotation strength thoracic rotation so I think having that background I’m quite aware um if I’m getting tight or weak in a certain area so I do do fairly regular strength and continuing stability work I don’t do anything I’ve done periods of heavy lifting in the gym but I don’t need that anymore um I think

I’m just more at a point where um David and I work more on like core and stability things I can do at home like with a kettlebell and um so it doesn’t make you super sore and tired so you can still hit your main triathlon training but I think having that background has made me aware of the importance of mobility but it was interesting working with the swimmers because you would often see and I didn’t I wasn’t super aware of how good they were say in their squad but you could sometimes see this it was like a range of swimmers and you could often see people who really mobile but often end up getting injured because they didn’t have enough stability and then you could see people who were more stable and stiff but didn’t necessarily have the mobility they needed to say get a really good cat um in their freestyle or or whatever um so I think what we would prescribe for someone who is um really mobile not so stable was more

stability work obviously and strengthening um and they tend to be the people who prefer stretching because they’re good at it um and then and then the you know the less mobile people but kind of stronger people um more stable people we would tend to describe more um you know phone rolling and light stretching and that kind of thing um so I’m aware I’m highly aware of the importance of that for swimming and I I don’t I don’t implement a whole lot of stretching I’ll be honest um but I do do a fed mobility and uh and a fed and quite a lot of stability work to try and stay strong which is important not just for swimming but for running and biking as well

and it’s interesting though because I distinctly remember you saying once when you were training for your Ironman did Ironman New Zealand wasn’t it and I distinctly remember you saying that spend that time on the TT bike took off quite a bit of your swimming um because the the kind of restrictions in mobility that gave you through your pecs and your back a thing from being in that kind of hunched over position so I’m aware of that and I do try and stretch out my pecs and my thoracic spine a bit but um yeah it’s hard when you’re doing all the other training as well yeah that’s right yeah I just remember and I’ve actually forgotten about that so I’m glad you um reminded me never to get back on a TT bike again um but I’ve kept that since I’m in New Zealand so it’s been five years it’s um you know I do yeah I do recall just like it was probably from memory about two seconds um two to three seconds per hundred

it slowed me down until I got back on top of that mobility work and it didn’t need to be a lot but yeah I just tend to be a bit more rounded I didn’t have that range above my head and my recovery was getting yeah it was a little bit hard to get over the top of the water and it’s just from spending all that time and you know hunched over position which I wasn’t wasn’t used to it I was just used to having swimmers flexibility and um yeah and so I had to get back on top of it so what does that mobility work and stability work look like for you what does that involve um so typically it can be anywhere from like 20 minutes to 45 minutes um like for example today after this recording I’ve got like a core and kettlebell workout but I’ll be doing like some kettlebell swings some squats some probably some lunges in there um as well as some just stuff like on a on a map um doing um things an exercise ball like planks and um roll

outs and things like that so so yeah just on stability probably more than mobility um but um so I try and do that probably anywhere from two to four days a week depending on what kind of cycle of training and block we’re in yeah yeah fantastic and I’ve found it doesn’t take a whole lot of that kind of work to have it to make a difference it’s um and it’s it’s often noticeable within the first like two or three weeks if you get going from doing nothing to at least a a little bit of it and I found this over like COVID last year I was doing maybe three strength sessions a week from down from zero to three a week because I was sort of taking a local swim club through some zoom sessions and I was doing it with them and then when I eventually got to get back in the water I felt really good and I didn’t lose that much fitness as a result because I maintained that strength I didn’t lose much um didn’t lose much speed I did lose the the fitness

it took me a while to get that back but yeah I think it’s um it’s really important but it’s uh easy for that to let that go by the wayside for those that um that aren’t sort of doing this as their profession because it can be hard to to fit it in so I think even like five or 10 minutes at night or before training can just make a a big difference and I often recommend five minutes at their bands before training or um you know some stretching at night like it’s the small things um can really can really help for people yeah that’s perfect I think it’s just something if you can get it in your routine like like you said before swimming doing you know you know you’ve got your three stretches that you need because you you ride the day before you do your swim squad the next morning so you do your pecs and your lats and and your thoracic rotation for example and that’s just part of part of your routine and um I think it’s like anything with with training or with being successful at any

it’s far better to be consistent over a long period of time than it is to do one or two one or two fantastic sessions that take 90 minutes but you don’t do it you know for three months after that because you can’t be bothered doing a 90 minute and then and that’s why I think David often prescribes just small things that um that I do before running or that I do you know on a an e-day I might do like today like a 45 minute core routine um that doesn’t doesn’t tax me much but it gets like you know the next day you can feel your hamstrings working when you’re riding or you can feel it’s working when you’re running um so you know you’ve worked those muscles a little bit but you’re not really sore and tired um so you can still have good quality in your other training which you know it’s the priority really yeah that’s right I think that’s the secret to getting people to to do things is give them either one thing or or make it really short

and it’s just like all right just just try this and that’s why you know when people do clinics with us or I’m working with them online I don’t want them to go like go go to the pool an extra session per week if you’re already going three times a week because it’s probably not going to happen they’re probably not going to be able to fit it in around family and work and stuff so we tell them we get them to just add a couple of drills they’re warm up when they’re at the pool and that’s it and and then they actually do it yeah and then they actually might have those improvements so it’s like just give people a small a small amount to do and then if they want to do more they will but um yeah yeah yeah that’s perfect and and that’s like of getting that by and like when I was in private practice as a physio you know one of the things I learned really early on was I only give someone you know one or two exercises max three exercises because

you know if they’ve got a sore knee tendon or whatever it is if you give them 10 exercises they’re not going to do it and and then you’re not going to get any improvements so you’re not going to get a bind in the reprocess and then they’re not going to see the benefit so um because they’re not doing it and and I’m guilty of that too like I’ve I’ve been to a podiatrist for my foot before all he said to do was roll it with a golf ball and I think I did it for two days and then forgot about it so so I know myself like you just have to make things super easy operated into a routine um and then then you can start seeing the improvements yeah yeah especially as a physio anytime I’ve gone to the physio I I don’t know if I’ve actually done the exercises that they’ve described like maybe maybe once like I’ve I think I’ve gone there with the the expectation of I’m going here and this is just going to fix it

and I don’t need to do anything outside of it and like I know that’s not the case but it’s just sometimes it’s just uh yeah it’s it’s just what we what we’re um just used to used to doing so like it’s just so easy to not do it yeah for sure and and it was hard as a therapist because I you can’t see some people come in thinking that you’re going to be able to fix them straight away and I think um what I’d do was and I think most people with therapists would try and do is put the emphasis back on them and like you know this is what you need to get yourself better um I’m I’m going to help you guide you through it but you know you’ve got to do the work and and that’s the same with like bringing you back to swimming for example like someone can come to your um session yes and you give them the great feedback you need you know your head position needs to be a little bit lower you need to um rotate a little bit more I try um and these are two or

three drills you need to do but if they don’t go and do those drills and they don’t focus on the changes they won’t see the improvement um so at the end of the day it comes back to being onto the individual I think I think that’s what’s helped my swimming a lot is I’m um I played a lot of different sports as a kid and I think being able to concentrate and having consciousness within the water so like over a time I really would would focus on those one to two cues that you gave me and then we would film again and go oh like you know my head position hasn’t changed okay I need to go back and work out again and and really work like focus on that and then okay that’s fixed now okay what’s next what have we got to work on next so I think being conscious in the water which is hard sometimes with triathlon if you um if you’re really tired from a run you did in the morning um or or whatever it is it’s hard sometimes and sometimes you go through the motions

but I think if you can get in the water more often than not really focused on trying to improve a specific aspect of your swimming you’re going to get a lot more out of it and and improve a lot faster yeah yeah that’s um that’s a big one because when someone hasn’t had any coaching or they’re just they’ve gone to the pool they’ve thought okay I want to start swimming and they’re just trying to they’re figuring out on their own like it’s and it’s awesome that people do that and they get into the sport and I love to see it then I find that when they get something to just sort of focus in on that’s um hopefully specific to them as they have so much more enjoyment because they they know exactly kind of what they need to do and yeah it might take me a while to kind of figure that out but with that focus you can go through your sessions with a lot more intent and a lot more motivation because you’re like oh I know if I if I practice

this and I’m thinking about my hand um then then I’m going to be getting faster and I know that it’s the same for me like I haven’t been filmed for a while so I’m I’m sort of like I feel like I need something to to work on because it’s it’s been a while since I’ve done it um but every time that I have sort of filmed myself it’s really uh exciting to sort of have something to to do and see that opportunity ahead of okay maybe I can drop a couple seconds here from my hundred times so it’s um it’s a very motivating thing to uh to to have in front of you

yeah for sure and I think I think that’s where motivation for most people probably comes from isn’t it is seeing like a progression um seeing it improve um no one wants to you know go to the pool three days a week or whatever it is and then six months less would mean exactly the same speed as as they were before and then I think that’s that’s where that starts to come back to

the sessions they’re doing and and the consciousness they’re having in the water and the end they’re having in the water and are they actually and I know we’ve talked about this before during some of our sessions of like actually changing something in the water it has to feel really really different so I’m at swim squad like this morning and I’m trying to get my right arm to catch and pull better I have to feel a little bit uncomfortable with what that arm’s doing otherwise I know it’s probably not doing what it’s meant to be doing like I think last time we talked about keeping the arms straight um straighter in the catch and the pool which actually turns out to kind of keeping the elbow higher and in a better position um and that feels really strange because I’m used to kind of thinking about my elbow bending um but I know that if I want it to change it has to kind of feel it has to feel different because if it doesn’t feel different

I’m I’m not I’m not changing what I’m meant to be yeah and here we’re talking for those listening with um for you having to go that little bit deeper through the catch and we were saying that that you might need to feel like you’ve got a straight arm as you’re going through that that pull phase in order to exaggerate how deep you you feel you’re going and it’s um it’s just it’s amazing how big of a change you feel like you’re making but when you look at the video it’s such a such a minor change uh yeah yeah it’s um but that’s yeah that’s just that’s just part of that uh that awareness but I think people who have listened to this podcast who have seen the videos I I think a lot of them are aware of how much they probably need to to change it but they still probably don’t allow themselves to experiment to the point where they’re they’re really overdoing it like it’s just I think it’s um it’s good just to like give

yourself at least a couple of laps where you’re just going way outside anything that feels like that feels acceptable with your stroke and just sort of see what happens with it because I mean I know personally like I’m very yeah it’s I always want to go back to what I’m used to so you’ve really got to kind of be comfortable getting uncomfortable with um with those sorts of changes yeah yeah for sure 100 um and like slightly off topic but I think something else that helped with me quite a bit when I started with David um three years ago was um he encouraged a lot um less use of different toys and I think I think probably a lot of triathletes to give this is kind of going straight towards pool boy and pool boy and paddles um as a way to kind of keep your hips higher and swim aerobically it’s quite this feels as you can kind of go faster at a less kind of perceived effort um and we still do use pool boy and paddles

but more for specific purposes like he might put in um for me with pool boy and paddles to use them at a moderate pace but to really try and feel my lats firing for example so I’ve got a specific purpose and I feel I can feel that in the water and then it’ll be okay to head off and now swim you know 200 free trying to have that same sensation so you’re firing the right muscles that you should be firing um so I think and and for a lot of my main sets he doesn’t put in any any kind of toys as such or whatever you want to call them um and I think that’s helped my swimming quite a lot I used to use that a lot more as like a crutch and I’m tired I’ll just throw the pool boy in but then you’re truly practicing what you’re doing um in the race so that kind of can take away from your main like focus and fitness for the for the race um but obviously everything still has a has a purpose and we still do use them but a lot less

than I used to yeah yeah I think that’s it’s a really good thing to to do like you want to be able to swim well without any any equipment and gear the one caveat that I have about reduction in using tools is for for some people I’ve found that like let’s say age group triathletes they they hate swimming if they don’t have their floaty pants on like their broken shorts that it might be or they don’t have a pool boy in they hate going to the pool and so if they weren’t to use those they it’s probably not going to get them to the pool so in that case I say we’re like use it wear it if you love swimming um and that gets you to the pool and that makes you enjoy it then then go for it um yeah for sure for sure and I mean in your case where yeah you’ve you’ve got to get your swim um you’ve got to improve your your swim when you’re racing in the elite level it’s um yeah I mean you’re going to be going to the pool anyway

you’re going to um yeah you’re going to have to go without the the equipment so um yeah I think it’s a it’s a it’s a balance and it’s sort of case by case thing but I yeah a similar thing like I have encouraged a lot of people to wean themselves off the off the tools um but then I’ve also encouraged people to um use a bit more like for example I had someone email me this morning he’s struggling to make 25 meters um without fatiguing so um and I said and one of the things I said to him was just try using a pool boy least for a little bit to get some of that swim fitness and swim strength up so that when you do sort of take it out you’ve at least got some of that um that feeling of the water and you’ve got some of that that strength behind you um but then I’ve got to be mindful of right we don’t want him to be reliant on that stuff um and then not be able to take them take them away so yeah they’re they’re good um they can be good

to use but I mean I’m a similar thing when I was training for Ironman um I was doing probably one one main session a week which was just like my longer aerobic stuff it was just sort of strength based with pool boy or pool boy and paddles then after that the majority of it was um was swimming and I think that really helped when it came to the the race itself yeah and I think like you said it’s case by case I mean if you if if you need to use those things to get yourself born to swim well then absolutely do it I think just for me I think David identified that um for me to move forward I needed to do a quite a bit more swimming and my main sets about it um in order to progress and to I think it was a case of really trying to develop a better feel for the water and a better better catch which I needed to do um just swimming and just just swimming freestyle without with anything else um kind of holding me up in the water but but again yeah it is it is case by case for sure

and um in terms of how can people find out you are just prolific on Instagram uh you’re just non-stop I’m joking so um we sort of jaded out this um earlier but where can people find you one um yeah online and um find more of your journeys you’re going forward yeah so probably the best way is um my instagram’s um simon underscore hern h e a r n um and also have a website um simonhern.com and um we try and keep putting up you know my races and my race results um to keep people we’re interested updated um but yeah social media is definitely not my strong point um I’m I prefer to just in and be in the process but um yeah it is something I need to get better out for sure look a little bit less time training and racing a little bit more time posting I think that’s that’s the kick the real success will come from that

but no it’s it’s great um the seeing where you’ve started and where you’re at now and um you I think very thoughtful and considered in your approach to um your improvement and I think that’s given you a lot of patience in um and just putting in the work and knowing that those results will come so I’m just really excited about um what’s to come in the next couple of years for you and just really enjoyed watching your journey so thanks for being on the podcast and uh yeah wish you all the best thanks Brent thanks for having me on and um thank you for your support for for this coming year I really enjoyed it thanks mate cheers thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

The post Patience And The Power Of Long Term Thinking with Simon Hearn appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Nic Owens who is based in Sydney. Nic mentioned that he has been stuck with his time for over a year and now recently has made a significant improvement with his time. I want to get him into the podcast so that he can share what he did to achieve this huge improvement

01:14 Reaching 17 Minutes Per Kilometer
03:21 Does It Feel Different?
04:34 Needing To Stretch Time Between Each Stroke
05:48 It Made A Lot Of Sense
08:33 Take-Aways From The 5 Day Catch Challenge
10:57 Enjoyment In Swimming
13:25 Technique and Consistency
15:37 Room For Improvement

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Join the Effortless Swimming membership:
Effortless Swimming Freestyle Clinic

it was just a real struggle to get to a kilometer. And now like I really look forward to jumping in the pool and I honestly feel like I haven’t got that slow down point anymore, like I can just power through and yeah, get through a kilometer a lot easier. 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 189 and my guest today is Nick Owens and Nick’s based in Sydney and he’s recently had a pretty big improvement in his swimming. So Nick, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Brent. It’s good to be here. You emailed me, I had a look at the date, it was early May and you said that you’re one kilometer times average between 19, 20 minutes and you said, I’d love to get down to 17 minutes for okay in the next 12 months.

And then just recently, so like a month later pretty much you said I did a, I did a 1702, I believe it was. And so it happened pretty quickly. So I wanted to get you on the podcast to share what you did to have such a big improvement in such a short space of time because the downside to sharing something like this is sometimes people might feel like this is the normal people can just drop two minutes, three minutes from their times, but I think there’s obviously some things that we can take away from it. So where are you at a couple of months ago? What’s your swimming background? And then what have you done recently to change it? Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so in terms of my swimming background I came to swimming very late.

I don’t think I really kind of got into it until I was in my 40s. And I was working on a show in Melbourne at the time about four or five years ago and I was swimming maybe three or four times a week. And I’d do a kilometer and at a time and I was doing okay back then. And then I stopped swimming for a while and then I’ve recently got back into it. And I suppose for the past year I haven’t been able to get any faster. So I’ve been sitting around like 19 and a half, 20 minutes per kilometer. And I just wasn’t getting anywhere. And then I can’t remember how I came across you but I may have been through a friend recommendation and I had a look and I saw that you had the five day catch challenge for $10 and I’m like, well look, can’t hurt. Give it a go. And so it just coincided with having six weeks off work.

And so I thought, I’ll give it a really, really good go. I’ll swim every day. And that’s what I did for about four or five weeks. And all the drills combined with swimming every day I just saw a rapid improvement.

Did you feel the difference when you were swimming so much quicker? Did your strike feel any different to what it used to? Yeah, it absolutely did.

I’d always felt like I wasn’t really very effective in my swimming. Four years ago, I kind of got down to like 17 and a half but I always felt like I was out of breath and that I was just kind of motoring half the time. And it felt like I was going nowhere. So I really, really noticed the difference from kind of day one with the catch challenge, thinking more about the stroke, the way my hands entered the water. And I don’t know, it just kind of really clicked quite quickly. Yeah. I’ve had that feedback a bit because the first module’s on the entry and getting that right. And I’ve had that feedback from quite a few people that that has been one of the things that’s really changed their strike. So what were you doing previously where perhaps it wasn’t, you weren’t entering right and it led to less of an effective catch and pull under the water? Yeah, absolutely. I think, look, I think I just wasn’t getting much pull in my catch.

And I think I was,

I saw someone doing it the other day. They were like, they’d swim with their lead arm and their other arm would follow in almost straight away. So it just wasn’t very effective in moving forward. Like, I think from the hand entering the water to the catch was way too quick. And that’s why I kind of felt like, just kind of, yeah, I needed to stretch out the time between each stroke, which I hadn’t really been aware of before. And so, the catch challenge, really kind of focused on that, elongating your arm as it comes through the water and just the simple thing of the angle of your hand to get rid of all the bubbles that helps you kind of lose all that drag. So, yeah, I guess it was just kind of focusing a lot more on what I was doing rather than just,

Yeah, and just trying to figure it out. I guess, had you had any instruction previous to going through the catch challenge? Not at all, no. And I think that was probably a large part of the problem because, you know, I mean, you jump in the pool, you think you can swim and you can swim, but you’re just not really swimming effectively. So I found it really, really, I don’t know, it was really inspiring like having that coaching because it just kind of makes sense. The things that you said and the breakdown of each part of it, it really made sense, the mechanics of it and how it all fit together to then, you know, equal the whole stroke. So, yeah. 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 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 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 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. What were some of the things that you picked up and you learned from there, from the challenge that you hadn’t heard before and then you’re able to implement it into your stroke and you like had that switch where you’re like, ah, okay, that makes sense and I feel it. Well, I really, like I don’t think I’d effectively kind of use my lats to really pull me forward. I think it was all kind of arm work before. And so that really kind of struck a chord. I hadn’t really heard of the power diamond before and that kind of opening your stroke to bring your lats into being effective. So we made up that term, so it’s no surprise that you haven’t heard of it before. Yeah, that’s what I hadn’t heard. And I sort of adapted that from, there’s a former Olympic coach and swimmer,

Gary Haring from New Zealand, who mentioned the shape that you want under the body is like a diamond. And then I sort of took that and we called it the power diamond because it’s really one of the most powerful parts of your stroke. But it’s a very good visual way to think of how you want to be under the body because a lot of some of that we’re working with in clinics and online, that pulls straight through with a straight arm. And it’s very much sort of upper shoulder and it can really load up the shoulder. Whereas with that bit of bend in the arm, you tend to sit, set yourself back into the lats a little bit more. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny you should say that too because I’ve been complaining months ago, like at work saying about how my right shoulder had been really, really sore. And this friend of mine who’s also a swimmer, they’re like, oh, well, that’s a really common thing from swimming. And since having done the training with you

and going through the drills and everything, like my shoulder is fine now. So it’s really helped take the focus off, just the arms and shoulders doing the work and splitting it to your back, which is like your biggest muscle set there is. So, yeah, it was really, really, it was quite eye-opening. Like to think, wow, I’ve been swimming this way for years and it’s so ineffective. So yeah, it was a good realization. Has it changed your enjoyment of swimming at all?

Absolutely, yeah. Because it was, like I did enjoy swimming before, but it would, I’d often get in the pool and after like 300 meters,

to me it felt like the lactic thing kicked in and I’d just really struggled. And sometimes I’d be like, oh, it was just a real struggle to get to a kilometer. And now, like I really look forward to jumping in the pool and I honestly feel like I haven’t got that slow down point anymore, like I can just power through and yeah, get through a kilometer a lot easier. So yeah, I’m definitely enjoying it a lot more.

And I think progress is a big part of that too, right? Like you’re improving something and you can see that there’s hope to get fast and you have a few ideas on what that can be. And it’s really motivating when you have that progression in front of you because no one likes to stand still and be stagnant with their times, right? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And it is one of those things that’s an easy thing to do to just go, oh, to just kind of plot along.

But it’s like, yeah, you’re never gonna get anywhere doing the same thing over and over. So yeah, it was really good to do some coaching. Yeah, I’ve found that in other areas of life, like with swimming, I’ve done it for a long time. So I’ve kind of got that understanding, but when it comes to say surfing, which I didn’t do as a kid, when I’ve got some coaching and I’ve got a couple of ideas and they’re easy to remember, like some good cues like power diamond, for example, some good cues in surfing I’ve found have really helped. And then the same thing goes for sort of other areas as well. So yeah, it just takes a couple of simple ideas, I think to really give you a lot to work with, especially if you’re coming from no coaching whatsoever. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like I’ve never done swimming drills before and it just, I mean, it makes complete sense to kind of get that muscle memory built in to each part of the stroke.

And yeah, it was really, really effective way to kind of get it in your brain and then transfer it to your muscles. So yeah. And I think the consistency would have helped as well. If you were swimming every day for five weeks or six weeks there, like I’ve got no doubt, obviously that’s gonna help too, but yeah, no doubt the technique will be a part of it too, but it’s really those two things, isn’t it? It’s technique and then it’s the consistency and the training that you do when you put those two together, that’s where most people tend to see some really good results. Yeah, absolutely. Like it was, the swimming every day, like it was so easy to see the gains coming because, you know, like swimming alternate days, yeah, it just felt like shifting along at the same level. And this was a really good way to kind of build on each day with each set of drills. And yeah, it was very effective. How did you structure those workouts?

So you do that, like we’ve got that, obviously that suggested workout for each day. Did you then do your one kilometer after it? Like what did your training look like during that period? I didn’t, I probably should have, but I don’t know, one kilometer at the moment is kind of my cutoff point where I can kind of get to. I think if I’d have done the drills with a kilometer after I just would have been out for the rest of the day. So what I do is I’ll just alternate the days. So I’d run through the drills of say the day one catch and then the next day I’d apply it to the kilometer and then day two catch. And then I just ran through that for a few weeks. So yeah, for me that was the most effective way so that I could, you know, get the drills in my head, work through them and the next day then apply the stroke. So. Yeah, that’s a good approach. And that’s what I mentioned as well on there is that you don’t have to do it five days in a row,

follow this exactly. You might need to take some time between because you can’t swim. Most people can’t swim every day and sometimes they’ve got squad and that sort of thing. So I think that’s a really good way to do it. And it’s obviously ingrained those habits pretty well. So. Absolutely. Is there, do you feel like there’s, well, I was gonna say, do you feel like there’s hope to break that 17 minute mark? I mean, you’re two seconds off it. You’re probably gonna be busy with work for a little while but does that feel attainable somewhere in the 16 range now? Oh, it definitely does. I mean, I should caveat that 17-02 that was the fastest that I’ve done. And since then I’m kind of averaging between 715 and 730 which is still, you know, 10 seconds faster 100. So I absolutely think there’s room for improvement because I think that, you know, that’s one part of the swimming that I’m getting my head around is, you know,

the stroke and the catch. I think I can improve in my kicking and I think I’ve also like, I’ve never ever been able to tumble turn. So, you know, that could help improve things as well. So, but yeah, I’m definitely more positive like than a few months ago. Like I honestly felt like a few months ago, well, is this it? Is this as fast as I’m gonna get? Because I’m not getting any younger. So I thought, oh, well, maybe this is it. But no, definitely my goals are shifting and it would be great to get into the 16s anywhere. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s, yeah, look, maybe if you’re around towards like one 15 pesos or so, you know, maybe it might be this is it and it might be a slow decline until, you know, 50, 60, 70. But, you know, when you’re around the two minute mark, there’s always stuff you can do. And, you know, you’re getting into the, what is it, low 140s? I’m trying to think, yeah, under low 140s. And so those, you know, 130s are not too far away.

Hopefully. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, and that’s the thing. You’ve only worked on the really the catch part of the stroke. I had a previous guest who was on probably two, well, it’d be a couple of weeks when this gets released. But he went through the five core principle trainings inside our membership. And so like the first one’s on breathing and relaxing the second one is on finding your balance. And, you know, kind of takes you through the other aspects of the stroke. And he was going through that. And after the second one, he emailed me and this was after recording the podcast because he had a, I think it might have been like a 10 second per 100 improvement as well. And he emailed me and he said, oh, I’ve dropped another five or seven seconds per 100 going through once he was up to that second core principle. So there’s always stuff you can improve when you work on the other aspects of the stroke. And yeah, but I think the catch is one of the main ones

because it’s where you get most of your propulsion. So yeah, I think it’s fantastic that you’ve been able to make that improvement. And I appreciate you sharing this on the podcast because I love hearing stories like this, especially when you thought you’re a stark and you’re like, this is it, there’s nothing I can do. And you’re able to make such a huge improvement. So well done on that massive improvement. Oh, thanks so much, mate. And honestly, like thank you. All the tips, like it’s just helped immensely. Like, and it really is, it’s such an enjoyable thing to swim and it’s something anyone can do. So, you know, yeah, it’s great. Thank you. Ah, you’re welcome. Yeah, that’s a good thing about swimming, isn’t it? You can, I’ll say 80, 90 year olds, I mean, my Nan, who’s 92, she still goes to the pool a couple of times a week. So I’ve got no excuse if I’m, if I don’t get to the pool at least once a week if my 92 year old Nan is still going.

So yeah. That’s it. Keeps you young. It certainly does. That’s it. Thanks again for being on the podcast, Nick, and all the best with your swimming in the future. Oh, thanks so much, Brendan. It’s been fantastic. Cheers. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post CASE STUDY: Stuck At The Same Speed For 4 Years Then Wiping 10 Seconds Off In One Month with Nic Owens appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Brett Hawke. Brett is a former Australian swimmer, two-time Olympian and Commonwealth Games medalist. He has competed and coached at the elite level and has a number of athletes who did very well at the recent Olympics. In this episode, Brett talks about his coaching, as well as some of the methods he likes to use and how likes to train sprinters.

01:42 Significant Race in 2020 Tokyo Olympics
03:58 Bruno Fratus Winning His First Medal
05:14 From Elite Swimmer To Coaching
07:38 Sometimes You Need To Stop And Let It Go
08:52 Talents In The Australian Team
13:09 Fundamentals Of Sprinting
15:51 Beating World Records
18:08 We Tend To Put Limits With Ourselves
19:29 Favorite Things About Coaching
21:36 Psychology Of Sports
27:48 Coaching Style

Inside with Brett Hawke

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You know, you as an athlete, you go in, you work hard for a couple of hours, you go home, you kind of switch off. Coaches never get to switch off. They’re always thinking, they’re always feeling, they’re always preparing, you know, the next workout and they’ve got multiple athletes to think about. 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 none other than Brett Hawke. Brett is a former Australian swimmer, two-time Olympian and Commonwealth Games medalist. And Brett has competed at the elite level. He’s also coached at the elite level and he had a number of athletes who did very well at the recent Olympics with one of his swimmers, Bruno Fratis, getting a bronze medal in the 50 freestyle at 32 years of age and that’s his first individual medal.

So we talk a bit about those things as well as his coaching, some of the ways and the methods that he likes to use coaching and also how he likes to train sprinters because his primary background and coaching experience is in coaching sprinters. And so we talk about what you can do to become a faster swimmer. So let’s get into the episode with Brett Hawke. He also hosts his own podcast called Inside with Brett Hawke. He has a number of elite coaches and swimmers on the podcast and draws stories out of them in a way that I haven’t heard before on a swimming podcast. So that’s also fantastic if you haven’t come across it. Let’s get into the episode. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Brett Hawke. Brett, thanks for being on the podcast. Yeah, Brent, thanks for having me, mate. You’ve been very busy the last 10 days or so, live streaming all of the footage from the Olympics. So watched every race.

Is there anything that stood out to you in terms of, I mean, you know a lot of the athletes there, you’ve probably spoken to a lot of them. What stood out to you was any significant races for you? Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of great racing. I thought it was an excellent Olympics. You never know what you’re going to get kind of coming off the year of training that a lot of these athletes had and the difficulties they faced. So in terms of how fast they’d swim, I think that was surprising. How deep it was going to be. I think that was surprising and just the great racing. You know, I think that’s the one thing you’re never going to take away from us as humans is our ability to rise and compete. And when you put on your country’s colors and the flag and your name on your cap, I mean, you’re going to have epic battle. So I think we saw a lot of that. And there was a couple of surprises. Obviously the first night, the men’s 400 free young kid, 18 year old from Tunisia.

I think we surprised the whole world with with his epic swim. Winning from Lane, nothing didn’t even know he existed, you know, and I saw him saw it, saw him out in Lane, kind of made a bit of a joke of like, oh, this kid’s going to win it from Lane, and then all of a sudden he just he just kept going. It was like, hang on, this thing turned from a joke to a reality real fast. That was pretty epic to watch that. You know, watching Lily King get beat in the hundred breast to young girl, Lydia Jacoby from from out in Alaska. I mean, I thought that was an epic race. And to see to see Lily get beat, I was very shocked with that. And and then look, there was there was great racing throughout a bit. You know, my my boy that I coach had a personal side of it there as well. Bruno Fratis in his third Olympics. Swimming the 50 freestyle for the third time in the final, you know, finally getting on the podium and the emotions that came out from that

was pretty epic to watch all that and be part of that, you know.

Yeah, how is it for you just watching that happen? Because, I mean, for him, it just looked like this meant the world to him. And obviously, you know, third time is 32 years of age to get his first medal. Then how is it for you watching that? It feels the same. Like I feel what he feels, you know, we’re connected spiritually in that moment, you know, like you try and give them everything you can, but you can’t swim the race for them, you know. And so you just have to sit back and watch it unfold. And just to see the outpouring of emotion for him and what it meant to him. We actually did a podcast today and we talked about it and I’m going to release it. And then it’s something to share because I think it’s it’s it’s a great story. But it’s kind of what we all go through, you know, you know, you have success and failure. But ultimately, you know, a lot of a lot of what we do, you know, your identity gets wrapped up in that as well.

And I think for him, he was never going to be fully satisfied with his life in general if he never got on the podium. I think there was there was always going to be something that you know, he’d he’d live live with some sort of regret for the rest of his life if that didn’t happen. So for him to fulfill that was pretty special.

And what about when for you being going from in a competitive summer and elite summer to then coaching? How did your perspective change or what was different for you going from being a competitor to then to then coaching? Because I think like what I found when I started coaching is you you obviously see a very different side of it. And I guess you you’ve got a broader view of things. But when you’re in there in your training, you’re very it’s just single focus and you don’t really get to take a step back and get a look at the bigger picture in a lot of on a lot of occasions. Yeah, I always felt like I was the one that was sacrificing the most as an athlete. Like, you know, like you’re so self-centered, you’re like, I’m the one doing this. It’s me, me, me, me, me. And then when you become a coach, you realize how much your coaches actually put into it and sacrifice. And, you know, you as an athlete, you go in, you you work hard

for a couple of hours, you go home, you kind of switch off. Coaches never get to switch off. They’re always thinking, they’re always feeling, they’re always preparing, you know, the next workout and and and they’ve got multiple athletes to think about. So, you know, when I started coaching, I just went back and started picking up the phone and calling all my old coaches and thanking them, you know, like, I am so sorry, I just didn’t get it, you know. So, yeah, I’ve got a lot more appreciation for the work that put coaches put into this, you know, and I’ve had moments where it’s been, you know, so fulfilling for me. And then I’ve had moments where it’s been completely draining and I’ve wanted to take a step back from it. And, you know, the Aussies right now are in lockdown, you know, coming back from Tokyo, they’ve got a two week quarantine up in Darwin. I think it’s kind of a blessing in disguise for some of the coaches

to be able to just decompress, you know, it’s very emotional to go through an Olympic cycle and then also to go through what they just went through the most successful team in Australian swimming history. So I’ve been able to chat with a couple of them in quarantine and knowing, hearing them, just feeling like it’s been a blessing to just kind of decompress. Yeah, yeah, I spoke to Kim Alburton, the Aussie distance swimmer yesterday. And she, like, she was sort of saying similar thing. It’s like, it’s really quite weird to go from the the biggest moment in your life for a lot of them to then just like pretty much isolation, essentially. But that’s, you know, can can can be quite good. How did how did you go as a swimmer going from those big meets to those real highs to then coming off the back of it? Like in terms of motivation, in terms of going all this all this fanfare to then, you know, pretty quiet.

How’d you balance that? Yeah, it’s tough, mate. You know, whether you have success or, you know, you feel like you fail in some respects, I think there’s a period of time where you just need to just stop and let it go, you know, whether whether it is the crazy success or or the failure. It’s like, you’ve just got to decompress. You got to let it go. And then and then for me, it was always like a three or four week period where I was like, all right, I don’t want to think about it. And then and then, you know, coming at the back end of that, then I’d start to think, all right, before my before my thoughts disappear, I need to write this down. You know, what did I learn? What how how could I improve? And then it was like, OK, I’m ready to get back into it now. But I certainly needed that month away just to just to let all that stuff go. And and sometimes with disappointment, it’s hard, you know, it’s like you want to get straight back into it and get going again.

But I think, you know, especially off an Olympic cycle, you’ve got to take time to decompress.

Yeah, absolutely. Being a part of the 2000 Olympic team, you know, it seems as though in terms of some of the success and then perhaps some of the culture of the Australian team, what we’ve got now was very similar to what happened 21 years ago. Have you sort of seen that that comparison? Or have you sort of thought about that? Yeah, look, I think it certainly helps when you have talent, you know, like I’ve been part of I’ve been part of teams as a coach, where I’ve like, you know, things are running so smoothly because you’ve got all the talent in the world, you know. Back in 2000, with the with the talent we had on that team from from the top down, I mean, it was stacked. I was I was the fastest swimmer in Australia and I wasn’t even, you know, a highly regarded swimmer on that team. You know, it was like we had all these superstars. So, you know, we went through a period where we lost some of that talent.

And I think now where, as you can see, the women’s team, especially is completely stacked. The men are coming into their own, they’re starting to get that talent back. I just think they went through a period of time where it, you know, you got to you got to wait for that talent to emerge again. And now it just seems like there’s a plethora of of of wealth of talent in in Australia right now. And they’re making the most of it, you know. Yeah, yeah, you’re right. It certainly helps. I mean, all it takes is a couple of amazing swimmers on the team. You know, you’ve got you’ve got Titmuss, you’ve got McKay and that alone. It’s like so many gold medals there, right? And that could be the difference between I’ve been the worst Olympics ever to the best one ever. Yeah, that’s what it takes sometimes. Exactly. And look at the US teams, you know, in the past, they’re always writing one particular athlete like even this year,

Caleb Dressel winning five gold, you know, previously, it’s been Michael Phelps that’s been winning multiple. So, you know, it’s not the whole team that ever at the US level. They’re not all winning gold medals. But, you know, they have a couple of athletes that have always done really well. And I think that’s what Australia has has done this time round, too, is like, look, it wasn’t like the whole team swam extraordinarily well, but certainly a good proportion of the team came away with some medals. And I think that was super cool to see. Yeah, watching Dressel swim like in the relays at the start, he was swimming well, but not outstanding in the relays in the beginning. I thought, OK, this would be interesting because from the 2019 World Champs, he dominated or he was dominating. So maybe it was like late 2019. And then I was thinking, OK, we’ll see what happens, you know, at the Olympics. But then he just he worked into the meet and he swam incredibly well.

Yeah, I’ve been fortunate enough to know Caleb, you know, since he was in high school, actually recruited him to try and come and swim for me. I went to his house and had dinner with his parents a couple of times and basically begged him to come swim for me. But he ended up picking Florida. And look, so I’ve seen him from from a young kid all the way to now. And I knew what he was capable of. I knew what he was potentially going to do. And, you know, I was preparing an athlete to beat him. But, you know, I know

Caleb’s talent and and and once he gets going, once he does get in a role, he’s very, very difficult to stop. And I think we saw that in Tokyo.

Yeah, yeah, it’s just incredible. And to get that world record to in the hundred fly. Oh, yeah, I think they saw three three world records, well, not only, but to have one of those was pretty special, especially on the the last of the second last day. Yeah, I was actually disappointed. He didn’t get the hundred hundred freestyle and the 50, you know.

That’s an old athlete of mine. You know, Caesar Ciello, I coached him in 2008. He broke the world records in 2009. And so I would I want those world records to go. And, you know, they came close. Him and Kyle Chalmers both came real close in the hundred. But I certainly felt like they were they’re capable of getting that hundred freestyle world record. I think I think it was a tense action packed hundred. But at some point soon when they get a chance, I think both those guys will knock that off.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, there’s something so fast and it’s so close to it. So it’s going to be good to see what’s what happens there. And with them, I mean, you’re primarily you’re a sprinter. You work with a lot of the best sprinters in the world. What what are some of those things that you you would say kind of like the fundamentals of of sprinting? Some of those things that you try and pass on to the athletes that you work with?

Look, the first thing is with sprinting is if you want to race fast, you’ve got to train fast, you know, like there used to be like when I when I trained back in Australia, we used to a lot of threshold sets. I never do threshold with my sprinters anymore. Like that’s a thing that used to be a big chunk of my training that is completely eliminated these days. So, you know, guys that used to swim 22 seconds in the 50 and 40, 49s, 48 highs, I mean, now everybody’s swimming 21 in the 50 and everybody’s swimming 47 in the 100. So it’s like training has shifted and it’s changed. So, you know, everybody’s training fast now. So that’s an essential element is like you’ve got to go fast in training. Recovery is a huge part of sprint sprinting. You know, like it’s it’s the same thing. If you want to build muscle, you’ve got to recover and then you’ve got to come back and work the muscle again and then you’ve got to recover again.

It’s the same with speed. You know, if you want to get faster, you’ve got to hit the speed and then you’ve got to allow time to rest and recover so that and come back. It’s like a building block. You’re slowly building blocks. And that’s what I do with my sprinters is, you know, at the start of the season, they’re not very strong and powerful and fast. And so we’re trying to build strength. We’re trying to build power, explosiveness. And these are things that you can improve over time. You know, you can get more explosive. You can get stronger, obviously. You can you can hold a lot more water in your training. You can improve your kick. You can improve your pool. I mean, these these are variables that you can manipulate. And that’s what we do is we look at what does it take to swim a really fast 50? What are the components of a fast 50? And where where in those components do I need certain attributes? You know, where do I need to be explosive?

Where do I need endurance? Because you need endurance at the end of a 50. When you’re going at 21 speed for the first 35, it’s very easy to to shorten up. It’s very easy to get out of your technique and break apart and fall apart. And so that’s where the endurance factor comes into speed. You know, speed, endurance is a huge part of our training.

And so we look at all these elements and we kind of build. It’s like building a race car. We build the perfect race car and hopefully at the end, it’s got the most horsepower and it’s got the you know, it’s got the best frame and, you know, it can hold itself together. So, you know, ultimately, we’re always trying to get faster. You know, we never get to a point where we think, all right, that’s the top end of our speed. We’re always like, all right, how can we get faster? And so that’s why for me, it’s like I’m looking at those world records and I’m thinking, you know, I want to go beyond that. I know where the I know where we’ve been, but I want to go here. And so I was like, how do we get there? So part of it is exploratory, you know, like we’re still exploring. But there’s also parts like you said, where you’ve got to have those parts in your training.

That’s what I’ve really enjoyed post. I think what was it 2011 when they got rid of the suit? So to see those world records eventually getting knocked down those old suit records, it’s like, all right, it’s and and previously in 2011, I was like, man, there’s no way that they’re going to be able to to beat these world records without the suit. It’s just it’s not going to happen. But then it’s it’s it’s finding different ways, finding ways to do it better, improve their technique. And, you know, a lot of those world records have have gone. There’s not too many standing, is there? No, you know, and there’s a there’s a psychological part to that, too. A lot of people when they first when we break in war records, people were saying, oh, they’ll never get to those world records. But my my take on that was, well, we’ve seen we’ve seen humans do it, whether they’re in a suit or not. We’ve still seen it with their own eyes.

So, you know, it’s possible. So even removing the suit, it still should be. I’ve seen somebody swim 46 and 100. I know what it looks like. I know it’s humanly possible as well. So once you have somebody break a barrier, it doesn’t matter what the barrier is. Once you see it happen, people tend to flock to the mean, you know, they get closer and closer and and that’s what we’re seeing. I mean, we just saw a 16 year old boy swim 47.3 in the 100 freestyle, you know, a few weeks ago. It’s like, if a 16 year old boy can do it, you know, that fast, then, you know, a man can swim 46 something soon. So it’s coming. And yeah, we’re we’re figuring it out.

Yeah, yeah, some exciting talent coming through. I mean, watching Popovich swim, watching the South Koreans, he just died that last 50 of the 200, but took it out with such speed. And it’s exciting to see what’s what’s what’s coming down the pipeline. And I mean, you got a brief chat to Popovich. I don’t know how much you spoke about this on it, but from what I sort of read, he’s like been training in a 30 he was training in a 33 meter pool. Average blocks like we started out in very humble, humble beginnings by the sounds of it. Yeah, I would I would think so. I haven’t gone too deep into it. I only had about eight minutes with him. So I certainly want to go longer and extend the next time we speak. But and and dig into all that. But, you know, there there are people out in the world that don’t put limitations on themselves. You know, we we tend to put limits on ourselves, you know, but people that have less than us sometimes figure figure figure out ways.

And I think kind of that’s been the story in COVID, too, is like when we’ve had these lockdowns, like I was even training, you know, a guy I’m sure you know the story, Cody Simpson. I was training him. Here’s this musician coming from music, hadn’t hadn’t really swum in 10 years. And we go into a lockdown situation. We have to figure out how to swim fast, you know, under really hard, harsh circumstances. So we did it. Multiple other people did it. I’m sure that you you had your challenges doing what you were doing. So I think you just figure it out and adapt, you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And thinking like what have been some of your favorite were some of your favorite things about coaching? What do you what do you really get a kick out of?

That’s a good question. You know, I really enjoy watching people maximise their potential, you know, whatever that potential is. I get a kick out of people breaking their own personal barriers, you know, I do like high end performance. I love that the top end swimming, you know, for me, I’m an Olympic coach and I always will be. I’ll never I’ll never coach club, you know, it’s just I I do clinics now and I go around and I teach young kids, but it’s not something that I’m passionate about. I’m passionate about high level swimming. And so I do like working with professional athletes. I like the professional mindset. That’s probably why I love love Bruno so much. And we have such a great relationship is because he does have such a professional mindset. So for me, you know, the top end of the sport is really exciting. I love competing for Olympic medals. That’s the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.

You know, like to be the best in the world is something really special for me. And, you know, it’s not for everybody. I’m not saying everybody has to have that approach. But I certainly love competing for a wall, championships and Olympic medals for sure.

I think I remember hearing a story. You might have told on one of your podcast episodes, but it was at one of the meets like maybe Pampax or something where you might have said to Grant Hackett, like you feel like he wasn’t fired up going into the 1500. And so you like said that the US guys would they were talking about this is going to be their meat. Like, yeah. And I think like as an athlete, that’s a really good way to fire people up. But as a coach, like I find that you find that you can sort of press the right buttons. If you know this from a well enough, you know, the right buttons to press, especially those that are so competitive, it’s you can find ways to really cheer them up. So is that would you rather go back to that that story and what happened there? Yeah, listen, the psychology of the sport to me is huge. And, you know, even Bruno, when I was talking to Bruno today about him in the in the ready room at the Olympics, you know,

he could tell who was going to beat and who was going to be tough, you know, like, you, you know, you know, who you’ve got a got a mental edge over. And, you know, other ones that are like, OK, this guy’s switched switched on. But in terms of the Grant Hackett story, it was just like, you know, we have a very close relationship. You know, we were roommates on on occasion on the Australian team. So I had seen him and and the way that he had approached his racing. And he was just very fatigued at the end of a long couple of weeks of racing and were at the Pampax. He was racing the Americans. He hadn’t been beaten in something like six years at the time. And so I knew I was seeing something that was a little bit unusual in him, like fatigue in and a different type of mindset, where he was kind of being a little bit negative. And and so you just use your coaching skills, you know, at that point. And this is when I was a swimmer on the team.

So I was already starting to coach back then. So and I think that’s what I love about coaching is the psychology, the mental side of it. You know, like I don’t think we’re really figured out, you know, the space between our ears right here. Like there’s so much power in here. And so I just used I just used manipulation on Grant to kind of get the best out of him. Told him the Americans I was listening to them on the bus and they were talking about him and saying how they were going to beat him. And and that just got under his skin. Like it was easy. It’s easy to figure out what gets under Grant Hackett skin. You know, who just talk about Americans and being beat. And that’s the end of it. It’s like, so yeah, I think that’s what you do with your athletes is you try and find what what really motivates them, what really is going to get them fired up because you want athletes to feel like they’re invincible, like you want them to feel like they’re unbeatable.

And and if you can if you can pull that out of them, then you’re going to get some extraordinary performances and granted up, you know, when in that race by half a half a pool length and swimming the second fastest time it ever swam, you know, whereas, you know, minutes earlier, he’s completely exhausted on the massage table and out of it. So yeah, it’s it’s pretty extraordinary

what we can get out of ourselves when we really start to use the power of our brain.

Yeah, that’s it. Is there has there been any stories from chatting to some of the swimmers or coaches that you’ve had on your podcast that that you didn’t know? And you’re like, that’s such an amazing, such an interesting story that that you’ve never heard before. Oh, mate, you put me on the spot now. There’s so many of them like it. And I think that’s the thing that I love about talking to all the different athletes is like everybody’s got a story, you know? And I’m kind of excited to to talk to some of the people that just went through Tokyo, you know, and like get some of their stories. And because I’m just a fan like you, I was the first time I hadn’t been to the Olympics in five Olympics. So, you know, I’ve been to five in a row. So this was going to be this was going to be number six for me. And I opted not to go. I wanted to be kind of a spectator and look at it from the other side on this one. So yeah, I just sat back as a fan and watching.

I’d love to speak to Ariane Titmus and and and try and get in her head in terms of, you know, racing a girl or a woman like Katie Ledecky, who’s virtually unbeatable, you know, and racing her at the Olympic Games and then and then beating her at that stage. Like to me, like that’s an incredible story. I want to get to the bottom of that one, you know? So so I’ve been fortunate to to talk to a number of people on my podcast and everybody’s got their own little unique story about how they got to where they were kind of thing. So I wish I could remember something very specific, you know, but like I talked to Emma McKee and 10 months ago. Now, at that stage, 10 months ago, Emma McKee and had never won an individual Olympic gold medal. She’d won relay medals before. She’d won individual medals at the Olympics, but she’d never won an Olympic gold. And I think I think this time she came away with, you know, something like, well, three, maybe three individual gold, I believe.

And she certainly won a couple of relays as well. So, you know, to see someone like that, who 10 months ago had never won an individual gold. Now she’s won it. It’s nice to go back and compare. It’ll be it’ll be interesting to hear what she said back then to now. So yeah, I love the stories.

I think I think that’s a great story, isn’t it? Like to someone who’s been in the sport for a long time and then to become the best in the world in that later stage in her career where she was always she was up there, but she was never a standout or anything like that. But she just she just fired from trials onwards. She just looked like she had so much speed and was there anything that’s like in terms of her training, from what I heard, she had reduced it to like five or six swim sessions a week and had up to a gym. Have you heard anything along those lines of what she’s she’d been doing? And I guess you’re going to talk to Bolly after this. So he’ll probably talk about that. I’m going to talk to Bolly in about an hour from now. So I’m going to get to the bottom of it for sure. But, you know, she she did say that she had worked on her strength, you know, she’s getting stronger. And I think that’s that’s a hallmark of a great champion

is figuring out where are my weaknesses? You know, like where am I? You know, I think a lot of people go through their career and they just they just do the same thing over and over again. And they expect different results where I think champions are like, you know, kind of do the same thing that I did at the end of a, you know, you have this decompressing part and then you have this assessment of like, all right, what have I got it? Where have I got to get better? You know, in order to either compete for medals or compete to be the best, you know? And that’s one thing that I always tried to do in my career is just figure out where’s my weaknesses. And I think probably Emma is a great example of saying, well, I got to get stronger if I want to be a champion. And she’s done that. Yeah. And just going back to it when you first started coach, like you’ve sort of coached under all like Richard Quick, Dave Marsh, like you’ve sort of been there

with some of the best coaches in the world. What kind of, when you first started coaching, what sort of coach did you feel like you were going to be? Like what kind of style? And then did that change at all with those who you coached under or those that you worked with? Yeah, it’s a good question. I never really intended to be a coach. I kind of fell into it under David Marsh. He kind of pulled me into it. And then I just realized pretty early on that I had a talent for it, honestly. I think one of the things that I wanted to do is I wanted to, I wanted my athletes to know that they had a partner, that I was with them in their performance. So it wasn’t just like me preparing them and then me standing on the sideline. I didn’t want that separation. I wanted it to be like, hey, we’re partners here. I watch a lot of UFC now, you know? And I see the fighters coming into the ring and their coaches are right there with them, you know?

And they stand right up against the cage and they’re shouting out details to the fighters as they’re fighting. That’s the kind of coach I want to be. You know, like I want to be that person that walks to the cage with the swimmer and for them to know that, hey, when you get punched, I get punched. When you throw a punch, I throw a punch. You know, it’s like I want that personal connection and that’s the type of coach that I’ve tried to be. And I feel like I’m pretty successful that. It certainly has helped that I came from a very high end type background where I was an Olympic swimmer myself. I think there was trust was easy to build because they’re like, oh yeah, you get it. You understand what I’m going through. But I’m very big on the psychology too. So for me, I mean, a workout is a workout. It’s how you apply the workout. It’s how you perform in the workout. And those things require both a physical and a mental approach to training

that then translates into racing. So like, you know, if I’m energized before practice and during practice, then my athletes are gonna be energized. When they walk in and they sense my energy, then they can feed off that energy. When they see me running up and down the pool deck next to them as they’re swimming, they’re gonna feed off that. It’s very much kind of like a Dean Boxle approach. I can see a lot of similarities with him and myself in the way that he invests in his athletes, you know, is you pour everything into it and you’re there with them and they’ve got a partner.

I remember hearing Bill Sweetnum say something on the lines of as a swim coach, you go in full to the broom with energy and you leave completely wiped and then your swimmers come in low energy and they leave completely pumped up. It’s like, yeah, and you sort, you really feel that after like a really good session as a coach, you’re completely exhausted, but the swimmers are on a high and they feel like they’ve really got a lot from it. I took a lot from that. Whereas I think, particularly at the start, when I started coaching, it’s like I sometimes feel like I would just put too much into it where I’d like just be too wiped at the end of a session in a way and it’s like, all right, gotta get back up for another one. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there are multiple times where I come home and I just be exhausted, you know, and my wife at the time would be like, what’s wrong with you? I’m like, really? Like, do you understand what I just did out there?

I was like, I just poured every ounce of energy I had into that, you know? And that can be tough, you know, in terms of coaching. That’s what gave me an appreciation for the coaches that I had. I never fully realized that they’d go home, just wiped out, you know? So, yeah, it’s a tough profession.

I remember, like my dad was my coach for the majority of when I was swimming and as a teenager, you’ve got everything provided for you. You don’t need to drive. You don’t need to feed yourself. It’s like, everything’s done for you. And so I remember, like my dad, he was working full time. He was coaching seven or eight sessions a week. And, you know, would sometimes get a little bit frustrated, you know, as a coach, you know? And at the time I was like, just chill out, you know? I think it’s easy, you know? I don’t know, I can’t see why you might be a little bit frustrated with things. But then as a coach or as a parent, you’ve got all these responsibilities that’s like, it takes a lot to just keep you cool sometimes. Yeah, for sure. You know, sometimes I didn’t handle that as well as I could have. And you’re like, all right, you got to learn from that, you know, but yeah, it’s tough when you’re doing 10 workouts a week

and then just back to back. And the hard thing for me in the US, in the university system is like, we’d go through the whole college system and then we’d go through the international season. And the international season would then back up into the college season. Then you just go again. So it was like Groundhog Day. You know, every year it was just the same thing. We never got any breaks. Like I didn’t take a holiday in 10 years. And so by the end of it, I just got blown out on that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s great to see so much of Dean Boxall and Ariane, like that relationship together, some of the sort of Australia stuff that they did with the Mic’d Up series and seeing that relationship and how he coaches. I think it’s so good for the sport on many levels. You’ve got parents looking in with their kids like, wouldn’t that be an awesome thing for my kid to be a part of? You’ve got coaches looking in, like a majority of coaches looking in,

going, that’s like, that’s a passionate coach. I can take something from it. I think that insight into it and what we’ve seen recently is going to be really beneficial over the next couple of years. Yeah, for sure. You know, I think it’s been good. You know, we all saw the way he acted after the win and it kind of went viral, you know, but like when you back it up with all the other stuff that he’s done with the Mic’d Up stuff, like you said, when you take the time to watch and listen, I mean, that’s a guy, that’s a coach and that’s a relationship that they’re invested in each other’s performance, you know, like, you know, Dean is just in that performance and so a lot of emotions flood out when you’re that emotionally invested into it, you know. So yeah, a lot of respect for what they did. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I know you’ve got a busy schedule so, Brett, I want to thank you for being on the podcast. What’s maybe one of the last things is,

what are you most looking forward to in the next six to 12 months? Because you’ve got a lot on your plate, but what sort of, what are you looking forward to? You know what, like, I didn’t really know where I was going before COVID hit, you know, and I think when COVID hit, it made me reevaluate a lot of things and it made me realize that, you know, I can put my energies in certain areas and that’s what I’ve done, like I put my energy into coaching a couple of athletes privately, you know, I put my energy into my podcast and it got a lot of success from that. You know, coaching Cody Simpson was very fulfilling, coaching Bruno Fratis has been very fulfilling into the Olympics, doing my podcasts and sharing stories from swimmers and coaches around the world. And so I’m just gonna keep exploring that, man. You know, I’m passionate about swimming. I love the sport, I love the people in it, I love the stories. And like I said, I’m very into the high end

type performance of it, so I’m just gonna keep sharing those stories and so I don’t know where it’s gonna go. We just started a live show, we’re gonna do a weekly live show on swimming and I think, you know, what you’re doing with your podcast and your platform, it’s exciting to see people, you know, doing the things that we’re doing, so I’m just gonna keep exploring this platform and see where it takes us. Yeah, well I think you’re doing an amazing thing for the swimming community as a whole. Speaking of my dad last week and he said, we were talking about the Australian swim team and what Lee Nugent went through in 2012 and then to see the success of the team now and he was saying it’d be amazing to just sit down with Lee and just listen to his stories and see what he’s seen and gone through. And I feel it’s very much like what you’re doing with your podcast is you’re drawing these stories out of people that we wouldn’t otherwise hear.

And I think that’s part, one of the reasons why I think your podcast has blown up over the last 12, 18 months with the guests you’ve had. I think the way that you interview and you draw those questions out of people, it’s amazing to hear them. So as a swimmer and a swim fan, it’s like, I love what you’re doing. So thanks for doing the podcast. It’s inside with Brett Hawke. For those that are listening, if you haven’t heard it yet, but we’ll be sure to link to it in the show notes and yeah, keep it up, it’s unreal. All right, Brenton, you’re a good man, mate. Appreciate it, thank you. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post An Insider’s Look At Competing And Coaching At An Olympic Level with Brett Hawke appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Kiah Melverton who has just returned from Tokyo. She recently placed 6th in the 800m and the 1500m Freestyle. Join us as she talks about her experience during the trial and leading up to the Olympics.

1:33 Racing With No Crowd
4:31 Leading To Trials
5:40 5 Weeks Between Trials And Olympics
6:59 Is It Harder To Hit PBs in the Olympics?
7:50 First Race at the Olympics
9:02 Making The Finals
9:57 Fake Crowd Noises?
10:41 Sleeping At Night Before The Finals
11:40 Olympics Being Postponed For A Year
12:28 The Australian Team
15:55 Leadership Group
17:16 Watching It Live
19:32 Typical Week Of Training
21:30 Being A Distance Swimmer
24:54 Technique And Drills
28:24 Tension Is The Enemy Of Fast Swimming

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Effortless Swimming Freestyle Clinic

One of the coaches says that tension is the enemy of fast swimming. So it’s all about being relaxed and swimming fast. And like you said, with that kickboard drill, it just gives you a chance to really reach your arm out in front of you and make sure it goes all the way under the kickboard before you pull. And you realize how much length you’re missing out in the front if you’re just pulling straight down. 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. And I guess today is Kei Malboten, who’s just returned from Tokyo. You recently placed sixth in the 800 and the 1500 freestyle. So first of all, welcome back, congratulations and how are you feeling? Yeah, thank you. It’s a bit weird. We were just talking before we started how you come from this big hive

being at your best in the Olympic Village and I’m now sitting in quarantine and in a little room and can go on my balcony. And that’s about it. So it’s a bit of a weird feeling, but it’s good. Yeah, I mean, those those listening who aren’t from Australia, basically every time you come back into the country, you’ve got a quarantine for two weeks. So you’re kind of stuck in a small room, but then you’ll be free to go as you like, which would be nice. I’m sure you’re looking forward to seeing your family after what was probably one of the best experiences of your life. Yeah, for sure. I’m definitely looking forward to getting home. I think Mum and my partner Conor are eagerly waiting for me, counting down the days. So, yeah, I’m really looking forward to being home. I’ve been away for about two months, maybe a little bit longer. So, yeah, definitely looking forward to being home. And tell me about, yeah, about the racing over there.

So, I mean, you’ve raced common games where you had a crowd, you’ve raced world champs. How did they compare to that with very little crowd and without as much of the fanfare as you would have had in previous competitions? Yeah, it was it was a bit of a weird feeling. We were kind of told before, you know, be aware there will be no crowd. There’ll be no cheering. Definitely won’t be as loud as what some of the other meets we’ve been to. But honestly, when you’re walking out on pool deck, you don’t don’t even register that there’s no crowd. You’re so nervous and your heart rate’s so high and you’re so ready to race that you don’t even notice what’s going on. And by the end of the meet, there were so many Aussies in the stands. There are so many other countries in the stands. The athletes are making so much noise. So I think it really brought a good atmosphere to the pool. Obviously, it was disappointing that not everyone could be there.

And I’m sure the Japanese would have loved to be there. If the circumstances were different, they loved their swimming and it would have been a really cool atmosphere. But I think the athletes definitely made the best of what we could.

And what about in terms of the heats at night finals in the morning? I know you’ve sort of prepared for that. But how did that feel for you in terms of racing? Did it impact your performance? Was there anything noticeable on that front? Yeah, it was a bit of a struggle, I think across the board. Obviously, we had people some great morning swims, but across the board, the heats were super fast. It was taking really, really fast times to make the final. I know in my eight, I snuck into the final seventh, going 8, 20 and 8, 18. Ended up getting a bronze in the final in the morning. So it was just really fast to get into those finals and it really put the pressure on in the heats, which makes it quite difficult when you’re a distance, so am I, doing that four to 1500 and you have to be in that top eight. So yeah, it was really fast in the heats and in the finals you’d have maybe top forward go faster and then top forward end up going slower just with that turnaround.

But yeah, it definitely adds another element to it. We did practice it and we did train for it. Our nationals was like that. We did our heats at night in our finals in the morning, but it definitely impacts it. But yeah, I mean, it just made the heats super fast and it just made it a lot harder to get into the finals. It was amazing watching the heats because even, especially those events, even the ones that had semis as well, they were going so quick to make the, you know, to qualify for the semis that it’s just like, well, this is almost like a final with how quick they’re going. And obviously no one wanted to miss out. And so they’re all just going for it every single race. And it seemed really challenging to be able to build your, build your swims where you progressively get faster. I mean, we saw a couple of people do it. I think Kaylee was able to maybe do it in the 100 backstroke, but it looked very challenging to do for most people.

Yeah, I don’t think you realise at night you just get up and you swim fast anyway. There’s not many people that can get up and swim at night at an Olympic heat and just cruise through. So everyone’s kind of putting the pressure on anyway. And then I don’t think you realise how fast you’re swimming once you’re in the race. So yeah, it made for some really fast heat swims. And how about the, so from trials, you leading into trials, were you expecting to make the team or was it something that you thought that if I swim well, I know I’m going to make it? How are you feeling leading into trials? I’m fortunate enough to be ranked fairly highly across the four, eight and the 15. So I had a few shots at making the team. There’s so many girls that I’m competing against to make the team. It was kind of my goal to make the team. It definitely wasn’t something that I could cruise through and just swim OK. And then beyond the team, I was had to be at my very, very best.

And the 400 I was stirred at trials and that kind of knocked me around a little bit. It was a PB, but to just miss the team on the first day, I had to get my head back in the game. And then obviously 1500, that was a tight race the whole way. And I just managed to get my hand on the wall before the other girl next to me and qualified in the 15. And then so by the time I got to the eight, I was so much more relaxed and all the pressure kind of came off and I was able to get in. And so I’m a really good 800. So yeah, I definitely it was definitely like a big goal of mine just to make the team. It wasn’t like, oh, let’s just go to trials, get on the team and then focus on the Olympics. The focus was probably definitely on trials. And then was it four or six weeks in between trials and Olympics? It was about five weeks, I think that five weeks at home. Yeah, a week at home. And then we went away to Cairns. That’s right.

And and how is how is that preparing again? Do you prefer having a bigger gap in between where we used to have like a couple of months between trials and then Olympics? What do you think you’re better suited to? I think I’ve sung off both. I had a bit of a bit of trouble with this five week turnaround at Worlds in 2019. I ended up not something very well at Worlds. And then the week later in the World Cup, I swam PBs in almost every single race. So I mean, we had that to work off. And I think in that five week period, you’re not going to really build any fitness, you’re not really going to build any strength. It’s just about maintaining and getting back into a little bit of work and really resting. And as a distance, some of that can be quite hard to trust the process of resting to cut down on your case so much. But I mean, I sang well, I did big PBs at trials in the 800 and then to come back in and be right on that are very close to that

at the Olympics. I mean, that’s all you can ask for. It’s rare that someone gets up and does a big PB at the Olympics. So to be right on my best times after I just dropped again five weeks ago, I was pretty happy with it. Well, there’s so much that goes into the Olympics, isn’t there? Like you’ve got the travel, you’ve got you’re not staying at home or you’re not staying in an environment is probably as as comfortable as you used to. There’s different food. There’s so much other stuff that you’ve got to manage. And do you feel like that’s part of the reason why it is hard to hit PBs at a meet like the Olympics? Yeah, I think so. I also think that being at the Olympics, it’s not so much necessarily on time. I think you go to like trials or a nationals and everyone’s focused on PBs and swimming their own race. Whereas at an Olympic, it’s it’s just getting your hand on the wall in front of the person next to you.

No one really cares about what time they’re swimming. So especially in heats, I kind of knew I was sitting in the pool and was just making sure I was top three, top four in my heat. And then finals, you just get in and you just race and you just write in the person next to you. I don’t think people focus so much on times.

And and with your racing, how did you feel when you were there? Like the first the first race that you did, which is the 800, how do you feel in the heat? Did you feel like because sometimes when you get to a meet, you have that first race, it’s like, yep, I’m on. Or it’s like, OK, I’ve got a little bit of work to do. Where are we at in that first one? Yeah, the first race was my 1500 heat. So I don’t do as much work for the 1500 as I do for the eight. I kind of like get away with it a little bit nationally. I have a big distance background. So it’s something that I’ve kind of just kept in my program, but it’s something that I don’t really necessarily focus on. So I got into the heat. I think I just snuck under 16 minutes. I was kind of hoping to do a big PB. I thought that maybe it was like my time to do a PB. So that was a bit of a shock. But then to turn around and do another 1500 a day and a half later,

that really took it out of me that I was had three K of racing before I got to my 800. And like I like I said, before I couldn’t just cruise a 1500 and be in the final, like it was a max 1500 in the heats and then to get up and do it again. So that was pretty hard. It was pretty hard to recover from that 4800. But it is what it is. And a lot of people were in the same boat as me. So and then to make the finals, was that a surprise to you? Or you were, yeah, what were you thinking going in? Because I mean, imagine it’s pretty hard to kind of know where you’re at internationally, especially over the last 18 months, right? When there’s hardly any competitions, and it’s just you’re kind of going in a little bit blind to what your competition is doing. Yeah, for sure. I think the 1500 final that was just an added bonus for me. I didn’t really think I would make that. I knew the field would be super competitive.

But like you said, we haven’t had that many big international competitions. So a lot of those times that the girls had posted were from 2019. And obviously we were racing in 2021. So you don’t really know where everyone’s at. And then to sneak into the final, that was a huge added bonus. I was in the outside lane for both my finals, which I don’t like. And I kind of said to my coach after just wait till the day that I can get myself in one of the middle lanes where I can get in and race everyone, but I was just happy to make finals. Yeah, absolutely. And with the

like the the racing over there, I mean, it seemed as though with the crowd that I didn’t know if they’re putting in fake crowd noises or not on the TV because it sounded pretty loud, you know, what watching on on TV. Was it was it fairly loud over there because I’m still I still don’t know whether they’ve added the fake crowd noise like they do for the footy. Yeah, I don’t know if they I don’t think noises or not. But it was actually pretty loud. The Americans had those little like blow up, clappy things that you hit together. And the Russians had horns and cowbells and, you know, everyone was cheering in your home so there’s a pretty good atmosphere for finals.

Yeah, that’s that’s awesome. And was it was a difficult like trying to sleep at night before the finals? Because I would feel as though if you qualify a heat in the morning, you’ve got the day like you’re nervous and you might want to try and go and have a nap and stuff. But then to be able to have to get up and try and sleep at night to and be ready for a phone in the morning. To me, I feel like I would get no sleep at all. How did you go at night? It’s definitely difficult. I think our assistance guys, we were in a little bit of a better boat because we do our heat at night and then we have a whole day off. And then the final would be the next morning. So we actually get two sleeps. But I know like, well, most of the team, they don’t get that luxury of having two sleeps. And it’s definitely hard to sleep at night when you’re coming down from swimming so fast at night. And you’ve got adrenaline, caffeine, and then you’re trying to get in

and recover knowing that you have to swim fast the next morning. You also have to be early up early enough before you race. So yeah, there’s a lot of different things that go into it. But yeah, it’s definitely hard to wind down after a heat swim when it’s that way. Yeah, I can imagine. And with the Olympics being postponed a year, do you feel like it helped you or hinted you with the extension?

I think I was I was in a very good spot. In 2019, the start of 2020, I mean, I was training well and I was producing good times. But I think the delaying of it might have actually helped me. I think I’ve got a got a bit more of a confidence boost and a bit more of motivation to get back in and train. I put all in this put put in all this hard work during quarantine. And I kind of thought, well, like I’ve got to do this for a reason. I have to have something that motivates me and making the team was definitely that. And I think doing all those extra things, those dry land stuff and running and extra gym, I think it definitely paid off in the long run for sure.

And it seems as though the team in terms of the Australian team got on really well. It seemed like an amazing environment and culture to be a part of. And and sometimes one or two people can make or break how a team really sort of gels together. But it seemed that way from the outside. And that’s kind of what we heard being reported. Was that the case on the inside that everyone that was just a really great team to be a part of this year? Yeah, 100 percent. This is probably one of the best teams I’ve been on. There’s I think everyone here is friends and everyone here gets along. And I think that makes a huge difference. Like you said, there’s often individuals that can make or break a team environment. And we just didn’t have that in that case. And it did make a huge difference. You come back for a marshaling and it didn’t matter if you’d want a gold medal or just some heat and didn’t make a final. Everyone was welcoming you back and everyone there had your back.

And no matter what you were doing, if you were in the village by yourself in the afternoon, you can send a message into our group chat and say, Oh, does anyone want to come get dinner with me? And you’d have someone to walk you over to the dining hall and you just have someone around you all the time. And we put a lot of effort into that in the past three years. The our leaders like our leadership group has put a lot of effort into everyone getting along together and the support and the camaraderie between the group. And I just think it’s really paid off. And obviously, the public is starting to see it as like as we get a bit more results and they’re starting to see that everyone’s getting along really well. And it’s just a really good group. So I think that’s something that’s really positive for us for moving forward as well.

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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. And who’s part of the leadership group? Is that swimmers or coaches or both? Yeah, so we have a swimmer leadership group. So that’s made up of, I hope I don’t forget anyone here,

Bronte Campbell, Jess Hansen, Alex Graham, Mitch Larkin, Kate Campbell. So they get together, I think they said, like once every two or three weeks, and sit down and discuss ways to help improve the team. And they just, they spend a good amount of time while we’re away and making sure that everyone gets along. And they put on like little things for us to do, like games nights and trivia shows. And just making sure that everyone’s, if you finish racing, you’re up there supporting people. And, you know, just making sure that everyone has each other’s back and holding each other accountable.

Yeah, that’s great. Is it something that they’ve done in the past with that? They’ve had a leadership group of swimmers? Yeah, they’ve done it in the past, but I think over the past three years, they’ve just really highlighted how important it is and how much of a difference it makes on the team. And I think we really saw it this year, that when you have a good leadership group and that when everyone does get along, it does make a huge difference on performance. And once you get those performances, you can just carry that momentum day after day after day. And when you’re doing a nine day meet, you want to get to that ninth day, that final day of relays in the morning and have everyone in the stands cheering on those guys. And I mean, we had one of our best sessions in the pool that morning. So I think that just goes to show.

Yeah, that was amazing watching that. How was it in the stands watching that stuff, watching that stuff live? Yeah, it was good. So I didn’t get into the stands until I finished my 800 final and I ran straight back up into the stands and watched the rest of the finals for that day. And then obviously the last day of finals, Emma won her 53 and the girls won the medley really. And I don’t think I’ve ever screamed so loudly in my life watching Kate swim that 100 freestyle of that relay. And I was next to Bronte and she was grabbing me and we were just jumping up and down and everyone was jumping up and down. And I actually turned to me and said, I think I’m more nervous to watch the final than I was to swim my 400 free. So that just goes to show how much we all care and support each other and just want everyone else to do well as well as ourselves.

It was, I don’t think I’ve ever screamed at the TV so much either. That was just, it was such an amazing race, the girls four by one medley and for Kate as well, and I remember hearing her when she was interviewed, she said, she’s a bit disappointed with her 50 and she said, you find out who you are when the chips are down and it’s like, all right. And she certainly showed that. And I think the splits were like almost a second quicker. The change over times were like a second quicker than the US team or close to it. And that’s what got them over the line in the end, which is unexpected really compared to the US team. But just the grit and determination that she showed in that last 50 was incredible to watch. And I think there’s quite a few races actually over the course of the last, over the nine days that you’d look, it’s very hard to put one over the other. There was so many great swims like that from the Aussies.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that just kind of summed up the Aussies in this whole meet, you know. Like Kate came off the back of a disappointing 50 and then got in and did the 100 of their life and got those girls across the line. And I think that happened a lot during the meet.

MC Bong got an individual medal in our fourth Olympics and then stood on the podium and handed the gold medal to Kaylee. And I think that just goes to show what our team’s like. Zach Starrty cooks swimming over everyone on the last 50 of the 200 breaststroke. Yeah, I think it just showed what Aussies are like in a pool. And yeah, it was just a really good meet for everyone. Yeah, totally. And in terms of your training, so just a general overview of what a typical week would look like for you, what is it? How many swims, how many Ks are you usually doing in dry land and that kind of stuff? Yeah, so 10 swim sessions a week. So they usually like two, maybe two and a half hours. I don’t, I rarely go over 70 K a week. These days, I used to do a lot more when I was younger, but we’ve kind of pulled it back a bit as I focus a bit more on my speed stuff. So 70 is about my max. I’d usually hover between 60 to 65 K a week.

I’m in the gym three times a week, spin once or twice a week, a circuit once a week. Yeah, it ends up being a pretty big training week, but when you’re a distance swimmer, that’s just how it is. Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s really funny actually watching, like with the distance guys and middle distance swimmers. It’s like, you know, you’re really there and it’s a full on swim. And then I was watching the 50s on the last day and like watching some of the specialists, like you’ve got Bruno and you’ve got like Crowded Joe, Crowded Joe and some of those just 50 specialists. That’s all they do. It’s like as a middle to long distance swim myself. It’s just, I could not imagine just going to the pool for 20, 21 seconds and that’s it. And that’s all you’re trying for. It was just, it was funny watching that compared to what you guys do. Yeah, it’s funny when you get talking to them as well and about their training.

And I train with Cam McEvoy and he does 50 hundred. So I see him get in the pool and then get out of the pool and I’ve still got my seven, six K session to go. But I mean, some of those guys that literally just do the 53, I think they swim about eight to 10 K for the whole week in the lead up to their 53. Most of the distance guards can cover that in about a session. So yeah, it’s a bit more different training, but obviously a lot of hard work goes into it for them too, especially out of the pool.

Yeah, yeah, true. And I mean, there’s got to be something that you really enjoy about distance swimming, being a distance swimmer. I mean, it’s, I don’t know, for me, when I’m, when I’ve been training well and training hard, like there’s just a, there’s a real kick out of when you’re fit and being able to hit your times and hit your paces and that feeling that you get. Like what is it, what is it for you that you like about it? No, no, I definitely agree with you. I know exactly what you’re talking about when you can get in and swim those really fast times over and over again and you’re just clicking, like clocking them over and continuously hitting those fast times. It’s kind of a weird feeling and hard to describe, but I definitely know what you’re talking about. I think there’s that element to it for me for sure, but I also love doing things that others wouldn’t be doing. Like I love getting these big sessions

and being like, oh yeah, I can do that and knowing that like half the squad would be like, there’s no way I would ever do that if someone put that in front of me. And I think it’s a challenge that comes with being a distance swimmer that I enjoy for sure. Yeah. And is there, there’s some favorite sets that you have or maybe some of the hardest sets that you did in the lead up to the trials or to the Olympics that still do you mind? There’s a few that we do all the time. So between trials and Olympics, we kind of repeated exactly what we did before trials just so we could compare and we knew it would be the same kind of lead in. We do a set that’s two broken 1500s. So it was, it’s a dive 300 on 430 and then 12 ones on, I think it’s 130. Then we get a little bit of loosen, jump out, put our suits on and do the exact same thing again. So two broken 1500s, that’s a pretty big set. We do 50s on 40, trying to hit 800 pace.

So that’s like trying to hit 30 points on 40.

Yeah. A lot of race specific work

comes into it in those last five weeks. A lot of 150s at pace.

Yeah. And I’m guessing in there, further out from competition, are you doing some, just more sort of aerobic base sessions, is it? And it’s just as you get close, you start to do more and more of those race pace ones. Yeah. So definitely like the further we are out from competition, the more you get to like your 10-4s or your 6-800s descending rep times and things like that, where you’re just not plotting up and down. That’s the real way to put it, but you’re swimming at like a threshold pace for a very long period of time and you’re just building this big base of fitness. You have this big base and then when you get to the competition, you’re at like this tiny little peak of trying to hit race speed and race speed with good technique. And that’s what all you’re working on for the past five weeks, but you have this big base of endurance work behind you.

And what are you hitting for, like your broken 1500, the 300 and then the 100, is what pace is here when you’re swimming well, where you’re at? So the dive 300, we’re trying to be under 310. So around 309-ish, 308 is a pretty good first 300. And then the hundreds, I think Maddie and I, a few of the sessions are holding like 61s on the hundreds, which is almost getting down to about 800 paces. But yeah, I mean, it’s sessions like that, that give you a bit of confidence when you’re behind the blocks. And you know, like if I can hit 61s for the 30, 100s, then surely I can swim the 1500, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And what about technique? Is there anything that you’ve worked on over the past couple of years with your stroke? Or is there something recently that you’ve been working on? And how do you go about working on your stroke? Because it’s, I mean, because you’re doing so much training, it seems as though it’s a lot about just thinking about it as you’re swimming and just checking in every now and then and keeping it front of mind as you’re going through these sets. So yeah, where is it for you in terms of technique? What do you focus on? Yeah, I think the hardest thing when you’re trying to fix technique is constantly being reminded of it. And when you’re a distance swimmer, it’s very easy to get in and swim in 7K session and not think and just kind of black out while you’re swimming and not think about it. But I do try to spend a lot of time focusing on my stroke. I have quite a long stroke

compared to a lot of the distant swimmers in the pool. They’re quite choppy and short and spin their arms over and rate a bit higher. But I tend to use the length of my stroke so that means I have to have a really high catch at the front of the stroke and I have to push through all the way at the back. And I really struggle to maintain that in early season. It takes a lot of strength. And then as I rest, I can really see the length come through. But for me, it’s all about just having that high elbow and pulling the water at the very front of my catch and not letting that slip and then making sure I can hold that length all the way through my stroke.

Are there any particular drills or maybe dry land things that you do to help with it? I love my single arm freestyle. It’s very simple, but it makes a huge difference. Not only being in the catch position but keeping your hips still, which is another huge thing for me is not rotating my hips all over the place.

As one where you have like a kickboard out in front of you and your hands are on top of the kickboard and again, single arm, but as your hand enters, your hand comes under the kickboard so you can really feel yourself getting the full length.

I also do a lot of single arm butterfly as well, just for length and rhythm.

High elbow freestyle just in that catch position, really letting myself relax over the top. Which I think makes a huge difference in distance swimming. If you can be relaxed when you’re coming over the water, then you can use a less energy to pull and you’re not wasting any extra energy.

Yeah, so that last one, you’re kicking on the side, you’re bringing your arm through. Yeah, so it’s just a normal freestyle stroke. Just a normal freestyle stroke and then you’re pausing in that catch position with your elbow up as high as you can. Just letting yourself recover and relax and then flinging your arm forward. But it’s just all about being relaxed in that recovery and as relaxed as possible and then as soon as your hand hits the water for that catch, you’re ready to go again. Yeah, that’s good. It’s something that where I work a lot with adults who have maybe been swimming for one or two years and what we often see is they’re very tense over the top and so it’s good to get them to, it’s called recovery because you want to be relaxed and recovering over the top of the water. So with the hand and forearm, if you can just sort of switch that off and keep it loose, it can help you apply the power where it’s actually necessary,

which is under the water. So it’s good to hear that. And I think with that kickboard draw you’re talking about as well, with adults that we work with, often they’re very short, like they don’t almost like rotate forwards, they just sort of pull straight through. So if you can get that length out the front, it makes a big difference. But I think the tendency is there to just want to enter the water and pull straight through because they think you’ve got to get straight into the propulsive part but you actually need that length out the front like you’re talking about. Yeah, for sure. One of the coaches says that tension is the enemy of fast swimming. So it’s all about being relaxed and swimming fast. And like you said with that kickboard draw, that just gives you a chance to really reach your arm out in front of you and make sure it goes all the way under the kickboard before you pull and you realize how much length

you’re missing out in the front if you’re just pulling straight down.

I like that. Yeah, the tension is the enemy of fast swimming, did you say? So it’s so true in like every sport, isn’t it? It’s like it’s that very fine balance between like exerting yourself and working hard but being able to stay relaxed as you do it. And I think that’s sort of going back to what we were talking about earlier about one of the appeals of say distance swimming. It’s like it’s when you’re right at that that limit where it’s like you’re almost at sort of top revs but you know you can just sit there and you can hold it. And when you do a good session you’ve been able to do it. It’s there’s something very peaceful about it as well. So it’s yeah, there’s something to it. Yeah, it’s weird. I think it’s maybe it’s similar to like a run as high that they get when all the dolphins kick in. But yeah, like you said, and there’s something special about those sessions where you dive into the water and you just feel amazing

and you just keep pushing out these amazing times and reps and while feeling relaxed. And yeah, if you can do it while feeling relaxed it makes a huge difference.

And you’ve got quite a few good, quite a few good swimmers in your squad. So how many others from your squad made the team? Yeah, so we had five Olympians come out of TSS which is a pretty huge achievement. I think, I think St. Peter’s got us by one but that’s all right. To have five is pretty, pretty huge. And yeah, our coach Chris would have been pretty happy with that.

I can imagine. And how long have you been at TSS for? So I have been something at TSS since I was about nine or 10 years old. I’m now 24. So it’s been a very long time and I’ve moved up through the coaches there. And it’s been a great club for me and I’ve really developed as a swimmer there. And Chris, I was there swimming as a young star in the 25 meter pool and Chris had his British boys over. He used to coach in Great Britain so he’d bring these boys over and they’d go to school and swim out of TSS. So he’s kind of been a part of my journey ever since I was young.

Yeah, it’s been really good to go to the Olympics with him and feel like it’s been a long time coming for us.

Yeah, that’s fantastic. And looking forward, so when you do get home you’re taking some time off and then getting back into it or what’s the next six to 12 months look like for you? Yeah, I’ll definitely take some time off. I think I need a bit of rest to try and recover and get my mind back into it. I know we have two weeks up here in quarantine but that’s not quite the break that I want. So I’ll have some time off and see family and friends and maybe go have a long weekend somewhere. Yeah, I haven’t planned anything yet but I will be definitely having some time off and then, yeah, it’s straight back into hard work. I think World Championships trials are in April so we don’t really have that much time.

Yeah, it’ll be straight back into hard work.

But you’ve definitely earned your break so congratulations on your Olympic results and thanks very much for joining me on the podcast. It’s been great to hear it from the inside because obviously all we’ve seen is from the TV basically but it’s amazing to see the Aussies back to where they were in the early 2000s with results and team spirit and all of that so it’s been great to see. So thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post How To Train And Race Distance Freestyle with Olympian Kiah Melverton appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Joining us again is Carl Reader. He has a background in Exercise Physiology and Pilatesbut primarily working in Functional Movement. We recently created a course together which is Functional Movement for swimmers. In this course, Carl teaches you how to do some of the primary movements correctly that is going to help you as a swimmer.

3:47 Scientific But Not Functional
5:04 Injuries are Caused By Movements That Are Not Functional
6:16 Serape Effect
8:35 Shoulder Issues
10:07 How Much Does It Take For Someone To Make The Change
14:55 Core Strength And Squatting
18:24 Squatting Is The Body’s Power Position
20:02 Swimmers And Squatting

Functional Movement For Swimmers
https://carlreadercoaching.com/

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This swim is, what it is, is that the squatting, when we talk about doing it properly, is it really unlocks the hips and the back and it provides that mobility and even swimming. And one of the key parts of the spine is in the middle back, which just as the middle back goes into the lower back, you got the rotational component. And when that is very common, locked or stiff in a lot of people. And so what happens is your lower back then overworks and that’s where you go to Kairos or osteophysicists who then start to manipulate and release that tension. When you start to the squatting properly, you start to release that rotational, transitional area in the spine and that then connects the whole body. That’s where you get all this movement from. So you really see the benefits, the squatting made another direct effect on the swimming like you just clearly pointed out, but it’s that the release you get from doing squats in the back

that then translates to the swimming. 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. Hi, welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. This is episode number 188. My guest today is Carl Rita and here’s a background in exercise physiology and Pilates, but primarily working in functional movement. And we’ve recently created a course together which is functional movement for swimmers. And in this course, Carl teaches you how to do some of the primary movements, correctly, that are gonna help you as a swimmer. And some of the differences here between what you might have seen in perhaps other programs or other courses is that in this program, we are really looking to make sure that you stay connected, that their full body movements are not just isolating individual muscles. And the reason for that is when we swim,

it is all about that connection. You may have heard me talk a little bit about the Serape effect, which is essentially the connection through your hips, through your torso and shoulders. And that is a really key component of being able to connect up your catch with your rotation and your kick. And I really like the phrase swimming from the inside out, meaning your core and your hips. That’s where you generate a lot of power from. And it’s these exercises within the program that are going to help you develop that kind of connection out of the water so that you can have that type of connection in the water. So if you’re interested in that course, then you can find that at effortlesswimming.com forward slash Carl and that’s C-A-R-L, so forward slash Carl. And I’ll also put the links in the show notes as well. So let’s get into the episode. In this episode, I chat with Carl about what are some of those common mistakes

that we see people make when they’re doing the strength-based or dry land exercises and what can you do to make sure that you’re doing them correctly? How can you avoid or overcome injury with them? And what are some of the most important things that we should be thinking about as swimmers or as triathletes when it comes to adding dry land to our existing program? Let’s get into the podcast. Right. Hey Carl, welcome to the podcast for the third time.

Yeah, good to be back. So we’ve been chatting over the last couple of months and you’ve been putting together a course for swimmers specifically, working on more functional movements that will help people either stop, avoid getting injured, but I think probably more importantly is those people that have got recurring injuries, how can they overcome them and how can they develop strength through those certain areas where they are consistently getting injured and how can they do it so that they don’t need to take time out of the pool? And you wanna talk a little bit about some of those exercises that you have been recording in the course and also sort of how it came about and what your background is with working with swimmers. Yeah, sure. You know, I’ve been doing this for the 20 years and I’m working with exercises and early on in my profession, I noticed that many of the sort of traditional exercise and stretching routines

are not working for a lot of patients and clients, particularly with low back and shoulders and knee issues. And then I realized that many of the movements that we’re giving were not movements that were necessarily functional or movements the body was designed to do even though they were scientific. And so for the last basically two decades, I’ve been researching and rediscovering what the body’s functional movements look like and how to master the techniques to do them. And in the six week course, I really share a lot of my insights and the functional movements that I’ve been working on in the course that’s to give a really good solid foundation to help people to move in the way that I believe the body’s designed to move. And it’s when you move in that, what I call the body’s method for exercises, then you get great results, particularly with shoulders and low back. Yeah, I’m watching through the videos from the course

and also having been doing a lot more strength than I was in the past with not being able to swim right now. It seems like a lot of the issues that people probably get from doing strength work incorrectly or from doing normal swimming and they get injured. A lot of it seems like it comes from the movements not being sort of functional, so sort of full body movements where they’re probably just isolating or loading up too much through their lower back or through their shoulders. Is that what it seems like from your end? Absolutely, we’ve been trained to isolate muscles or focus on a particular joints and then this idea of body weight, so using the whole body to generate power, particularly the shoulders, it’s a good topic in terms of injuries because a lot of shoulder workouts or recovery programs try and strengthen, for example, ricketycut. So they focus on ricketycut strengthening exercises or bicep strengthening exercises

where the shoulders so much connects to the hips and to the whole body. So it’s learning through that in the class and the course, how do you generate power with all the big muscles helping the shoulder? Yeah, and that’s what I’ve liked about watching through the, as you take, you go through the exercises. I mean, I’ve been doing quite, let’s say probably half the exercises just in my weekly strength and conditioning stuff lately and I know I’ve been doing some of them wrong after watching the videos and what I like about, you know, you talk about the Serape effect and how can we generate that power through our hips and through our upper body and like it doesn’t require a massive change in the way that you do exercises, but it’s this little minor 10% change that can really, I think, develop that Serape effect and connection through the body, which is really key in swimming. And I mean, I was talking to a physio a couple of months ago

about just one long distance to know that he was working with. And I don’t know if we talked about this last time, but this guy had shoulder issues all the time. And one of the things that this physio found is that he wasn’t kicking at all, like his legs just stragged behind him. And so it was loading up his shoulders too much. So he didn’t have that stabilization through the kick that’s transferred through the body. And that’s a good example of someone who’s not having that connection through the body and not using that Serape effect. So that’s what I think some of these exercises are really good for in developing that, but it doesn’t need a massive change at all for a lot of people. No, just to learn, to experience and to feel, we talked about that in one of our last podcasts, that connection, just how the whole body is connected. And so just as they work through the exercises, they’ll start to really train that what does it feel like?

Because if you say you don’t want to be having two left arms or two right feet, you can, with the exercise, it will help to build that connection, which I think is very powerful, especially for swimmers. Yeah, absolutely. And I put out a survey about who’s got recurring injuries that stop them from or impact their swimming. And I think it was 44% of people said they do. So nearly half the people who were probably adults, most of our swimmers are sort of 30 to 60 years of age. Almost half of them have got recurring injuries. And if they can get rid of those injuries or they can develop the strength to be able to overcome them, then it’s going to mean that they can spend longer in the water, where they’re not having one or two or three weeks out. And it means that they can keep that build of their training going. So they’re not having to take these ongoing periods of time out. And so one of the most common ones that popped up

was shoulder issues. This is obviously one of the main ones with swimming is shoulder issues, particularly rotator cuff. Where do you see a lot of those issues coming from for swimmers that you’ve worked with?

Well, especially for not the elite athletes, but swimmers, it would be obviously posture plays a major role. And one of the huge benefits of moving functionally is you’ll see great results and change the posture straight away. And then obviously not balancing the opposing muscles. So if swimmers are not, they’re just working on the pulling action, they’re not on the pushing action. So we see that that’s one of the things I address in the course as well. It’s hard to train and strengthen, balance the muscles. So that asymmetry that we see in swimmers, I said posture, but obviously people who work at a day span most of the day, that puts a lot of strain on the body. Then we also talked about a lot of upper back stiffness. The thoracic spine, your upper back, your lot of stiffness up through, which is related to posture again, can be related to posture. They’re often just loosening up the upper back has huge benefits for releasing shoulder problems.

And as you know in swimming, it’s quite a lot of rotation and movement, depending on the stroke you’re doing, but you need that mobility, which is key for shoulders. And often with shoulder problems, it’s not even the shoulder. It’s often it can even be, as we know, it can be the hip, the back, it’s complex. But by moving function, it’s the key thing I want to get to the swimmers is by moving function, it’s almost like it’s resets the body and it’s just the fix are great. And for somebody who’s listening to this and thinking, yeah, that’s me. I’m pretty stiff my upper back, sometimes got issues with the shoulders and it might stop me from swimming or it might just mean I can’t go as hard as I’d like to, but I can’t be bothered putting in the work. What would you say to, how much does it take for someone to make a change to the things that we’re talking about, to their mobility and to the way that they move? How long do you think it is for someone from the get-go

to see those changes and to notice them? And then how long until they can see, not necessarily a permanent change, but a change that is really noticeable?

You know, so referred to as the minimum effect of dosage in a sense, you really, you don’t need to be doing hours and hours a day up. If you could choose maybe two or three of those exercises, you know, specifically for the shoulder and do them almost every day for five to 10 minutes or even in between like what I call movement snack. So if you’re at your desk and you stand up and do a few movements or mobility exercises that are literally two, three minutes then you can see changes pretty quickly. You know, a lot of plants have actually, after even a weekday, they’re not gonna see major posture changes, but they’re gonna feel differences and mobility changes in the shoulder. Yeah, and I find with a number of things, for me it’s like a sort of a five to six week turnaround of doing something consistently. And I talked about this in a recent YouTube video with, for most people I think if they, when they get back into the pool after taking say two

or three months off with all of the lockdown stuff happening, for most people I reckon they can get back to where they were pretty close to it within about six weeks if they’re training relatively intensively or eight to 10 weeks if they’re just sort of easing their way back. For most people, and obviously elite athletes are different. They were training 10 times a week and it’s a different story. But yeah, I think five to six weeks you can really notice. And that’s what I’ve noticed doing, getting back into strength training now since I haven’t been able to swim is, the things I was feeling so sore the first two to three weeks of the strength training, but now I’m not pulling up as sore and I’m noticing the change physically in how I feel particularly the strength through the core and through the hips and how I move and how I walk. And then in terms of posture and how you carry yourself like it, it really transfers to a lot of different aspects

of your life and my shoulder because I came off the mountain bike seven months ago and so I was having issues with it. Haven’t swam obviously much lately but my shoulder has improved dramatically. So I haven’t had any issues and that’s for surfing for like six or seven hours a day sometimes whereas before it was pulling up sore after two or three hours. So I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes when I get back in the water and swim but that strength training so far I’ve noticed has made a big difference. So I think that seems to be a real key to overcoming those sorts of injuries or issues.

Yeah, with the shoulders, it’s a, we talk about a ball and socket joint. It needs to be mobile. And again, some of the listeners may be familiar with fascia. So it’s quite a big turn now. It’s my fascia stretching and you’ve got those foam rollers and there’s a lot of benefits to that. With the game with the functional movements when you start to train all the muscles and the right sequences and then again, functionally you’ll see that the fascia actually starts to reorganize itself without having to do hectic and painful stretches. So it’s this, for those who love to do the stretcher that’s fine but also for those who aren’t maybe want to do, you spend hours stretching every week just simply moving it. It’s incredible how the body reorganizes itself and that gives a lot of mobility to the shoulder because if you’ve got tight fascia, as you know, it’s tight fascia, it’s really kind of limited mobility. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, and that’s, because I’ve done next to no mobility work lately, but just moving better and doing, like we’ve been doing a bit of stuff on the ground, like I’ve been taking some juniors through some strength training and we’ve been doing some lying on the floor on your chest and y-raises, the Y-W stuff, your chest off, bring your hands up above your head, bring them back and some movements like that and angels and demons as well, which is kind of where you start up here and bring your hands back behind your bum. A few different exercises like that as well. And I feel like that stuff is, it’s not a strain at all. It’s, you’re not working at the complete limit of your mobility, but you might be working at say 80% of it, but those sorts of movements and just doing them regularly for six weeks has made things so much, so much better. And one of the things that you do, or you talk quite a bit about in the course is core strength and squatting

and sort of, I guess that connection, that strength that you can have through the hips. You wanna talk a little bit about those sorts of functional movements and how they relate to swimming and how that can actually develop core strength. Cause I think now when you first mentioned, squatting is one of the best ways to develop core strength. I was like, I’ve never sort of heard that before, but the more you have sort of looked into it, it’s like, yeah, it’s one of the best things you can do for your core strength. Absolutely, and I mean, it’s so funny, he said, I just had a patient yesterday, he said, what are you talking about? And then I explained to them, I said, I can’t believe my tummy is, my core feels like I’ve done like a whole bunch of planking. And I said, yeah, it’s because you’re not connected. But for swimmers, that connection, the mobility in the hips and the core and that rotational component is just by doing the squatting technique correctly

or functioning, you actually open up low back. You get the core muscles to fire. And the core muscles, I mean, I talk about core, it’s talking about your abdominals here as well, but the core actually involves all your trunk, big trunk muscles. So your pec, your lats, your glutes, your hip flexes. So in terms of what a lot of people associate, core is would be the abdominals. But they’ve got to work together with the glutes, your buttocks muscles. And so it’s the squatting action when done correctly activates all those muscles beautifully. And it also has a tremendous effect on the whole spine, not just your lower back. And when that lower back and the back loosens up and you’ve got the mobility and when you’ve got the rotational freedom or improvements in mobility there, then you’ve got that better connection with the Serape effect and the whole sort of thing which you go through the core. So squatting is, yeah, I mean,

from a fat burning, from a metabolic efficiency to back improvements and backs, joint health, mobility, strength. I mean, I can have all podcasts just done squatting and we go through that in the course, it’s really, in fact, if the average person doesn’t like to exercise, just did those squats, they would see improvements in shoulder mobility and posture two, three weeks by doing that.

With some of the junior kids that I’ve been doing some strength work with some of them at the very beginning, they were squatting maybe that far down as in like from where the hips, they weren’t hardly squatting, right? And so you’re just not gonna get anything from it. And so it’s something that, you know, I see my young kids, they’re able to do the squatting, but I think a lot of times as you get a bit older, we just, you know, these kids aren’t old, they’re like 11 or 12, some of them. We just either forget or we just don’t do that movement and we don’t do it properly. And I know for me personally, like so tight through my hips. I’m good now, but I have been in the past so tight through my hips from sitting in the car for hours at a time or sitting at a desk and plus your hip flexors get tight. And so when I’ve been opened up by doing these exercises and sometimes a little bit of yoga as well, I find really useful.

It’s like, man, you can be so much stronger through the hips. And I’m looking forward to getting back in the pool tomorrow for my first swim back in the pool and just seeing how it feels with this better strength. Because I reckon for me it’s probably the strongest I’ve been through my core and through my hips in the last probably 12 or 13 years. And so I’m looking forward to seeing how that feels and how that relates to swimming in the water. Yeah, and the thing is, you know, we talked about core strength and I do shares in the videos, but is that we’ve got to get away from that sort of burning feeling that you get in the olden days of you used to lift your legs up in the air and do your thousand sit-ups to really feeling all the muscles work together. And that’s really where you get the power. And as I said, I’m not gonna really mention it, but squatting is a very, very powerful and functional. It’s a foundation to all of, if you look at tennis players

and they stand when they have to receive the tennis ball, how they stand, that squat position, karate, surfing, any snowboard, any sort of sport where even before you go into rugby into the scrum, they get into that position. It’s where I call the body’s power position. And I think in swimming, it’s hard, sometimes harder to see than a lot of other sports because like you can see obviously the hips are rotating a bit and it’s, but it’s really hard to sort of notice and understand that connection when you’re watching someone swim because it’s so, I guess it’s so sort of intricate, but if you look at someone say surfing or playing rugby, like with someone surfing, for example, if you look at it slowly, look at someone sort of generating speed, they’ll compress and then they’ll come up and it’s that movement through the hips and it’s really well timed with the feet and through the hips and so on. And it’s essentially the same sort of thing through swimming,

but it’s a lot easier to see in other sports that are land-based and I guess more obvious movements than swimming.

For the swimmers, what it is is that the squatting, when you talk about doing it properly, is it really unlocks the hips and the back and it provides that mobility and even swimming. And one of the key parts of the spine is in the middle back, just as the middle back goes into the lower back, you’ve got the rotational components and when that is very common locked or stiff in a lot of people and so what happens is your lower back then overworks and that’s where you go to Kairos or osteophysicists who then start to manipulate and release that tension. When you start to the squatting properly, you start to release that rotational, transitional area in the spine and that then connects the whole body. That’s where you get all this movement from. So you really see the benefits, the squatting made another direct effect on the swimming like you just clearly pointed out, but it’s that the release you get from doing squats

in the back that then translates to the swimming. Yeah, right, that’s interesting. And it’s, so you’re saying that, so that lower part of the back is often quite tight, quite compressed and so that’s gonna limit someone’s ability to generate that power. Yes, sir. Your lower back, as you described in the course, your lower back can’t actually rotate, so it doesn’t have the rotational component. It’s got to do with the orientation of the joints. So your lower back is designed for flexion extension, flexion extension. There is a little bit of rotation on what we call the L5S1, right at the bottom of the base of your spine, but most of the rotation takes place up higher up in the spine and there’s a transitional area where the spine goes from rotation to flexion extension and that’s often quite tight. And a lot of physios and carers work around trying to loosen it up, but I’ve discovered over the years by doing the squats,

that area loosens up quite quickly and that’s where the power comes because when that loosens up, then now your body can function correctly and then you’ve got connection, really. Yeah, right, that’s interesting. And for you, is there any sort of, any people that come to mind who have, let’s say, come to you, they’ve been really tight, they’ve had issues with either shoulder or lower back or knees, whatever it might be and they’ve practised this stuff for a number of weeks and they’ve been able to operate without pain and that sort of thing? Have you got any people who come to mind?

If it’s related to those physical limitations, absolutely, I’m actually quite surprised how quickly people will tell me how their mobility improves. We have this idea, you’ve mentioned five, six weeks and yes, it does take that time to build strength, but in terms of often even just releasing the back can be a day, a week, it’s quite very, very interesting to see how quickly it depends on the person and the issues, but it’s really, I’ve found, I’ve noticed on my own journey, I started off as a Pilates instructor and I couldn’t do the next level three Pilates because I didn’t have the mobility. I was quite frustrated because I was thinking, well, if I’m doing Pilates, I should be improving my mobility and I realized I moved away from Pilates about 10 years ago and started really looking into this functional and often just, even just simply squatting again, that sounds like I’m trying to promote the squat, but just squatting, my mobility radically improves

within a day or two, it doesn’t take, that’s the big thing about flexibility, it doesn’t need to be hours and hours and weeks and weeks of stretching. Once the right muscles work, you can improve flexibility quite quickly, which I think is really exciting for the average person, who doesn’t want to spend hours doing gym. And those who do do yoga and Pilates, it’s also, this is a compliment set because now they can go to their classes and do their stretching and really take shift to the next level. I think the people, those that are listening to this, they’re probably going to jump off the podcast and just start doing some squats for the help of it. And I know last time I had you on, I know last time I had you on and you talked a bit about the squat, I started doing squats where I hadn’t really done them for the years and so it’s a good thing but you want to make sure that you’re doing them right because I know people who have done them wrong

and for most of the time, it’s given them a bit of pain in the lower back by not doing it right or often pain in the knees as well. So you want to make sure that you’re doing that in the right way. So thanks very much for being on the podcast and so the course, I’ll put a link in the show notes for this and it’ll be on our website as well for the course and it’s a six week program that will take you through all the fundamental movements that you should be doing if you are doing any sort of swimming. And as we mentioned, it doesn’t need to take a lot of time.

A couple of minutes a day will make a big difference and if you are doing any sort of gym work then I’d highly recommend going through this course because just a way to make these movements much more functional and sort of all body movements that’s going to help you not have shoulder pain, gonna keep you in the water and allow you to just maintain that training without having to take big chunks of time out of the water.

Great. No, well, thanks for having me and look forward to the feedback from the guys who you did the course. Yeah, awesome. And those that are in our membership as well, you’re gonna be in there answering any questions that they’ve got. If anyone’s got specific issues, they can either contact you through your website or if they’re an effortless swimming member, then jump in the forum there and you’ll be in there helping out as well, which would be great. So thank you. Looking forward to it, Branson. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post Functional Movement For Swimmers With Carl Reader appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Joining us in this podcast is Brad Beer who is an APA Sports and Exercise Physiotherapist, Founder of POGO Physio, best-selling author of ‘You CAN Run Pain-Free!’, podcast host of The Physical Performance Show, and also an experienced runner and triathlete.

1:08 Working with Elite Athletes
2:28 Common Trend in Injuries Among Athletes
5:05 Avoiding Injuries When you are Coming From Off-Season
7:57 Strength Versus Mobility
10:49 The Importance Of Fueling
16:37 Swimming Background
20:45 Why Does Under Fueling Leads To Bone-Stress Injuries
24:50 Swimmers With Shoulder Injuries
30:06 Injury Rehabilitation And Recovery
32:48 Capacity Testing

Brad Beer
Pogo Physio

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There’s lots of ways to skin that cat, but we need to remember as the workload increases, our tissue capacity needs to keep pace with it. And normally with these injuries, these overuse injuries, it’s as simple as the workload exceeded the tissue capacity. 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 is episode number 187. My guest today is Brad Beer. He’s a physio and a physio to probably a lot of names that you’ve heard in the triathlon world, the swimming world, the surf Ironman world and probably the running world as well. And not only that, you’re a pretty well experienced runner and triathlete as well. So Brad, welcome to the show. Brenton, thank you very much. So your background as a physio has provided you with a lot of experience working with athletes of all levels

from probably fairly beginner level, but up to a lot of professional triathletes and on from there you’ve been the head physio at the Super League Triathlon with the bar and endurance team. So what are some of these things that you’ve experienced and seen working with some of these guys at the very top? Yeah, it’s been a really great experience. There’s been many great experiences, Brenton and there’s a few observations that I know you would observe too with your work. With some of the pointy and swimmers. One is they’re just so committed. Two, they’re very intentional. And three, it’s interesting, sometimes the best performances seemingly come from the athlete that’s the most relaxed on the start line. And that doesn’t mean they’re falling asleep, but there’s a confidence within them. They know they’ve done the work, they’re well prepared. So I always find that quite intriguing to be able to observe from behind the scenes

what an athlete’s mental state is like before they take to the start line. So there’s a couple of immediate thoughts, Brenton, and it’s always just nice to see that they’re very intentional about recovery, highly, particularly the triathletes, highly attuned to data and workload. So they’re very athletically intelligent athletes, the triathletes, they’re really tuned in. Is there any sort of common trends that you see at that level, whether it’s with the triathletes or the swimmers or the surf, I mean, any sort of common trends you see with injuries, like what time the season they’re getting them, are there some common ones that you see happen as a result of some mistakes that could be avoided, those sorts of things? Yeah, definitely. One would very clearly be Brenton on the other side of the off season. As an athlete matures in years, an endurance athlete,

some athletes will take two weeks off, some will take four weeks. After Olympic cycle, you often see, as you recall and know from the swimming world off, and it’s maybe four weeks off of complete nothing because of that four year build up or five year build up for Tokyo. But one of the things you see with a complete off season where the athlete completely stops is on return to training for the running-based athlete. So distance runner or triathlete can absolutely be a swimmer as well or cyclist, is some onset of often soft tissue-related injuries with the return to loading. And that’s because across the two, four or more weeks of cessation of training, there’s some tissue deconditioning that happens. And then with resumption of the training load, once the load exceeds that local tissue tolerance, you might see an Achilles tendon become a bit sore or a rotator cuff in the shoulder. So that’s definitely one time

when athletes need to get it right, coming back from the off season to the start of training. And the other side of that is definitely towards the end of a long year or long season where an athlete’s been doing the training but also required to race X amount of times the triathletes might end up racing almost every weekend as they’re into their World Traffin Series events and events in between at the end of the year, Super League events, et cetera. So then you start to see that cumulative effect of workloads across a whole season and that can also produce your soft tissue injuries, your bony stress injuries as well. And I think that’s probably relevant to at least us here in Australia at the moment we’re getting locked down left front and center for a week or two weeks. Like it’s on and off. And I experienced this just last lockdown we had I think about two weeks out of the pool came back and just didn’t really give it much thought

like I just went back to the same intensity that I was doing prior to that. And I’m feeling it in my shoulders just went a little bit too hard too early and that was from just two weeks off. So what’s the answer there? What’s the solution for, how do you avoid those injuries when you do take that bit of time out of the water? Yeah, and we would all recognize that there needs to be a psychological refresh at some point. So the tapering and recovery experts all agree there has to be a down phase in the season or the calendar year. So if we make peace with this is it’s not bad for someone to have a break but as you say, there are key things to be mindful of on the return. And one is it’s a progressive return to training workload. So we try and avoid the rules of twos the rules being too hard too quick too soon too much I think we come back from an off season either really pumped up to get into it or sometimes a little bit like I could have had longer off

but typically I think most athletes are pretty motivated so they come back ready to get into it and have their best season ever. Either they’re building on a good year or they’re trying to redeem themselves from a season that didn’t go well, right? So that’s one consideration is just being aware of progressively increasing your workload. If it’s running related, if it’s running specific injuries we’re trying to minimize, Brenton, we know that it’s the magnitude of bone load that’s more important than number of loading cycles in the risk of bone stress injury development. So how that practically might look is an athlete returns to running a triathlete for example, after some time off. Restore the volume, the minutes of training for the running say it’s five hours a week or eight or 10 hours, whatever it may be three hours before that athlete starts to add intensity because it’s the magnitude of bone load which is a function of the speed of running

that is the greater risk for a bone stress injury. So that’s our key principle that athletes should be trying to not violate.

And the other part of trying to minimize injuries on return from an off season would be the tissue capacity of our bodies. So when we have a break it down regulates we do get deconditioning locally and more globally. So as the workload’s increasing the body’s tissue’s capacity which can think of in very simple terms as the strength if you like of the body or the tissues needs to be increasing as well. So that’s a progressive attempt to be doing some strengthening conditioning work. Now that can be as simple as poolside work for a swimming athlete, gym work for any endurance athlete, home programs. There’s lots of ways to skin that cat but we need to remember as the workload increases our tissue capacity needs to keep pace with it. And normally with these injuries these overuse injuries it’s as simple as the workload exceeded the tissue capacity.

And what about strength versus mobility? If you were to prescribe if you had to say let’s say it was an hour a week how much of each one would we wanna be doing and obviously it’s gonna be different for different people but where does that sort of where’s that sweet spot typically lie on how much of each and how do they go together? Yeah, such a great question. And it’s always gonna be individualized we all recognize that but just to sort of give a conceptualized answer

the remembering what we just shared and that is that it’s the deficit in tissue capacity which is primarily a strength or a weakness of certain tissues that presents the problem. It’s not typically because an athlete’s gotten stiff on an off season or during the season. It’s because the workload’s gone up and the tissue capacity rotates at a calf calf muscles that affect the Achilles tendon muscles on the side of the hip that affect the tendon on the side of the hip they have not kept pace. So if an athlete had an hour a week and I know it’s a fun little game

I would love them to spend 60 minutes of the 60 minutes available working on tissue capacity, endurance, tolerance and all those factors. Now that is not saying that a bit of mobility work hurts or isn’t important but it’s just stating how important the strength and conditioning element is for an endurance athlete. If they only had one hour. Yeah, that’s good. That’s really good. And you host a podcast yourself physical performance show you’ve had a lot of elite athletes on there as well from runners and swimmers as well as well as triathletes and with those guesses there been anything that’s come out in conversation that’s perhaps surprised you or that has led you to taking that on board and implementing that as part of your sort of physio practice or how you go about your own training. Has there been any examples of that? Can I give you two things, Brenton? Certainly can. Well, the first would be it’s always we ask one set quest

in two actually at the end of the show and one is what’s one key piece of advice you could dispense to help people listen in perform at their best and whether it’s a featured expert, athlete, coach it’s surprising but not surprising at the same time how common people talk about commonly people talk about consistency and being consistent and it’s kind of almost fun to hear because we know it’s important but I don’t think we can be reminded enough on how important it is. So that would be one of the key themes that’s emerged across the five years of sort of weekly outputted episodes. The other key theme, Brenton which I’ve certainly taken on board as a practising clinician, a sports physio but also as a keen recreational recreational competitive athlete is just the importance of fueling. And if we talk about ways to try and minimise injuries will arguably this is probably the biggest emergent theme for endurance athletes

in the last decade of sports medicine. And that is as an athlete’s workload goes up their fueling needs to keep pace. It really affects things like bone stress injury risk if an athlete has three or four indicators of low energy availability then they are 15 times greater risk of developing a bone stress injury. And how often do you see elite runners, triathletes succumb to a bone stress injury that really cruels their season and all that momentum behind it. We’ve featured some key minds on this dietetic experts, physiologists and it’s a common theme and the summary of how to fuel for your training is fuel for the work required. So if your workload goes up athlete A, B or C please fuel accordingly. We often don’t change our eating patterns much yet it’s not difficult for a triathlete for example to go from 10 hours of training a week to 15 hours. There’s a one third greater demand on the body for fueling yet we wouldn’t eat necessarily 30% more.

So that deficit can quickly add up and it can really result in an increased risk of injury and it can certainly decrease performance as well which is just, it’s comical in the sense not comical in the outcomes but comical in the sense that we’re training harder to try and improve performance but we have a handbrake on it because we don’t have enough fuel on board to power the adaptations to the workload.

Is there a couple of things that you would keep in mind when it comes to the fueling in regards to like eating beforehand what’s more important to make sure you eat afterwards and refuel like where does that lie for you and what you’ve found? Yeah, this is certainly a sports year this is not my department but in learning from the guests that we’ve featured

one of the key things is fueling before session. So I grew up like you did Brenton swim training in Australia we’d be at the pool at whatever time in the morning often straight out of bed most times I wouldn’t eat something before training

and this year I turned, last year I turned 40 and I wanted to tick off an Ironman as a lifelong goal so I did one several weeks ago and in the lead up to that I’d had a few bone stress injuries Brenton so I was very aware of making sure my fueling was where it needed to be to try and avoid another bone stress injury so I was very intentional about eating before every session eating after and then something I often tell athletes is they recover from a bone stress injury is eat more than you think you need so we underestimate how much fuel we need it’s very difficult to eat enough when you’re doing 10 hours plus a week of training so I’m personally sticking food in my face most chances I get. Yeah, and what about now? Has that changed since completing the Ironman? What sort of training volume are you doing at the moment? Yeah, well it’s gone from sort of 15 hours a week Brenton’s around anywhere from 8 to 12 at the moment

so it was meant to be the Gold Coast marathon this weekend but sadly as many people be aware that got cancelled with COVID.

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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 and with your so you were competing in triathlons at least like sort of nine, 10 years ago where I think it was Australian age group champion for Olympic distance 30 to 34 year olds correct so you pretty well experienced triathlons what was your background in swimming? Did you grow up as a kid swimming and yeah was it something you had to take up as an adult? I was fortunate to get into a pool the moment I wanted to start doing triathlon so we both know that if you start later

it can be a bit more challenging to come up to speed as quickly as someone that’s got those skills from early on so I started swimming in Brenton at 11 due to a friend of mine at Grafton High School Gordon Kilby who actually reminded me recently that I reminded him actually he commented on a post I put up about my cans I’m in performance and he said I said you were the reason I started swimming good and he said you were the reason I stopped so it was Gordon Kilby that got me into swimming in Grafton Brenton but I fell in love with the domestic triathlon seen on TV in the 90s the twoies blew the Accent Accenture series it had a few naming sponsors over the years but Brad Bevan was the dominant force in that domestic televised triathlon world and he was what I wanted to be in life Brenton so that was my early start at 11 in triathlon

and did you and haven’t you gone on to treat work with Brad Bevan and probably a bunch of those guys that you aspired to be? Yeah, I often think about that if you had a told that 11 year old star-struck boy that one day you’d get to work in the end of their careers with these guys and athletes I should say I never would have believed it so I don’t even had two paths in mine triathlon or physio so it’s been fun to morph the two together. Yeah, I can imagine is there anything that you’ve because for me personally right so coaching a lot and then when it comes to my own swimming sometimes I sort of take my own advice I’d give to other people and sometimes I just I do my own thing because it’s just what you do how’s that been for you in treating people? Have you had injuries because perhaps you haven’t followed the own advice you might give what’s that balance been like? Yeah, that’s a brilliant question I’d love to say I always practice what I preach

however I don’t and just like any athlete I’m fallible to get it wrong sometimes more often than we get it right so I’ve made most errors over the years and in some ways I’m happy to be a guinea pig because it does give you professional experience with these injuries

but I think Strava and the uptake of these digital platforms has kept a lot of athletes including me quite accountable because I do often get a comment or two on my Strava account if the session seems a little bit long or hard it might get a couple of people so comment on that so there’s an accountability that that’s brought to me which is good but I’ve practically made so many mistakes over the years I went through about five or six bone stress injuries in a 10 year period I haven’t raced a marathon since New York in 2015 and this was to be my first one six years later and the reason is I sort of bounced from bone stress injury to bone stress injury so that’s really forged a real passion for me to understand that space better and I love treating that in clinics now in clinic

and the number one reason so number two reasons I’ve developed those over the years looking back where I was simply under-fueled I was in the treatment room X amount of hours a day all week not often not eating just running from appointment to appointment I’d train in the morning, train in the afternoon I simply wasn’t fuelled enough and I was just doing too much intensity running in there so it was a perfect recipe for bone stress injuries

and why does under-fueling lead to bone stress injuries?

Great question

so if we think about training to answer this simply, Brenton we know that it’s not the training that makes us fit it’s the adaptation to the training so that adaptation is driven by our hormones our sex hormones testosterone, estrogen, growth hormone, etc and when we’re under-fueled that whole hormonal axis down regulates so we don’t have the same fire and if you like it or hormone health or hormone profile that we otherwise would so that can manifest in

for female athletes in lack of menstruation cycles or irregular cycles for males that can manifest this is something that’s been more openly discussed now and known and shared between practitioners and patients is erectile dysfunction so that can look like less morning erections for male athletes and I know it’s clunky and awkward and everything else but it’s really important female athletes have a very clear scorecard and that’s did the monthly cycle happen yes or no if not there may be an under-fueling component there particularly if it’s gone on for three consecutive months so these hormone this hormonal hormonal down regulation affects the the reproductive systems and it affects bone health so if there’s not enough fuel on board then bones can lose density which increases the risk of a bone stress injury

and then it’s a hard thing to have shown in the science but it would make sense that if bones are at risk through under-fueling so to a soft tissue’s tendon injuries which is one of the most common triathlon related injuries and swimming related injuries if you think about the shoulder so to summarize and simply it’s we need those fuel levels to optimise our hormonal profile which they direct everything whether it’s our reproductive system our tenocytes for our tendons our bone cells for our bones it’s it’s the key I was training with a a lady who does sort of that kind of work with with the elite athletes primarily females and she’s done a lot of work with the women’s AFL talking to some of those teams that kind of thing and she was saying that when she was a an athlete she was a runner as a junior and it was basically if you had your cycle that month then it was seen as a failure you haven’t trained hard enough maybe you’ve

eaten too much it’s like so it was so backwards and so her education now and what she’s trying to teach and get across is that is exactly that it’s like your overall health is much more important than being underweight and really like to be able to run fast because that is not with long term and it’s probably not going to be the best thing for your sporting and your sporting results in the long run as well absolutely it’s not just about health because a lot of highly ambitious motivated athletes would choose a performance outcome over their long term health like in the short term like it’s not unexpected that’s why they’re elite athletes but you don’t have to choose between them in fact if you want optimal performance you need to have an appropriate level of fueling you need to have a maximise sex hormone profile all of those things and in the swimming world I can’t recall the exact paper but I recall Dr. Margo Mountjoy on an expert edition

of the podcast I host the physical performance show and she was she’s an IOC sports doctor who was really the one that championed the change in naming from the female athlete triad to what we now know it as relative energy deficiency in sport because 50% of the athletes on the planet are males it affects males too they just don’t have a menstruation cycle Dr. Margo Mountjoy spoke about swimming out outcomes and they ran trials where they looked at swimmers that were purposefully underfueling versus those that were fuelled appropriately and I think it was a 400m time trial their 400m time trial performance was down in the group that wasn’t fuelled appropriately so we don’t have to choose between long-term health and right now performance measures in fact you can have both if you eat your cake and eat it if you have your cake and literally eat it too so there’s a greater awareness and it’s something that I’m so passionate about

as a health practitioner is educating athletes about this I look back at my 10 years of junior triathlon from 10 to 20 and I was likely underfueled the whole time and I picked up low bone density as a 36 year old I found out I had osteoporosis in my lumbar spine and I’d always lived a healthy life I was pretty stunned I went and had my bone density check done purely as a interest just to see where I was at and couldn’t believe the results now fortunately I picked it up I’ve worked sort of diligently in the last four years and I’ve improved that it’s now in the osteopenic range in my lumbar spine 70% of our bone density is genetic but I look back and I do think the lack of knowledge in the 90s and underfueling was no doubt probably part of what I’m now experiencing there you go and with the swimmers that you have come in to the clinic and that you work with is there something that you typically prescribe for them if they come in with shoulder injuries

and those sorts of things the majority of issues that I come across when people come to our clinics is shoulder injuries which is no surprise and sometimes it’s caused by technique when we slow it down we see there’s a pretty obvious reason why you’re having pain and issues there but then some of it is perhaps overuse or it might be just from sitting at the desk and having a bad setup there’s so many things that can cause it is there some pretty common ways to overcome some of these injuries that you see? Yeah definitely it always is prudent to have an accurate diagnosis Brenton because once that diagnosis is made then you just apply the right principles to get the treatment outcome you’re after and to think simply about shoulder pain a UK colleague of mine Adam Meekins who is a well-known shoulder focus physio Adam speaks about breaking down shoulder pain into really four groups one’s the weak shoulder two’s the stiff shoulder three’s the unstable shoulder

and four is the shoulder pain referred from the neck so if we quickly rule out a few we’ll be left with 80% of the presentations that the swim population the triathlete population will experience and that’s the weak shoulder so then the neck referred ones from nerve roots in the neck mind you there can be very rare occasions where people have a bony growth on their shoulder and that’s why someone presents with shoulder pain often it’s very good to have an x-ray the unstable shoulder that can present problems you know this Brenton from the elite swimming world there’s often such great mobility in these elite swimmers and sometimes that can become pathological so that’s that excessive range of motion which we see in the elite swimming swimmers can be people that have had trauma to their shoulder so dislocations etc the stiff shoulder you don’t tend to see outside of the very mature folks so the people with glenohumeral osteoarthritis

or arthropathy with the stiff shoulder in their 70s 80s whatever it may be and that can also include frozen shoulders our frozen shoulder is often over diagnosed sometimes we lose a bit of movement we get a bit sore and stiff and we go I’ve got a frozen shoulder but a true frozen shoulder is is often seen in the middle ages and more predominantly in women and it will last 12 to 18 months so we don’t often see that in the active population so much but the last category the first category we started with there which is where most of the listeners of your show Brenton if they’ve had a sore shoulder or if they develop a sore shoulder will sit a weak shoulder so it’s a soft tissue injury to the shoulder and it tends to be most of the time a tendon driven pathology or pain so it’s a tendonopathy that term tendonitis is now dead in the water we talk about tendonopathy and quite simply the reason it gets sore is because the training workload like we touched on

at the very start has exceeded that shoulder or the rotator calf’s capacity to cope with that workload so the way we get that right is we increase that tissue capacity at the shoulder and that’s through exercise but Brenton the exercise has to be progressive you can’t get some exercises day one and still be doing them in six weeks there needs to be gear changes along the way to make that harder and heavier and therefore develop better strength and soft tissue resilience I think you put that pretty well that’s interesting

I’m just thinking of the swimmers that I have come across that do come in and they do have some issues with the shoulder and I think a lot of them will spend a bit of time out of the water to let their shoulder heal and then they’ll get back into it now we talked about this at the start what would be the maybe the right approach for those that have got pain obviously they should go and see someone like yourself like a physio to go and get it treated but would that time out of the water if it’s three or four weeks would that actually make it potentially make it worse Great question Brenton I think if people think about injury rehabilitation or recovery as a two-sided coin and on one side of the coin you’ve got this strategy of calming symptoms down so calming down the upset sore shoulder how do we calm it down you just mentioned it Brenton it might be necessary or it might be wise to have a period out of the water so whether that’s three days

or two sessions or one week or two weeks that sometimes is a key requirement to get a timely outcome with recovery someone needs just to chill out take some time out let the shoulder settle down so that’s reducing pain that can also be achieved through medication anti-inflammatories for example when appropriate energisics were appropriate occasionally you might have a reactive bursitis in a shoulder that could benefit from a cortisone in corticostero injection these are all calming down strategies soft tissue work manual therapies you know all the host that all the things that that encompasses so that’s one side of the coin the other side Brenton is the building up the strengthening conditioning so they’re both required where people often get disappointed and you would have seen this in disillusioned is they take the time out it feels better because they’re not using it they’re relieved they’re happy coach is happy let’s get

back in they get back in the water and the shoulder gets sore again and the reason for that is because the swimmer or the athlete hasn’t addressed that strength deficit or decrement that existed so when people are out of the pool it is an ideal time to be working on that shoulder strength deficit and that’s got to be objectified it’s no good just throwing a bunch of stuff you know you need to know where your gaps are what the numbers are and then you get to work to improve it because we know that what’s measured gets improved right and how do they what are some of those things that they should be measuring and how would they go about it or how would a professional like yourself go about it yeah it’s great I term it sort of in my notes they even put capacity test in so if it’s a case of a shoulder we’ll use a handheld dynamometer like this where you have a swimmer pushing into it to a couple of different ways you can

test it a make test or a break test so developing force maximally or just quick force development and you’ll have a swimmer up in say the abducted 90 degrees it’s a common piece of gear here it’s going out of the room right now to the next route but you’ll have a swimmer up in say a 90 position externally rotating the wall to do that internal rotation we’ll test that flexion we’ll test that often abduction so all the key areas we might do something as simple as a push-up test how many push-ups can someone do before their shoulder gets sore so we’re thinking locally about the shoulder and then there’s other tests we might do Brenton further refilled so we might want to get some side bridge measures or some hip capacity testing done as well because we know that there’s a whole kinetic chain that’s involved the swimming right yeah fantastic that’s that’s answered a lot of questions that I had for you being having the expertise that you’ve gotten

I like the fact that you’re a triathlete a swimmer yourself because I think there’s so much that you can you can take on board from your own experience when you’re delivering that that advice because often we and I was a junior a lot of my teammates would go and see physios and they’d say like don’t swim for two weeks and it’s like you got you don’t swim beer like you probably don’t do any or much sport it’s like you so then you know we ended up changing and and seeing people who knew the sport and knew what had to be done and the results from that were a lot better rather than just telling people to stop doing completely what they were doing and they could you lose your swimming fitness and you feel for water so quickly and so we needed strategies to mitigate that and so often that would be kicking with a kickboard if you couldn’t swim at all if you had really bad shoulders but having people who have got that experience because it helped

so much in physios so yeah I think it’s great that you’ve got such a depth of experience in both of those worlds and on that I often say it’s easy and often lazy advice sometimes it’s entirely appropriate but when it’s appropriate fine because there’s times when people need to take time out but bone stress injury you know you can’t run through that really stirred up shoulder that you can’t swim 50 metres with right out of the pool but it’s easy and lazy often to say take time out it’s difficult to work with an athlete to get them finding their zone of tolerance so if someone is being given that advice ask questions about why ask questions about what you need to do in that downtime but maximise it there’s stuff you typically couldn’t should be doing yeah it’s the equivalent of like a swim coach saying you’re dropping your elbow you’re dropping your elbow get it up it’s like well how do you do it most people don’t know how to do it

or how to develop it so it’s very easy to say what they’re doing wrong a way or a method to be able to change it and explain what they need to be doing rather than just telling them what they’re doing wrong and it really frustrates me as a coach when people will get told those sorts of things those simple like one off sentences or words but it’s like now give me something to actually do to change it don’t just tell me that I’m dropping my elbow all the time like I say it all the time it frustrates me as a coach the frustration I have Brenton just like you shared there is like a communication between therapists and coaches you would have seen it over the years I’ve been told I can’t swim for this many weeks and you’re left sort of as a coach going well okay what else did they say like in my opinion that should never happen there should be a phone call a text message it doesn’t take much to the coach to say here’s where we’re up to

this is what the athlete can do let’s work together to make sure they’re back assume over the years particularly in the juniors you might have seen that happen a fair bit where the coach is pulling their hair out going well where are you up to with this how long is it going to take yeah that’s exactly right well Brent thanks so much for being on the podcast and for those listening where are you based if they need a good physio and where can they get in touch with you yeah thanks Brenton on based on the Gold Coast Australia the physio practices pogo physio let it for 14-15 years more or less since I graduated and Brenton a lot of conditions and this has been one great thing out of COVID one great thing that is most things can be actually treated remotely because normally with these endurance overuse injuries it’s a mismatch of load and capacity so as long as you’re working on the load of the athlete and building up capacity

you can get an outcome so if someone did need a hand happy to get emails b.bieratpogophysio.com.au and available on all the socials as well at Brenton fantastic well Brad thanks so much and I appreciate you jumping on sharing your experience with the listeners and yeah it’s been great to be a guest on your show as well and you have 270 episodes deep now so you’ve been doing that for a while and congratulations on doing that many episodes as well because as a host myself I know the time it takes to do this but I think personally too it can be a bit of a not a selfish thing in a way where it’s like you get to learn so much and so I’ve really learned a lot today and some stuff I can apply to my own swimming and my coaching so from a selfish point of view thank you for sharing all this team it’s mutual I’ve been working on my power diamond Brenton in my swim strike so thank you thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help

you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

The post What Is Causing Your Persistent Shoulder Pain (And How To Fix It) with Brad Beer appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

rAmy recently did the Cairns Ironman. She had a pretty big PB. She went from 1:18 down to 1:09. I invited her to the podcast to chat about what she did to make such a big improvement on her swimming speed.

01:05 What Inspired You To Work On Your Swimming
02:26 Take Away From The Effortless Swimming Clinic
03:08 It Takes Patience
04:20 Making Changes Permanent
05:46 Clinic Expectations
07:59 Noticing Changes On The Stroke
08:44 Keeping Those Changes In The Openwater
11:00 Few Things At A Time

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And so what did you take away from the clinic? What did you learn there that you perhaps didn’t know before? Or was there something specific to your own stroke that you found out you had to work on? I guess it was something straight away after going to the clinic that I knew, just, he just changed my whole, whole way that I, you know, entered the water through to pushing the water out. Just my whole catch was completely different once I left that 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 the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Amy Rine and Amy recently did the Kansai Man and had a pretty big PB. So I went from 118 swim time down to a 109. So I wanted to get you on the podcast to chat about what it is you did to make such a big jump in your, your speed in your swim time.

So welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Brennan. So you’ve done two Iron Man’s prior to Kans and Kans was in June. What, what sort of inspired you to work on your swimming? Cause you came to a clinic of ours in March and you mentioned that had a good impact on your swimming. That’s correct. So I decided to do the Iron Man Kans. And I know Kans is sort of notorious for being pretty crappy weather, pretty rough swim. And I’m not a confident swimmer in the open water. And I’ve always sort of, you know, struggled to get into the water. And I sort of only really enjoy Iron Man once my hand touches the ground after the water. So I always sort of had that in the back of my mind and seeing the podcast and seeing the Instagram posts and thought, I really need to get myself along to one of these clinics so I can get that confidence in the water in case the weather does turn in Kans, which it did. So I’m quite glad that I did go along to a clinic.

With the race, how far along was it that you’re in the race where the wind started to turn and the swim started to get a little bit choppy? The day before, when we’re checking our bikes in and we can see it, it was really, really rough. And thinking, oh God, tomorrow’s gonna be really bad and woke up and it wasn’t as bad as the day before. But yeah, we knew that going into the straightaway it was gonna be pretty rough in that swim. And so what did you take away from the clinic? What did you learn there that you perhaps didn’t know before or was there something specific to your own stroke that you found out you had to work on? I guess it was something straight away after going to the clinic that I knew. He just changed my whole way that I entered the water through to pushing the water out. Just my whole catch was completely different once I left that clinic. And then I was able to watch the videos back and just see how different it was

from the start of the clinic to the end of the clinic, how much he just changed the stroke. And then I was able to work on that, work on that and slowly progress and get a bit faster and faster. How did you feel after initially making those changes? Did you see an instant result or was it something that actually sent you backwards? How did it go the next few weeks? To be honest, it was definitely the second. I got a bit frustrated, got a bit confused, but I just remember Mitch saying, it takes patience, you’ve got to be careful with it, like to do the drills. And after a few months, he’ll start to see an improvement. And it wasn’t till probably a month before Cairns after I started really doing those endurance swims and just really working on my technique where I just started to see the massive improvement. So it was probably two or three months after the clinic and then just something switched and it was just like, yep, I’m improving.

That’s awesome. I’m glad to stuck with it. I mean, when we first started running these clinics about six years ago, we didn’t tell people what to expect. And so I think people would give up fairly quickly when they got frustrated, but it’s a given that you’re going to get frustrated when you’re changing your rhythm that you might have done for quite a while. I was definitely frustrated, yep. And just in time, a month before Cairns, I’m glad it fell into place. And so what did you do to make those changes more permanent? Did you end up doing drills as part of your Walmart? Was it just something that you thought about when you were swimming? So I’m coached by Trivelo coaching as well. So I’ve got a pretty structured sort of training plan, you know, which was a six month training plan into Ironman Cairns. So with a mixture of what I was doing with Trivelo and then a mixture of the drills, I was able to sort of do the drills

for maybe the first kilometer and really sort of slow down my stroke and really remember what Mitch was saying and how to really get that catch and just slow that whole process down. And then for probably the next half of the swim, then I was able to do the main set that I was given by Trivelo coaching. Yeah, that’s great. I mean, we’ve had probably, I don’t know, maybe dozens of Trivelo athletes come through the clinics, which is great. And we’ve got a couple of other clubs and squads that send our summers to us fairly regularly. And the good thing is a lot of them will actually program in like do some of the swimming drills as part of your Walmart, or they’ll put something in the Walmart, which is great because you don’t want to have to add in much more of what you’re doing. But if you can fit it into your session like you’re doing, then you’ve actually got time for hopefully some life outside of work and traffic.

That’s it, yeah, work, life balance. Yeah, exactly, right. And leading to the clinic, did you expect that you’d be able to take nine minutes off your Ironman swim time? Like what were your expectations? I would have loved to, I reckon that was my dream outcome. I just, I knew, I’ve always been sort of around the two minute swimmer. I’ve been doing triathlons for maybe eight or nine years now and never really sort of advanced in the swimming. I’ve always felt more stronger in the swimming and I can get out the water fresher, but never really got faster or faster. And then so it was always sort of in the back of my mind that I’d really love to improve on that leg. And if I could knock five or six minutes off the time, that would be like my dream outcome. But just getting that confidence in the water was really one of my focuses as well. And yeah, just I was blown away by the improvement that I was able to get in about four months process.

Where did the confidence, increase in confidence come from? Was it the fact that you, that it started to click or was it that you felt like had a bit of knowledge behind you that you could use when you’re swimming? Where did it increase in confidence come from? I guess both really, like knowing that I was going to get out of the water a little bit quicker, but also just not like rushing through the stroke and being able to just sort of concentrate on my arm,

getting in there and just moving through the water, I think gave me the confidence knowing that,

yeah, that I was going to, yeah, sort of unknown.

So before, did you feel like you were, like the analogy I use is it’s like on a treadmill that you just can’t get off. And that often you find your heart rates are up and there’s no point where you actually relaxed and balanced. But when you do take your time with the reach and the catch, then you just feel like you’ve got almost a point of rest on each side. Was there some of that in there? It just sounds like it’s a bit of what you’re talking about. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just stretching out and reaching and knowing that I was actually making progress in the water and not just sort of swimming on the spot. Yeah, the treadmill analogy is a great one there. And how did you know you were making the changes in your stroke? Did you have someone film you at the pool? Did you just have a look at what you were doing or was it just more by feel? So with the Tri-Velo coaching, we do a fitness test every six weeks. So back in November when I started with them,

it was a 1500 meter swim and I was exactly 30 minutes. And then towards the closer to Cairns, it was a 1900 swim and then I got that down to like 33 minutes. So it was a big improvement and I could see, you know, with those testings every six weeks, I could really see the difference that I was making. That’s fantastic. And in the race, did you change or do you feel like you sort of changed your stroke at all in the open water and with the choppier conditions? Did those changes that you made in the pool transfer across the open water or what was that balanced like? Because it can be challenging to keep those changes in the open water sometimes. It definitely was. And a strategy I had was to get on the feet and to, you know, swim on someone’s feet. And there was none of that in Cairns. Like it was just choppier. As soon as you got near someone, you were just pushed off. So it was just a solo swim. And the whole time I was just thinking,

right, high elbow catch, you know, long stroke, that power V, and I just had that in my head the whole time. And then you’re focusing on the boys and just getting around it. Yeah, I didn’t really know till I was sitting there in T1. I even forgot to press my watch and I looked down and I was like an hour 10 and I was sitting in T1 and I was like, oh, I’d swim all right.

Oh, that’s awesome. And how did you go for the rest of the race? Did it set you up well for the rest of the race? And did you manage to sort of save a bit of energy on the swim?

Well, it was quite a windy day, so jury’s out, but I would say so, yeah. Just sitting in T1 and going, oh, I’m an hour 10 and that was a big confidence going, yep, I’ve swam well.

You know, now it’s onto the bike and yep. Yeah, so it was really a big confidence boost knowing that I’d swim under that hour 10 mark. Yeah, that’s fantastic. And it’s going forwards, if you’ve got any more Iron Man’s planned or any more races, or if you’ve managed to take some time off afterwards. I’m definitely in a downtime now, but I do have Western Sydney at the end of September, that’s probably my next focus, but I think the long-distance stuff, I’ll park for a bit, concentrate on the 70.3s, yep. Fair enough. And going forwards, where do you envision that you can get to with your swim with another, say 6, 12, 18 months of practice and work behind you?

Yeah, so I remember Mitch saying like, he’ll only give us three things to focus on, otherwise it’s just going to confuse us. The main thing for me was my catch and getting that arm position all the way through. But I do know my, you know, I could probably improve on my legs or whatever. So I am looking forward to doing another video, you know, in the next month or two, sending it through to you guys and getting that another analysis and then working on another three things. So I know that I’ll be able to progress. And who knows, I might be able to be a 140 swimmer.

Yeah, that’s great. And it’s, yeah, there’s always things to work on in swimming, which is the good thing. And I think it’s a good approach to keep it really simple like you’ve done. And it’s great to be able to make such a big improvement. So well done. And thanks for trusting that we’d be able to help you in some way. And I’ve got no doubt that the training that TriValley guys are giving you as well is making you pretty fit from some of the sessions that I’ve heard get this out there. So yeah, thank you for being on the podcast and I wish you all the best for Western Sydney. You’re welcome, Brennan. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

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