Effortless Swimming

Julie McDonald is one of Australia’s most celebrated Swimmers. She’s competed in 2 Commonwealth Games and 2 Olympics. Julie held the Commonwealth Record for the 800m freestyle for 21 years, the longest standing record for any Australian. Join me as Julie talks about her experience competing in the Olympics.

00:46 Exciting Swimming Events Going On
06:00 Is It All About The Gold?
10:10 Going To My First Olympic
13:08 Getting Your Head Into The Right Space
16:47 Olympic Flashback
19:52 Best Swim
22:17 Second Olympic Performance
27:39 Listen To Your Body
28:51 Using Logbooks
30:50 Hardest Week Of Training
34:43 Transition From Athlete to Working
39:51 Positive Mindset Is A Daily Activity
46:27 Consistency

How To Contact Julie:
https://www.facebook.com/juliemcdonaldoam
https://www.instagram.com/juliemcdonaldoamoly/
https://juliemcdonaldoam.com/

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big believer that everything that happens in our life is a result of the way that we’ve been feeling and expressing ourselves. And then if people were really honest with themselves, they would think about that and go, you know what? Yes, because my mindset’s been that, you know, I’ve felt lousy, I’ve not been honoring myself, I’ve not been valuing myself. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that helped 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 185 and my guest is two-time Commonwealth Game and Olympian, Julie McDonald. So Julie, welcome. Thank you so much. So we were just talking about the trials going on at the moment. There’s a lot of really exciting swimming happening and my guess is you’ve been watching it pretty closely with your background in competitive swimming

and what have you noticed in the last week or so that they’ve been campaigning, what stood out to you? It’s really interesting, I guess, Brenton. For me, the exciting bit is that a lot of the people that I swim with have got kids that are swimming at the trials, which kind of makes you feel old, but, you know, it’s exciting to see, you know, their careers taking off and how they’re responding to it. The biggest thing with the Olympics, it doesn’t matter, you know, who you are, it’s the, everyone in the back of their mind has that, this is a once every four year event. And obviously with what happened last year, you know, it’s once every five years, but that added more pressure for some. So those athletes that were looking at retiring, you know, I think it put, they could have looked at it two ways. They could have looked at it that they’ve got another 12 months, they got another 12 months to get work behind them.

And, you know, obviously it was difficult for some that Victorians, obviously the majority, but they could look at it that gave them more opportunity to get better or that they went into that mental mindset of, you know, oh, I was about to give up. And, you know, the initial shoulders drop and then it’s like, can I do another 12 months? And so it’s interesting to see these athletes that are winning now and seeing that, you know, some of them have had, you know, an injury last year, so they had a bit of time off. And so they’re a bit fresher, so they’ve come back better than ever. You see other athletes that were younger that got that extra 12 months and used it to their best advantage and went, right, you know, another 12 months trained for these Olympics, let’s go. So for me, it’s been interesting to see who has been excelling and who hasn’t been. Yeah, it’s, I mean, you look at someone like Carl Jarmers who he had his shoulder op six months ago.

And so for him, it’s worked well. And I think they’re saying Cam McAvoy as well. He sort of looked at it and went, oh, you know, I might get in and train for, have it come back and just get in the gym more and bulk up. And he’s made the four by one team. So it’s worked very well for some swimmers. And like the times that they’re doing, so impressive. So I remember thinking last year about like time out of the water with the lockdown and everything, like how will this actually affect people? And hasn’t really, it’s probably done wonders for them by the look of it. I think it has. You know, you look at how many world records have been broken and or, you know, so close to world records and it’s been exciting, you know? And I think that doesn’t matter, you know, what went on last year, every Olympic trials is, there’s always gonna be those triumphs. There’s always gonna be those narrow misses, you know? And, you know, the way we were trained

was that you had either came first or second under that qualifying time or, you know, it didn’t matter. And I noticed a post on Facebook today of a guy who used to be a journal who’s now an athletics coach and he posted up, you know, about somebody that just missed out. And I just said, you know, that happens with so many, you know, it’s you’ve got to be prepared that it’s one, two on the wall under the qualifying time guaranteed to go. And that’s why it’s exciting. It’s, you know, you could miss out by 0.01 of a second. And I think it was the turn of breaststroke. Can’t remember the swimmer’s name, but he came in second just, yes. And you just look on his face. Oh, the poor guy in the bathroom. It’s like, and I feel for him because his grandma passed away last year, right? And I feel for that because that was me in 1990 Commonwealth Games before you were born, right? Oh, sorry, come on, give me some. Oh, OK, yeah, OK.

I’ve got some wrinkles here.

So, you know, my granddad, my biggest fan, passed away a few months before the Commonwealth Games. And, you know, I know what that’s like. You it’s in the back of your mind and you want to do the best for them. And and and so, yeah, I felt for him for that. But, you know, you look at his times and the last couple of years, he’s sort of been getting a bit slower. He hasn’t hit those times he did at the World Champs in 2017. And you sort of think, well, so for me, I was sort of, I guess I think the selectors, you know, they’re either thinking, we’ve only got so many spots on the team. Obviously, if everybody qualifies automatically, that leaves less spots for those who are borderline. They’re not known for their leniency. They’re not known for their generosity, these selectors, you know, or compassion. So they’ve got a job to do. And the athletes have got to make it easier for themselves by just knowing they’re going to do that time, you know,

and being prepared. And, you know, everyone’s going to have their good and bad days. But, you know, I did I did feel for him. Yeah, yeah, it’s hard not to to feel for him. But look, it’s that’s what it’s all about. And I mean, you come so low Lawrence being your coach. I mean, I imagine you’ve got that that mindset of, you know, it’s all about the stuff to silver, you know, it’s all about the gold. Is that something that you feel like you had in the early days of your swimming? Or is that something that you had to take on board with the coaching of Laurie and just having that repeated? And you eventually embodied that sort of mindset? Yeah, I think it would be interesting to check with my mum and see if I was really competitive when I first, you know, was younger. You know, I some of my memories of my brothers and sisters, my brother and sister riding our bikes around the house, I’ve got a feeling that, you know, I pretty much wanted to win.

And I think swimming, I just found the sport that I that was good for me. You know, when I was younger, I wanted to be a jockey, you know, because we lived on acreage and we had horses in the backyard. And when I was 10, my dad, you know, he said, sweetheart, you’re too big to be a jockey, cried. I cried for two days and and then I said, you can swim, you know, hello. OK, so for me, that was, I think, bred into us, you know, from a very early age, I learned to swim with Laurie. I really only had a year or two away from him because of the transition from a 50 metre pool outdoor to when Chandler was being built. And, you know, I think that we had that culture in our squad that you did whatever it took to win and that we were going to do extra. And that, you know, we didn’t want to leave any stone unturned. And I remember training for Barcelona. We were training down at Palm Beach, Crumb and Pool outdoors.

And it was 12 months, the Olympics. And Laurie said, we’re training at midnight because we’ll be the first athletes training with 12 months to go. So we walked up at the pool at midnight and did two hours training and then went home and went back to bed. You know, like we would do crazy stuff like that, you know. And it but it made it fun, you know, that it was we worked hard. But we also really tried to enjoy ourselves by doing it and pushing each other. And so I think that culture is definitely bred into us.

We always had that goal in mind of the Olympic gold. It’s what everybody that, you know, is has some kind of competitive nature in them it goes for. And, you know, I think that when you get there, when you when you make that Olympic team the first time, I think you just there’s a bit of relief. And then there’s that right now we’ve got now our job starts again. And that’s, you know, we were talking before about the Olympic trials being so close to the Olympics. And I was saying that that may not have worked for me because the way that we trained and, you know, maybe we would have had to change the way we trained, but when we trained, it was we trained for nationals in February. That was when we made the teams. And then we got back in and we started that preparation again for the Olympics or Commonwealth Games. And we had, you know, five or six months to do that again. So it was sort of you’re preparing for two meets a year.

So I think it would have been interesting to see how we went. I know that, you know, sometimes it works for athletes, sometimes it doesn’t. It didn’t work that well for Janet Evans in 1987 for the Pampax. She broke the world record two weeks before Pampax came to Australia

and then had the Pan Pacific championships two weeks later. And, you know, swam 10 seconds slower than her world record, which was great for me because I won the race. But it would have been good, you know, if we had have been head or head, head to head because, you know, I missed her world record by point seven of a second. So, you know, it’s interesting to see I think it suits some athletes and not others. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, for you in that first, that first Olympics, how old were you in the first Olympics? You weren’t quite young, were you? 18. 18. There you go. Were you nervous going in? Did you feel like you were quite young and perhaps inexperienced then? Or, you know, where was your where was your head out going into that first one? I think Laurie really trained our mindset to to be ready. And I’d had a tummy bug leading into the Olympics where I was my training was affected a bit. And I just remember like we all gathered at the Commonwealth

at the Canberra Institute of Sport for a farewell dinner. And I remember getting up at about one or two o’clock in the morning with vomiting and diarrhea. And one of my teammates heard me and called the doctor and they had to give me an injection to stop me vomiting. And I remember the next morning we all got up and got in our outfits, ready to get on the plane to go to Seoul. And I was like Moses. I parted the sea of people. They would have got around really sick.

And, you know, and it was I’ve got photos of when I rock up at Seoul Airport and I am just white, I’m white as a ghost. And I thank goodness we didn’t have social media back then because I might have been taking selfies of myself. I’m going, gee, I look like rubbish, you know, totally. But we just it was interesting. I don’t think I was nervous, but I remember walking in the gates of the Olympic Village beside Grant Kenny, actually. And I remember feeling that instant relief that we’re here and we’ve made it. You know, and I think that was I think my my tummy bug was probably pressure, right, pressure that I’m putting on myself because of the expectations that we had that, you know, that go along with being involved with Laurie squad was that we’re there to win. And, you know, and as an 18 year old, it’s a bit daunting, you know, going to the Olympic Games and but it was just I think that moment walking in those gates was I’m here and the relief.

And then the I felt like the pressure was a bit off then. And then I had six days to prepare before, you know, lining up behind blocks.

And you had quite a few squad mates that you knew in that first Olympics that that made the team. Did four or five. Yeah, and that I mean, I imagine that would have helped as well, like feeling now you’re in similar or familiar surroundings a little bit with familiar people and and having Laurie there as well. It must have been a like and I think what we’re seeing now at the moment, too, seeing Dean Voxel with that sort of very similar personality to Laurie. It’s just it feels as though that kind of personality just instills some kind of, you know, some kind of positivity. And we can do this where and it’s you were seeing that play out at the moment. Is that sort of what you what you felt and instilling that kind of mindset that you mentioned, is that something was that from a combination of hard work and the the words and the way he would say like what sort of made made all of that come together? Yeah, funny you say that I was, you know,

watching the couple of the races the other day and, you know, when Dean was going off and I went, oh, my goodness, here’s our next lorry. It was just the same weapon, you know, on the side of the pool. And I was like, oh, yeah, that’s funny. I guess, yeah, it’s a combination. You know, we’d done the work. We were doing 80 to 100 days a week. Well, I was for my event, 80 to 100 days a week as well as land work. The mindset, you know, lorry would always play games with us mentally. You know, he would, you know, instill that belief in and, you know, gear us up. You know, he would pretend that he was on the phone to Janet Evans’s coach and and, you know, he would, you know, he goes, oh, he goes, Julie, I’m talking to Janet Evans’s coach, you know, and and she’s doing, you know, 2,800 in an odd, bullshit lorry, you know. But it was fun, you know. And so that when we get to the Olympics, we all know we’re there

for a job and we all know what job we’ve got to do. And it’s about and I was just thinking about it the other day, you know, I remember we did a lot of walking before we went to Seoul because lorry knew that there was going to be that was going to be the only way we’re going to get from the village to the pool was walking distance. So, you know, be walking a couple of days a day. So let’s get familiar with that. So there’s a lot of preparation with things like that. He would do a lot of research around that. And I remember when we got to the Olympic Village, a couple of the athletes went into the into itaewon and one of the boys bought me a bike, right, and a $5 bike that I could ride. And I was like, wow, that’s really awesome. Thanks so much. So I was able to ride from the and I don’t remember having the conversation with him. He may be able to shed some light on it. But, you know, I was able to ride from the village to the pool

and it was a lot easier than it was walking all the time. And so, but you know, you know, you’re there for that. And it’s all about getting your head into the right space then and being prepared and not getting caught up with the, you know, we weren’t allowed to go out of the village until after our swim. That was our thing with lorry. We were stuck in the village and we just had to we weren’t, you know, no, no excessive walking, walk to the food hall, walk to the pool. That’s all we were allowed to do, you know, and just conserve our energy for what we had to do. Because as I said before, it’s once every four years, you know, I know there’s athletes that I swam with that, you know, could have been possibly more talented than what I was who. But once they made the team, they gave up, you know, they just sort of relaxed. They’re like, I’m on the Olympic team now, you know, and it was just and that we didn’t understand that mindset.

Our mindset was that we’re there to do a job to get the medals and come home. But yeah, it is easier when you got your coach there. It’s easier when you’ve got your teammates there because you’ve got that familiarity. You I was just thinking back to I hadn’t been to MSAC for a while, the main pool in Melbourne. But I remember it’s probably it was a couple of years ago, I walked into the indoor pool after not being there for like five years. And I had this flashback of going there for like, you know, state championships was always there. And I had this flood of just like nerves come into my body of just, you know, as a teenager growing up and, you know, go to the pool each day of states and you have the finals and those nerves that you’d have as a as a kid. Do you have it those sort of similar flashbacks or feelings when you see this stuff or when you like go to certain pools that have memories for you? Yeah, absolutely.

And even when I’m doing a keynote presentation and if they play some of my footage, you know, like I get nervous, you know, like when I’m about to watch my race, I’m like, I know the outcome, but I’m still nervous. And even that last 50, you know, it’s excitement. You know, I think it’s nerves, excitement. It’s a little bit of, you know, if you watch the Panpak race, it’s a bit of like, why couldn’t I get point seven more? You know, or, you know, or the Olympic race when Anki Moreng and I were charging to the wall for the bronze. You know, it’s that, you know, I get that stirred up grit and like, come on, come on. And I’m pushing myself, you know, and but I love that, you know, and I, you know, the old Adelaide pool where I made my first Australian team before they renovated it. The scoreboard used to be on the side of the pool. So I remember, you know, turning at the 800 meter mark because the way I made my first Australian team

was it actually entered the meat as a backstriker and I came out as a distance freestyler. We we had entered the 1500 freestyle as a backup in case I didn’t make it in the backstroke events. I made it in the hundred back, but not the 200. And so the 1500 was my last effort. So we spoke into the selectors and said, will you please consider me if I go faster than the girl who won the 800 free? And they had agreed. And so when I turned at the 800 meter mark, I pushed off the wall. Soon as I took a breath, I could see my time up on the scoreboard. So I knew I’d beaten my teammate, Jenny, who won the 800 free. And so I’m like, Laurie, we’ve made it. Looks like I’m swimming, right? You’re like, Laurie, mum and dad, Laurie, mum and dad. And then he let me muck around like that for a lap for a hundred. Then he went, get going, you know? So it was interesting because I’m not sure who it was that said it, but they are who was it the one, the 200 medley?

But she said in the breaststroke leg, she came. She could see her time. Yeah, split. And then she knew she was 50 freestyle to go, what she sort of had to do. So, you know, I remember those types of things. I love that. Yeah. Yeah, it’s, I imagine that feeling would never you’d never forget that. And what would you consider to be your best, your best swim?

I think I think my best swim was panpaks.

Because I, you know, I just felt so good. I felt so good in the warmup. You know, normally I’d do 2K warmup and I did 400 meters. And even after 100, I said to Laurie, I’m ready. And he goes, no, you need to do more. And I just that once in a lifetime, it was a once in a lifetime for me. It was just everything aligned on that day. And I felt amazing. And I just for the first time, went out hard from the start and left Janet for dead. Whereas with the Olympics, I dived in. I felt rubbish and, you know, and I had to fight for it, you know? So I think if I had to race again, I would have liked to race like panpaks. But I think, you know, you can’t go past the Olympics. Racing in the Olympic Games is pretty special.

And how so you said it just felt felt good from the start for the panpaks swim. And what about at the end? Did you feel like you’re exhausted or you just felt like you felt pretty good and almost like you could could keep going? Because I find that often with the best, sometimes your best races are the ones that you just it doesn’t really hurt as much as those ones. We have to grind it out. I know, right? And because I never really created a lot of lactic acid, I didn’t get fatigued. I always negative split my races. So for me, my downfall was sprinting. So I didn’t go ever go out really fast, you know? And for the Olympics in 88, I went out in 414 and came home in 4-7, you know? And I just the longer I went, the better I got. So for me, yeah, I would get I don’t think I ever felt fatigued. Once I hit that wall, it was like, oh, I’m done, you know, like, you know, your beauty or whatever.

You know, and I think I always tell people that that the moment you touch that wall, the pain goes away instantly, you know? And yeah. But yeah, I was lucky. I was one of those athletes that never really created lactic acid. So it wasn’t ever a drama. Yeah, look, one benefit to being a distance swimmer. Yeah. And with the with your second Olympics. So going into that. So the story, I’ll let you tell the story there about why you didn’t perform how you wanted to. But how are you leading into that? Did you feel like you were training well and your times are great and that you’re a real shot at the government? So the trials, you know, I was 22, which was considered old for an athlete. Back then I went in and won the 400, the 800. I felt great. I swam well. My times were, I think, equal number one in the world with Janet Evans at the time. And I knew I could go in there and win. I knew I could win. I’d beaten her before.

I was one of the only non-drugged athlete to beat her

ever in her career. So I knew I could do it. And I remember just being at the Olympics and just not feeling excited. I didn’t get nervous before my race. I just felt flat. And then when I swam the 400 and did no good, people were like, don’t worry, you know, you’re you’re 800 your gig. And, you know, you’ll you’ll be right for the 800, you know, in a couple of days. And then when I dived in for the 800 free, I had nothing. And, you know, like those visions, I could see Laurie. And I can see Laurie in one side.

He’s just looking at me like I could just seem looking just bewildered and I could see my parents in the grandstand just sitting there bewildered. And, and, you know, while you’re racing, you’re doing your best. But when you’ve got nothing in the tank and, you know, your mind kind of takes over and you just have these thoughts and you’d like what’s going on, you know, and so when I touched the wall, I knew I hadn’t made the final and I swam so slow.

And within three days, I’d left the Olympic Village. I didn’t want my disappointment to affect the others and allow them to celebrate. And, and then when I got home, my doctor said, you need to come and see me.

Sorry.

It’s OK. And we did some tests and I had septicemia, which is blood poisoning, which I’d got from an infected wisdom tooth about three or four months before. And we’d made the decision that we wouldn’t remove the tooth because I’d have to have two weeks out of the water.

And that the the antibiotics that the dentist gave me would kill the infection. But what they didn’t say was that was the bacteria from the infected wisdom tooth would poison my system. And, and that’s what happened. So, you know, it’s just one of those things that sometimes it brings up a motion. And I think being Olympic week, you know, being the trolls and seeing some of the kids going through the same thing, I understand it. And it’s it’s destroying. You know, it’s it’s took me a long time to get over that.

Yeah. And I’m watching some of the guys who have missed out and who were perhaps expecting to make a team or even like it was considered, you know, they were going to be on the team. It’s it’s so hard to watch them go through that and think like, what do you say to them? Like, there’s nothing you can say to make them feel better. What what did you what did your parents? What did Laurie say afterwards? Yeah, like, there’s a photo of Laurie and I.

And I’m just sitting there like this and he’s holding my wrists.

And I think he just, you know, I don’t remember what was said, you know, I’m pretty sure that there’s not a lot to say. And I think Laurie probably did his best to try and sort of console me or work out what was wrong. Or and, you know, if my parents, you know, they were just like, you did your best, did your best.

And on the day I did, it’s all I could do, you know. And like looking at me, you wouldn’t have known that I was that I was sick. Like, you know, I looked great. I was ready, you know, mentally ready, physically ready. But you just don’t know what’s going on your body that you can’t see. Right. And I’ve had a few incidences like that in my in my life where I’ve had, you know, in my 20s, I had three major health issues. So I had sepsisemia in Barcelona. I had chlorine poisoning when I made a comeback in 95 and then had stage two melanoma when I was 27.

Wow. And so after the the Olympics, how was there something that looking back in the end, was it a was their positive to take from it?

Oh, yeah, like, I think go with your gut feel, you know, like with things like that, you know, with your health, you know, I sort of. You know, and I think hindsight is always a great thing, right? You always say, oh, I should have got the tooth out. But it’s just listening to your body. And I was usually pretty good at that. You know, like if my I would take my heart rate every morning and if my heart rate was above, you know, 62 beats a minute, I knew that I was getting some kind of infection or cold or something. And so that, you know, then I would I’d monitor it all in my logbooks and, you know, be like, Laurie, my heart rate was up this morning. And, you know, just monitoring stuff like that. And but, yeah, it’s some of those things are just unknown, you know, and and you can some things you can’t prepare for. But it’s it is what it is. And then it’s just doing the doing the best you can with what happens on the day.

Yeah, that’s that’s it. And I know I’m like, you’ve using logbooks is you’re doing that throughout your career. I remember using them as a teenager as well. I don’t know too many athletes that are using them these days, whether they’ve got them using them on the phone or not. But have you have you still got those logbooks throughout your swimming career and do how often do you look back at those? And yeah, what do you what do you take from from reading back at some of those sessions and maybe some of your thoughts like a dear diary type of thing you may have written at times? Oh, yeah, some of them in there, like, you know, some of the fun ones like, you know, when you’re 14 and the and the Olympics are on and you’ve got Bob John Seaman, Justin Lemberg, Michael Delaney, you know, the the the original mean machine then. And they became

advert advertisers for a bread company and they put out these stickers and hear these boys and their swimmers. And, you know, there’s no no, you know, none of the suits that they got today were covers them all up. They were we got DTs that are like covering nothing, you know, like, we’re like, they’re stuck all through my logbook.

But yeah, it’s funny because I’ve I’ve still got them and I have shared them with anyone that has wanted to look at them.

Anyone that’s a distance athlete that wanted to see what kind of work we were doing. And yeah, it’s fun looking back on them, though, and just seeing because, you know, I would write in there, you know, if we went on a training camp or things like that, or, you know, like one of the we went to Perth and, you know, it says I met Fat Cat today, you know, and it was when Carl Wilson and I had gone on Fat Cat, you know, and yeah, it’s fun. It’s good. Probably only look at them, you know, maybe only if I’m doing an interview like this or something or they’ve asked me to look at it or. But yeah, good fun to look back on. Was there is there, I say, a week of training that you can remember being the hardest week of training in your life? Is there anything that stands out to you? Yeah, I think when we went to Hawaii in 91, I had had a few months off training. I just got back in the water to prepare for Barcelona.

And Laurie, myself and a few others were got called up for.

What was it? The America, Canada and Australia, the distance, distance training camp or something like that and in Hawaii, right? So Laurie says we can go and we have been doing. Three and four K leading in to this training camp, you know, but who was going to miss out on training camp in Hawaii? And so we get there and our.

Shorter session was 10 K. And the majority of sessions were 14 K. And what what it was basically was an ego fest of all the coaches because each coach got to do a different session. And so they wanted to outdo every other coach, you know, and Mr. Karoo was on the on the team. And he was the guy that gave us the 10 K session because he felt bad for us. He was like, this is ridiculous. I’m going to give you 10 K, you know, it was just it was crazy. That was the hardest week ever, I think. Oh, how many how many Ks do you think you did in that week? Oh, well, we did a while, I assume I think I should look back on the log walk. I think we did. We would have only trained. Would have only been there for six days, I would say. We probably did at least, you know,

80 K 80 to 90 K. Oh, it must have been more 90 Ks for the week or, you know, it’s pretty is pretty full on, you know. But I mean, even I think it was just because it was like everyone was trying to do the hard, you know, hard session each time. There was no recovery, whereas my training, we would often do 80 to 100 Ks a week

anyway, but it would be, you know, a combination of, you know, heart rate sessions or distance or, you know, whatever.

Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it? Well, and I think probably from the coach’s perspective, too, it’s probably a bit of an ego to see who can, who can write the hardest session. So it’s a bit of a pissing contest with that. But I think and it would also be, I think, having something like the top distance from us in the world, in a majority of them there, how much fun would that be? As a coach on the deck, just watching these guys train like that. That would, I remember watching Mac Horton and Greg Peltinieri train at M-Sack, just watching those two guys go back and forth. You’re just like, wow, this is awesome to watch. So having having several of you there would have been a pretty awesome experience. So I can see why it became a bit of an ego trip for many of them to write the hardest session. But I wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of it. That’s for sure. Yeah, I think we went out to an excursion one or two days.

We went to the beach once and we went on the Polynesian village another day. And I think that was our only reprieve, you know? But it was not a lot of entertainment. I can tell you it was a lot of sleeping going on in between sessions. Did you get to stay after the camp or was it?

Or didn’t get to enjoy the the sights or anything like that? It was just warm weather and that was ill. Come back, yeah, head back and then prepare for Barcelona. Sort of like it was definitely a shocker to the system. But it was like, oh, well, since we’ve done that, can’t be too hard now. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, wow. And what about towards the end of your swimming career? What was that transition for you from from summer to working and having to put that behind you in a way? Well, I did it twice. So after Barcelona was interesting and this is a great reflection on mindset. So come home from Barcelona, destroyed. I’m pretty disillusioned. I went on a holiday with my partner at the time, came back and at Stuart home, one of the colleges here in Brisbane was looking for swim coach. So I went and did that for six months to sort of work out what I wanted to do. And every time that I went to a

a function or got invited to a lunch or something, I would collect business cards, right? And I would get these business cards and I would write on them where I met this person and then I’d file them into a folder. And when I came back, when I was ready after coaching with all the girls, I thought, well, I’ve got to get a real job. So I started, got out my folder and I started calling these people and saying, hi, you know, it’s Julie McDonald. We met at whatever conference, blah, blah, blah, or event, la, la, la. I’m looking for a job, you know, wondering if you’ve got any jobs going, you know, and they would go, have you got a degree? Have you got this kind of training, you know, and no, sorry, no, it can’t help you. I got to M.

Right now the letters. Yeah, it’s a lot of letters. And I only saw it the other day.

Anyway, and there’s lots of cards in there. And I got to M and they finally said, well, if you can start tomorrow, we’ve got a training course starting. So I was like, okay. So it was pretty soul destroying, you know, because I just didn’t know what else I was gonna do. And then when I made it come back in 95 and what tried out for Atlanta, I got third at the trials. Obviously I hadn’t given myself enough time to train, but I originally only got back in the water to train for masters, because that was in Hawaii.

I was trying to get that holiday in Hawaii. Yeah, I reckon.

Two months in I went stuff masters, I’m going to the Olympics. So I went and changed coaches, went to Mr. Karoo and said, will you train me? And he said, you’ve got 10 months. And I said, will you train me? And anyway, he said, yes. So when I finished trials, even though I got third, I felt really satisfied. And I thought, you know what? I can do anything if I really commit my mind to it. You know, and I felt really good about it. And so then when I got back to Brisbane, I got job offers. You know, I had people saying, hey, I hear you’ve retired. You know, can you come and do work for us? And then, you know, I started in my first job and then, you know, a couple of months, pretty much, you know, like a year in, then I’d be somewhere and someone go, what are you doing? I tell them what I was doing. They’re saying, have you ever thought about doing this? I’ll, no. You know, why don’t we have a chat? So then I just kept being poached.

And I kept, and I went from one job to the other being head-hunted. And it was such a different experience, you know? And I just sort of looked back on that and I go, it was totally mindset. The energy that I was putting out there. I came back from Barcelona shattered, you know, feeling that I had let so many people down that I was a disappointment.

Whereas then I came back from Atlanta, on Atlanta trials feeling like, hey, you know, this is possible and anything’s possible. So that was a massive difference for me. And, you know, in that time after Barcelona, I, you know, really, I stayed away from the Olympics. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t, I just did my job that I was in and I put on a lot of weight. I was pretty, yeah, probably just wasn’t living my best life. And then it was interesting after 96 that had different that was. Yeah. I think for me, I think had a similar experience in terms of like the mindset that you’ve got. Like at times, let’s say like last year at times when it, you know, when things shut down, it was tough at like, it felt like, are we ever gonna get out of this? And it felt like there’s no, like I don’t know where the business is going to go. And I just sort of shut down any possibilities of growing or changing what we were doing.

And then when things start to open up and, you know, in this positive frame of mind where, you know, anything’s possible, opportunities start to come. And then you sort of take those actions and you have some success and it just really starts to grow. And it is so much to do with mindset and so is there anything that like over the last, you know, since 95, have you come across times where you’ve noticed you may have been in a bit more of a negative headspace and you’ve been able to turn it around and draw on that experience? Yeah. So many times, right? So unfortunately, I got myself involved in a couple of unhealthy relationships. And from that, I think it was pretty much an overall feeling of a low self-worth and self-esteem. And people that know me might think that that’s really odd and they don’t understand that. But, you know, that experience with Barcelona still would affect me from time to time. And particularly every time an Olympic came up

or Commonwealth Games come up, it would become, you know, it would always remind me of that. And anytime that I wasn’t doing well in my job, then, you know, those thoughts of, oh, I’m not good enough or I can’t do it, you know, or things like that. And, you know, so positive mindset is a daily activity that you have to control and you have to really practice. And so then after I left my second unhealthy relationship was when I really started pouring myself into personal development and, you know, understanding the person I was and why I had attracted that to me. And, you know, people, you know, I’m a big believer that everything that happens in our life is a result of the way that we’ve been feeling and expressing ourselves. And then if people were really honest with themselves, they would think about that and go, you know what? Yes, because my mindset’s been that, you know, I’ve felt lousy or I’ve not been honoring myself,

I’ve not been valuing myself. So then I’ve had a car accident or I’ve had, you know, you know, I’ve run into something that, or somebody that, you know, has been unhealthy. So, you know, it’s about taking control of our thoughts and really changing the way that we think and valuing ourselves and honoring ourselves and then being able to attract all the really good things. Like you said, you know, looking for opportunities and, you know, being open to what is gonna come in, you know, who can I help today? You know, for me every day, who can I help today? Who can I serve today? And whose life can I change? And, but also that I am enough and that I am valued and I’ve got a lot, you know, of good things that I can give to the world. So it’s important to, you know, it’s interesting when we’re at kids and particularly girls, you know, any girl that had great self-esteem and great self-worth and was confident would normally be portrayed as a bitch

and then she would be picked on or then she would be victimized in some way, you know. And whereas what we should have done was be going, how can I be like her? You know, how can I improve myself and have that confidence and self-esteem and self-worth like her? And so now, sorry, my dog’s having a coughing fit. So now it’s just about teaching people that so that then they can have the best life that they want because I know that that works, you know. And I look back at my swimming career and I go, so what were my thoughts leading into Barcelona? Was it pressure? Was it, you know, you know, was it something that was in my subconscious that caused, you know, me to have an infected wisdom tooth and, you know, things like that? It’s just, I’m always looking at, you know, like, okay, how can I always do something better? So, you know, it is massive. Mindset is huge, but it’s something that is like a muscle that needs to be exercised every day

because it’s, I’ve noticed that last year when we really focused on a particular mindset and everything our business grew, whereas this year I’ve noticed that, you know, I’ve kind of just been riding that wave and I’ve not really been focusing, having that intention and it’s, you know, it’s still growing a little bit but it’s not growing like it did last year. So, you know, it’s time to tap back into that. And with the speaking that you’re doing, is that, do you, when did you start doing that? Was it long after 95? Was it while you were working full-time? Or how did that come about? And when did you start it? Well, when I made my first Come Off Games team, I would be asked to go to schools and do school presentations or award ceremonies, you know, stand up on stage and say something

and, you know, invited to events and things like that, not necessarily always speaking but maybe being interviewed a lot. And so then it was a steady flow and then getting, I think in 1999, yeah, 1999, I started my own speaking business,

you know, I really started doing it professionally, rode that wave, oh yeah, it would have been 98, 99 before Sydney really rode that wave of, you know, that was incredible, 18 months, travelling Australia speaking and then I had my son a couple years later so then I went back to coaching

and put speaking on hold for a bit until he was about four or five and then started again. So, you know, I love doing my inspirational speaking but I kind of am now moving more towards being a personal development coach and helping people with that mindset and how can they become self-motivators? And so they’re not relying on, you know, there’s not really a lot of events that they can go to and listen to an inspirational speaker. So how are they, you know, motivating themselves? How are they able to get through, you know, situations like Victoria’s gone through in the last 12 months, you know, and it’s just training them to have that mindset and that capability to be responsible for themselves and be resilient.

I think it’s like, I look back at when I was like late teens, that was I was, you know, sort of started reading personal development books and continued that all the way through. And then I found some like journals from a couple of years ago and, you know, often write down things and like what I’d like to achieve. And often they took two or three times longer than expected. But I think back to the thoughts that I had as a late teen, early 20 year old and the things I wanted to do when I grew up and that sort of thing. And pretty much all have sort of come true. And I think it’s that consistent, consistent thinking about your goals and developing as a person, developing your skills. And yeah, and it all starts to come together. And I don’t think it doesn’t show straight away. It really takes time, but it does happen with that consistent sort of work. And, you know, nothing’s ever perfect and you’re not gonna do things right all the time.

But it’s that awareness of, you know, when that doesn’t happen and making the change. And I think for me, taking full responsibility for the things that happen, whether or not you’ve got any control over it, really or not, I think, you know, what’s your other option just to be a victim? It’s, you know, I think taking that responsibility, that’s been a big one for me. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s, you know, a lot of people, I mean, I think with sport it’s a little bit different with your goals because you do have a timeline. You’ve got a deadline of when you’ve got to perform. But, you know, you can work back from that. But with people that follow the smart goals, right? You’ve heard of smart goals before? Yeah. So I smashed that out of the water. Okay, don’t follow that process. If you’re an athlete, you know, obviously it’s, you’ve got a deadline, you’ve got to compete on the, you know, the 16th of June, 2021, you’ve got to be ready.

But with everybody else with their goals, you know, I say, you know, write them down, work on them. But don’t put a timeline on them. Because as you just said, sometimes they take longer, right? So if you say that you’ve got a goal of you want to achieve a certain amount of income by the 31st of December, 2021, right? And you’re doing the process, you’re doing the activity that needs to develop that business. And then it comes to the 1st of December and you’re a fair, you might be a fair way off that, right? And so then what happens? The doubt starts coming in and you go, and then you say to yourself, I don’t think I’m going to make it because I’ve only got 31 days to go. And I’m nowhere near it. Now you could have won Lotto the next day and achieved that goal, but you energetically have put it out there. I’m not going to achieve it, right? So that’s where smart goals fall down because the timeline, you start that doubt.

The moment you have an ounce of doubt, you’ve blown it, you know? And so that’s what I teach people is that don’t worry about the how, don’t worry about the when, just focus on what you really want because so many times I’ve heard stories of, I’ve done vision board workshops with people and then they’ve pulled out the vision boards, two or three years later and they look at it and they’re going, you’ve got to be kidding me, this is what’s happened, you know? So it’s just about embedding that into your mind and believing that it’s going to happen. With sport, it is a little bit different, but the majority of people I’m working with aren’t sports people. Yeah, yeah, it’s, what I found in the past when I was setting goals that were very much to a deadline, it’d be time and time again, it’d be like, hasn’t happened yet. And then I’d set another date, hasn’t happened yet. And it’s like, oh man, so it’s got fed up with it.

And one thing I looked back at recently, I think I set this, it’s probably about six years ago, but there was a list of about 10 things that I wrote down. I printed it off and I put it in this little folder and I just kept it in my desk drawer. And in some of those things, it’s like, okay, I want to earn the X amount. I want to be able to surf when the surf is good. I want to be able to swim with a squad when I choose to. And I want to be able to basically do what I like with my time and spend it how I’d like to. And the majority of these things I’ve ticked off, but it’s taken six years since setting them. And that wasn’t the first thought I had of these goals. It really took some time. But when you look back at it, you go, oh my God, this stuff has happened. And it’s just such a good feeling. So you look at that, all right, five, 10 years time, what can happen in that timeframe? That’s right, yeah, exactly.

And don’t limit yourself, you know? I think a lot of people set goals that they think that they’re going to achieve. And smart goals, they say, relevant, achievable goals.

Because if the goal doesn’t scare you, if it doesn’t get you excited, then it’s not a goal worth having, Olympic gold. That gets people excited. That gets people motivated.

If you went in there and your goal was to make, for me, considering my background and what the culture we were in, if I went to Lauringo, I want to make the Olympic team, he would have probably smacked me in the head. It’s like, no, that’s not good enough. And so you’ve got to set out their goals. Goals that you think that may never happen and don’t worry about how it’s going to happen, but really focus on what that is, what you want. One of the ones that just came to mind was probably five or six years ago when we were starting to run our swimming clinics. And we just started and we were running maybe one every two months or like a day’s worth every two months. And then I was like sort of mapping it out. And I think the number that I wrote was like, I’d love to have 700 people a year do our clinics. And I looked at that and thought, wow, that is like, that’s impossible. There’s no way like, I can’t see that’s going to happen.

But anyway, I wrote it down and that sort of worked with the numbers. And then for the last couple of years, we’ve had like double that every year go through, go through clinics. And it’s like, and now it just feels it’s normal and you get accustomed to it. And you just sort of learn how to deliver that and do a good job of it. So yeah, this stuff that at the time might feel unachievable. You might look back and go, you’re well beyond it. And you can’t see not doing that now. So yeah, I think back to when I was sort of early 20s, it’s like, yeah, the stuff that you think is scary and challenging, you’ll probably be doing that in five or 10 years and well beyond it. So just be used to, yeah, that something that might be very different down the track from where you are. Yeah, that’s it. No, exactly right. I mean, you look at careers now. You know, the careers that are happening now weren’t around 15, 20 years ago.

You know, my son’s doing game programming. He’s had that dream since he was eight years old. There were no courses around when he was eight years old, you know, no university courses, but now he’s at uni with a uni that’s designed, especially for that. So, you know, don’t ever limit yourself because it’s not there yet. Well, thinking of when you got initially, when you were asking, have you got a degree? You know, have you got this sort of training? These days, it feels very different. Yeah, certainly degrees can help with some roles. But I think as a business owner, no one, they just want the job done, the job done well. And what degree you’ve got is irrelevant if it’s not in, say, STEM field or something like that. So it is a very different world. And I think, you know, for me as someone who employs people, it’s like, I don’t care about that stuff. If you can do the job and do it well or you can learn to do it, then that’s all I care about.

It’s, yeah, it’s very different than what it was 20 odd years ago. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And for people who are listening to this, what’s the best way to get in contact with you? Where can they find you on social media or on your website? Where, what are those details? Yeah, so I’ve got Facebook is Julie McDonald OAM because there’s 5 billion Julie McDonald. So it’s easy to find me, Julie McDonald OAM. Same with my Instagram and my website is the same JulieMcDonaldOAM.com. Fantastic, and we’ll put that on the website as well. So, Julie, I really appreciate the, I mean, it’s been quite a long call. So we’ve gone probably a little bit over time, but that was great. I appreciate you showing those stories and being willing to sort of go back and travel back to what it was like for some of those events. I’ll say. Yeah, that’s right. I really appreciate it. So Julie, yeah, it’s been fantastic. Thank you. You’re welcome.

Thanks so much for having me. It’s been great fun. 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 Highs And Lows Of Being An Olympian with Julie McDonald appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Abe Goldberg has recently been through the 5-Day Catch Challenge. He knocked 7 seconds per hundred of his 1000 yeard time trial. I thought it would be great to get him on so that he can share what he changed about his stroke and about his swimming because I think it’s going to be relevant to a wider audience and I am sure there’s going to be some learning that people can take away from this and will apply it to their own swimming.

2:10 Open Recovery Versus High Elbow Recovery
4:10 Doing It Consistently
5:49 Being Mindful Of Front Quadrant
8:58 Using Bouyancy Shorts
11:46 Swimming Downhill
12:30 It’s Okay To Come Up With Your Way Of Doing Things
14:50 Ongoing Commitment
17:07 Using Numbers

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

Again, I just come back to how simple you make all this is really the benefit to anybody that’s following you or your content.

If they would consider that five day challenge and just that in and of itself, I think that breaks down everything you need to know. 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 184. My guest today is Abe Goldberg and you’ve recently been through the five day catch challenge and replied to an email that I sent you with some pretty good results. You’d knock seven seconds per hundred off your thousand yard time trial and I thought it’d be great to get you on, share what you changed about your stroke and about your swimming and because I think it’s gonna be relevant to a wider audience and I’m sure there’ll be some learnings that people can take from this and apply to their own swimming. So welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, well, thank you, Brenton. It’s really exciting to be here and I appreciate all the content you provide to all of us out there who take a little bit of time to search you out and so it’s really been helpful.

Yeah, so I have been comfortable in the water for a long time, I swam as a kid but never competitively but always active and so swimming in general is fairly comfortable for me. You know, I don’t panic in the water in a triathlon or anything like that. I’m pretty comfortable overall

but I have recognized that it really comes down to technique and it’s not a power game in the water. I know you’ve done some analysis on Lionel Sanders and if it was a matter of power, well, he would certainly be the first guy out of the water. So when it comes to some of the subtle changes, so I have seven seconds sounds like a lot and it is a lot but I find that my gains are more incremental that I’ve had when I kind of follow some of your tips. One of the first things that I tried to incorporate was what you refer to as this open recovery versus a high elbow recovery. So I used to find myself coming real close to my body to try to get that arm over into the water and I noticed people either with your content or just watching races online, people’s arms were quite a bit wider when they were coming back into their recovery and I wasn’t sure if that was just sloppy or they were in a hurry or they were open water.

I really didn’t understand why they were so wide and then when I started doing that, I heard that slap in the water, right? That you just sort of drop your hand in and extend it and then all of a sudden you get this little bit of a slap to it and I thought, okay, well, you’ve been talking about that. So I started to incorporate that. That’s definitely made it easier.

I just feel like, I wouldn’t say I’m effortless but that’s certainly one of the things that I have incorporated into the swim is just trying to come a little bit wider with the recovery and stretch that arm out.

So that’s definitely, I guess I should back up and say that all of your instruction or all of the analysis that I followed you now for quite a while really kind of comes down to those five or six things, how you start to catch,

where you put your hand in the water to begin with.

Focus on that power diamond when you’re going through the water. I don’t bilateral breathe, I just breathe to one side. I don’t worry too much about that. I try to make sure that at least one foot breaks the water line when I’m kicking. I know that I’m dragging my feet a little bit. So all of the things you are suggesting, you could kind of break them into these five or six little things. And now it’s just a matter of keeping it in front of mind when you’re in the water and executing it. Yeah, that’s exactly right. When you look at it and then you have it explained you, you can think, all right, it’s really simple and it really comes down to a couple of simple things. And then the challenging part is to be able to do that and do it consistently and then do it at speed. And that’s where all the practice comes in and doing the drills and the warmup and that sort of thing. But I 100% agree with some of those small changes

you talked about the open recovery. Like some of those small changes where people are perhaps told something like have a high elbow recovery and it’s taken is come really close to the body and so you get jammed up with your shoulder. And yeah, teenagers, a lot of those guys will have the range of motion to be able to do it comfortably and it might be an okay thing to do. But being an adult, we just don’t have that same range of motion. And so we’re just gonna do some really funky things that probably aren’t good for your shoulder if we’re having to come over really close to the body. So sometimes those little tweaks can make a difference. I recall some of your feedback was, imagine you had like a string or something like that pulling your elbow forward, right? So I think about that, right? I just think to make sure, because if you don’t, you could very easily just lay your arm down in the water and that’s not good at all.

The other thing that I’ve taken away from the challenge and some of your other content is really the front quadrant, being mindful of that.

I don’t know that it’s natural to, unless you’re doing a catch up drill, I don’t know that it’s automatically natural to, you put one arm in the water, it’s natural to then pull it behind you, but to give a little more thought in concentration to making sure that something is always above my head in the water or in the front quadrant. And then when I watched some of these other swimmers, like we just talked about Dan Smith or something like that, I mean, it’s a whole nother league in what they do with regard to, or I watched your other interview with Sun Yang and the same thing, these guys are, they’re gliding in the water with almost, their second arm is almost in the water while their first arm has barely started to catch. So it’s pretty extraordinary. And for you, what was it those couple of changes that you mentioned that helped you take off that seven seconds per hundred? Or was there, what were you thinking about?

I think so, I mean, I think, so most of my swimming is gonna be,

so if I’m doing a longer distance triathlon, so I’m gonna be, it’s kind of a sustained, I’m not gonna be sprinting, right? Or I may try to be sprinting, but it probably won’t be a sprint, right? So it’s kind of a sustained, swim for 30, 35, 40 minutes, right? And so having that comfort and focus on some of those subtle things, right? Where are my eyes looking? Obviously, in the open water, it’s gonna be a little different, but where are my eyes looking? What is, how is my arm, how am I recovering and reaching? Am I staying on the training tracks?

Am I creating that power diamond in every stroke, right? And then not overthinking it, right? You gotta relax a little bit, right? I mean, in the first 400 yards or meters of any race, nothing is relaxed, but then you try to find your zone and you try to find your lane and then you implement all these little subtle things.

And I’ve been fortunate to have some pretty good swims. And so you’ve done triathlons for around 12 years now? Yeah, about 11 years, yeah. And if you, how often are you able to get into the pool at the moment? How many sessions a week are you doing? No, I swim, I commit to two days a week, right? I know three is better and four is even better than that, but if I get in two days a week, I’m doing, and it’s usually with a swim group, some type of squad or master’s group, a couple of days a week in the winter season, we’re now in our summer season here in the States. So, the master’s program that I would swim with, now I’m kind of on my own. So a couple of days a week, a couple, two times a week for about an hour, hour and 10 minutes. And one of the things that I remember you mentioning in an email was that you were using the neoprene shorts, the buoyancy shorts, and then you took them off, you were a little bit slower,

but I think you started to get back to, yeah, you started to get back to where you were without them. So what caused you to go without them? And then how was it, how was that process of getting back to the same speed? Yeah, I feel it, and that’s a good, that’s a good side comment for where you and I will continue our work together because I’m definitely faster with a pull buoy, right, than without one. So I’ve got to figure out how to correct that so you can make a note to yourself that that’s a follow-up item for you. But yeah, so I just decided that it was a crutch to use those neoprene shorts and heading into the winter season. So we’re now in June, so probably back in November to December of 2020 as swimming was, you know, we were able to go back in the pool and start swimming again with COVID and everything. I decided to lose the shorts and just, you know, not have that crutch. And I was clearly, you know, seven or eight seconds slower for sure, for a hundred.

But I have crept back up to a time close to where I was using those.

Yeah, which is fantastic. And it’d be interesting to see, have you worn them since? Have you? No, no, I’ve been in a wetsuit a couple of times in some open water swimming, but I have not worn those. But if I do a interval set that has a buoy, a swim buoy, a pull buoy, I will be five seconds faster for sure. At least. And it’s not uncommon to be faster with a pull buoy. It’s particularly if perhaps your kick isn’t really effective or your body position has room to move. Like it’s, that’s usually the case where perhaps your hips and your legs will sit a little bit low. And so obviously the extra buoyancy at the back brings that up and it reduces the drag and that speed increases. But there’s obviously some things that you can do to help bring that up. And then there’s a number of things that will cause the hips and legs to drop. There’s like six or seven different things that will help it. And a lot of times I think people just go to

what’s just head position. So they put their head down, they sink it well below the water and they just go to this really bad position in the water where they’re just almost swimming completely underneath it because I think it’s all to do with the head. But the head’s a small component of changing that balance out the back. I think some of the comments that I’ve watched from some of your content about swimming downhill, that’s I think a mistake. I don’t, it doesn’t make sense. And you can have too many drills, right? I thought, again, I just come back to you how simple you make all this is really the benefit to anybody that’s following you or your content.

If they would consider that five day challenge and just that in and of itself, I think that breaks down everything you need to know. Now it’s a question of can you do that, right? But I mean, that’s the content that that is so helpful.

Yeah, thank you for that. I think one thing that I learned probably I started to be comfortable doing about five years ago was it’s okay to come up with your own way of doing things. Obviously, when you start in anything, you’re brand new, so you’re learning from other people and immediately I learned from a lot of different coaches when I first started and I often just repeat something that I’d heard another coach say. And then when you get enough experience and you work with enough people, you start to figure out different ways to explain things or deliver things or maybe different drills and then just being comfortable maybe making some stuff up and just seeing how it works. And so after 13 years of coaching, I feel like I started to get to that point. And yeah, I mean, we’ve worked with so many different people and particularly when we first started running clinics where we had 20 odd drills that we do, now we only do about five.

So there was a lot of complexity in the beginning and I think the best version of something really is often the simplest version of it. So just really try and weed out anything that’s not 100% relevant to you swimming faster. And so as you mentioned, it’s just how simple can you make it? You can have too many drills, too many things to focus on. And I think one of the real keys to the five day catch challenge why so many people are getting good results is it’s one thing each day and that is it. It’s like, it’s pretty much one drill, maybe two, but it’s the one focus point each day. And that is like, again, there aren’t a hundred things to do. There’s a few things you have to do and if you can get them all to line up, you’re gonna have a good swim. You’re gonna improve. And again, I’d like to, I’d love the aha moment, the breakthrough moment where I feel like, oh, that’s it. Like I go from 140 to 130. Well, those pills aren’t available

on this channel apparently. So you gotta take them one second at a time and you make these little incremental stuff like where’s your hand when it’s going underneath your body? And are you rotating it? Are your feet all over the place? And all these little things, and I really do think that 5B Challenge kind of summarizes it.

It’s great. We were talking about the Chuck Ryan podcast and you had a chat to Chuck as well about, you know, like it’s, and we see with him like it’s a process. And as you said, it doesn’t happen overnight. You can certainly make some changes with one particular aspect of the stroke. You might see a few seconds drop, but really it’s just that ongoing commitment to improving your stroke. And over the course of many months, you’ll start to see that gradually come down when you do focus on the right things. And I think when people have that approach, they’re gonna be so much more successful than just wanting to take that magic pill and have it drop 10 seconds and then it’s done forever. And that’s not really how things work. And it’s great to be great if that was the case. And it’s great to pitch it that way, but it’s just not really how things work. And so that’s why I try and be as honest on these podcasts and in the videos as possible.

So that we get the right people coming to clinics who are willing to take that time to invest into their strokiness with me. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, on a sprint on 25 or 50 yards or even 100, you know, I can have a aha moment, right? I can hit a time that is, you know, seven or eight seconds faster than what I might normally do, but to be able to sustainably swim at a, you know, at a tempo pace at an 80, 85% effort pace.

Yeah, it’s just incrementally, just little tiny tweaks. I did a five by 200 set the other day. And, you know, I was, you know, below 140 and as opposed to 145, right? As opposed to 146, I was swimming, you know, 138, 139. So that to me is, those are the kind of gains I know. Like I said, I’d love for it to have been, you know, 129, but that’s just not the case, right? So you just have to keep working at it.

And again, your analysis and the feedback you’ve shared with me already about my particular swimming as well as the content you provide out there, it’s a huge benefit. Yeah, thank you. And so just before we finish up, you talk, so it sounds like one, you know, going under that 130 is the, that’s the next goal, that’s the big, big target, something that you’d love to achieve. Do you have a sense of what you need to do to get there? Do you have a feeling of what may need to change? Yeah, I’d have to swim with a swim buoy.

So I really do, I really think that there’s, that’s clearly, I mean, if I just,

you know, without analyzing it much more than that, I mean, if I swim 139, you know, I can hold that pace, you know, I just did a five by 200 set, you know, with a little bit of rest and, you know, off I went.

You know, so why is it that I can do, I could probably do that in 134 or 133 with that buoy, right? So that is the question, not for me, but for you. So that’s the work, that’s the magic answer, right? So how do I get that, that, you know, is it rotation? You know, I need to, you know, little subtle changes to my body position to be able to take that three or four seconds or five seconds off. That would be significant, by the way. That would be significant over, you know, a half iron main distance or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the way that you can think of it too is, let’s say, all right, you’re swimming 140, so that’s a hundred seconds. So, yeah, so like you’ve got that as like a hundred seconds to swim, sorry, yeah, a hundred seconds to swim a hundred. So if you were to get down to 130, that’s basically 10% quicker, roughly. And so, you know, where can you find that 10%? And so sometimes you can use them, you know,

use the numbers a little bit. You can look at your stroke rate, so your cadence, and then how far you travel with each stroke. So your stroke count. And so the way, and then it’s really just about manipulating those things and, you know, perhaps looking to increase the cadence a bit and increase how far you travel. And that’s just often reducing drag, which is probably one of the main ones if you’re fast with that pull buoy. And then perhaps some improvements with the catch and alignment and some other things. So when you look at it from that analytical perspective, you can sometimes see where those improvements lie. And then it’s about making that actionable and applicable to what you’re doing. So, yeah, we’ll have a look at that, but I appreciate you coming on and sharing what you’ve improved and what you’re focused on to get such a good result. And as we mentioned before the call, it never stops. There’s always something to work on.

Doesn’t matter where you’re at, but that’s all part of the farm I think goes to me. Yeah, well, I just want to thank you again for all the feedback, all the content you provide. It’s great, you know, public service, although I know you don’t do it for public service, but it’s really helpful. And I would encourage others to, you know, follow you and learn what they can and then reach out to you. You’ve been amazingly engaging and I appreciate it very much. Thanks very much, Chad. 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 A Few Small Changes To His Technique Wiped 70 Seconds From His 1000TT with Abe Goldberg appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Sam Laidlow who is considered one of the best triathletes in France today. He is born in the UK and was raised in French Pyrénées. Join us as Sam talks about his training, beliefs, and goals.

00:46 Working Hard And Working Smart
01:59 Dad As A Coach
03:39 Swimming 3X A Week
05:22 Big Part of Success In Swimming Is How Much You Enjoy It
06:06 There Is No One Way OF Swimming
08:18 Swimming With Stones
09:56 Strength Development
12:41 Go-To Sets
15:03 Should I Learn How To Flip Turn?
16:32 If You Don’t Use It, You Will Certainly Lose It
17:47 Spending Too Much Time Running And Biking
19:16 Main Goals
22:38 Best Time
23:42 This Is What I Want To Do
27:29 Contact Sam Laidlow

Sam Laidlow
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Yeah, absolutely. Like it’s, I see it a lot too. Like quite often those junior swimmers who are champions for their in their age group at 12, 13, 14, if they’ve been pushed to, to get that, um, they often don’t continue on. And I think success in swimming is a big part is about how much you enjoy it and whether or not you want to, or you continue to do it as an, as an adult and as you, as you get older. 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 swim podcast. My guest today is professional triathlete, Sam Laidlow. Welcome to the podcast, Sam.

Thanks a lot. It’s an honor. So, um, your first questions first, what are you doing beating guys like Jan Frodeno and Sebastian Kinlay in the swim? What’s it’s going on at such a young age of 22?

Uh, I’m just, I’m just working hard to be honest. Uh, yeah, there’s no, there’s no, well, working hard and smart. I think, yes, not, not just working hard. Um, I’ve been, I don’t, I don’t swim a lot compared to a lot of people. And I don’t, lots of people think I come from the swimming background, but I really don’t. Um, I came out my first national when I did my first national, like junior race, I came out 135th of the water out of like 145 people. Um, so yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a slow, but sure, sure progression. And yeah, I’m lucky to have a father who comes from a swimming background and his father, so my grandfather also comes from a swimming background. So I guess it does kind of run in the blood, but equally, um, no, I don’t, I’m not, I’m not swimming. I’ve always been in a triathlete. And that’s what we’ve also looked at is the specificity of, of our then, if you know what I mean, because it’s very different to swimming

a flat out 200 in the pool. So yeah. Yeah, exactly. That’s funny. My, um, my dad and my granddad were also swim coaches as well. And, um, yeah, just what a funny world it is. And, um, so your dad coaches you across all three disciplines. Is it? Yeah, he does. Yeah. Um, he was never, he never forced me into, into triathlon or even coaching me. So, um, I often went, I often went with whatever the school coach was or the facility I was in. And then it was only two and a half, three years ago that I came back um, and asked my dad to coach me basically. Um, and it was from that point on that my swimming really got stronger. Um, yeah. So I used, I used to swim like many of the short course athletes do kind of almost every day, let’s say five to six times a week, around four and four to five K every swim session. Um, and it didn’t, well, it’s only now in hindsight, but that didn’t work super well for me. Um, and since I moved back with my dad, um, it was kind of a

blessing in disguise really, but the pool was actually like a 45 minute drive away. So we would only go three times a week, but when we’d go, we’d make sure we did a proper swim, if you know what I mean. So there was kind of two years where we’d just swim three times a week, but it was three times six K. And, um, and that’s where I really saw my progression. Um, and yeah, I think lots of people, especially triathletes, promise that when you get in the pool every day, um, and then you’re on top of that swimming, sorry, you’re on top of that you’re biking and running and you don’t, you never really get in the water fresh. And I think for me, swimming is so technical that I don’t really see the point of swimming if you’re even remotely tired, if you know what I mean. Um, so that’s why making to just do in three sessions, but making sure I went into them, uh, fresh was worked a lot better for me. What about, um, now, how often are you again in the pool?

Yes, thanks. So three now during the summer, I swim three times in a pool, um, and once in the lake, uh, but the, the volume reduces a bit in the summer, uh, just because, uh, we have, I have less swim times. And also I try to focus a bit more on, on the bike and running. Um, but yeah, generally, I, I tend to, well, one of the, one of the benefits of swimming is it’s obviously lower impact. And so you can do a really hard strength session, you know, without it having a big effect on your body, which you have to be more careful for a, for a triathlete if you, if you’re doing that on the, on the bike and run. Um, but one of the, one of the things my dad’s always, always been really careful with the young ages, even if I didn’t swim a lot, he would always, um, pick up on, on technical aspects, if you know what I mean. Um, and really, really focused on that, even if I was swimming once a week, we’d rather me swim once a week

well than, than swimming three or four times a week with a terrible stroke, you know, I mean, that’s really where, where I felt my progression came along as soon as I started swimming more, I got to be a lot faster. Um, but I certainly think that’s, that’s an important point for the, for parents or to take into account is, is yeah, some, it’s sometimes it’s best for, for a kid to, to swim two or three times a week and be a healthy kid who enjoys swimming, you know, um, and he’s still got a massive room for improvement rather than, um, sticking in the pool, yeah, six, seven, eight times a week, which I’m sure, which I know happens already, uh, a very young age in certain, certain places. Yeah, absolutely. Like it’s, I see it a lot too, like quite often those junior swimmers who are champions for their, in their age group at 12, 13, 14, if they’ve been pushed to, to get there, um, they often don’t continue on.

And I think success in swimming is a big part is about how much you enjoy it and whether or not you want to, or you continue to do it as an, as an adult and as you, as you get older. Um, so I think that’s hugely important. And the technical side of it too, like with your, with your dad, like what, um, and it’s obviously made a big difference. I’ve seen some videos of your swimming. I’m going to put some stuff on YouTube, um, to sort of show people how you’re swimming, which is, it looks, looks great. Like what, um, and that’s obviously pays off too with the results that you’re getting in the, in the swim. So how did your dad help you work on those technical things?

Um, we’re, we’re big believers in doing a lot of, a lot of strength work and just, and then you kind of body naturally becomes more efficient. Um, we don’t, we don’t necessarily, uh, focus even with our athletes, um, that we coach because my dad coaches other athletes and I coach a few athletes also. Um, sometimes you do just have to kind of, uh, swim into your arms, fall off, and then let that adaptation period. I mean, lots of, lots of age group and stuff, kind of look for short core shortcuts. I find, and they think that sometimes just by magically, I don’t know, dropping their shoulder a little bit or doing, or I don’t know, twisting their hand this way or that way, we’ll make, we’ll make them swim five seconds, a hundred faster, which unfortunately is not the case, if you know what I mean. So technique is important, but, um, I do also kind of feel it comes naturally. And, um, you can relate that to, to running.

You see some, you see people running of all sorts of different strokes, uh, sorry, all sorts of different, um, forms. And so when you, when you, if you just tell, if you just get somebody to run every day a little bit more, if you know what I mean, eventually they do become very fast. And so every bit, we’re all different physiologically. So, uh, there’s no one way of swimming, if you know what I mean. There’s no point trying to copy Sun Yang, if you, if you, if you’re not Sun Yang, if you know what I mean. So yeah, it’s, um, I wouldn’t, what we really focus on, especially for open water, um, and this is why strength is important. It’s just, um, just having the strength to kind of keep the momentum of your arms turning, if you know what I mean, because when the water’s choppy or whatnot, there is, there isn’t much, you cut this, whether what, what you see in the pool where they have a nice glide and that suddenly becomes

less, less important, because if you do, if you do have a, like a dead point in your, in your stroke, then suddenly that the choppy water or whatever will, or the many waves will kind of push you back, if you know what I mean. So, although it’s not aesthetically super pleasing to watch, um, just kind of having that strength to be able to turn your arms around, and especially lots of our swims are with a wetsuit, and that also adds another, another restriction, if you know what I mean. So, one of the things we do a lot of is, um, swimming with stones. So, and that, I’ve found that’s a really good drill. So, we hold, well, I, I don’t have stones anymore, my dad actually, for Christmas, he made me some lead edits, that was my, my Christmas present, um, because the, what we wanted was as much weight as possible for a little grip, um, and it’s, it’s actually a really good tool for loads of reasons, um, one, you feel like, like, if your core

is not engaged, you just feel like you’re going to drown, um, two, obviously you’ve got less, um, less catch, so your cadence naturally has to be higher, uh, which is good for open water. And three, the kind of the, the pullback phase is obviously harder because you’ve got a weight in your hand, which kind of simulates the muscles you’d use in a wetsuit. So, uh, yeah, we found that’s, uh, to be a really good tool. And, uh, yeah, this is the first time I’m saying it, but it’s a, it’s a ladle of secret.

I, um, saw one of the videos, I think it was with your dad, um, just talking about some of the, the things that you, um, you focus on with the swimming. And, um, I was gonna, I was going to bring up, um, stones. And I’ve heard, um, a friend of mine, Enie Jones, who’s a swim coach, um, she makes the Enie billy, um, which you might have seen at the, the pull, um, the pool boys that a lot of triathletes will, um, will use. She’s, um, she’s talked about swimming with shells. So with these, I can’t remember the name of the type of shells, but basically like similar concept, but they’ll empty when you go across over the top of the water. Um, so it sort of speeds up that recovery and then they’ll fill up between them through. So very simple concept and, um, she’s a, she’s a big fan of those as well. And, um, so you’re talking about strength work, um, swimming with the stones. You’re talking pool boy and paddles as well. What sort of stuff are you doing

for strength development? Um, yeah. I think, uh, pool boy, pool boy is, is a good tool for, for triathletes and especially pro triathletes, I guess. Because as I said, often, often we already go into the water with some fatigue, if you know what I mean, um, and especially, especially like, so you know that you’re going to go into a race to generally fresh. So sometimes, sometimes, you know, with a pool, it’s just easier to hit them times, if you know what I mean. And your heart rate’s obviously a bit lower because you’re not kicking. Um, but then equally, I do find lots of age groupers sticking pool boy in far too much, if you know what I mean, because they can swim fine with a pool boy. So, and they just find it much easier. Um, so it’s certainly a balance. And then other, other strength, uh, or I find certainly doing a lot of I am, uh, is really good, uh, butterfly. I mean is especially for that for exactly what I was saying

before and not having a point in your strength, you know, I mean, a butterfly, you really just have to turn your arms around. Uh, and it does when you see the best guys, it does look like they kind of glide into the water like a dolphin. But if you do look at it properly, there isn’t really any moment where they’re not, uh, kind of even moving forward or catching the water. Uh, they don’t just stay at the front for ages, if you know what I mean, as soon as they’ve got the power to be able to just turn their arms around. And so, yeah, we do that. Then, um, then it’s just, yeah, just session. I mean, I always say it, but my like five, five K with my dad feels like eight K of any other, uh, swimmer. And we just, so we don’t do, we don’t do, we don’t do a lot of intensity necessarily. Um, but I’m, I don’t do a lot of intensity full stop. I mean, Ironman is like almost a hundred percent aerobic effort. You know what I mean? So there’s, there isn’t

much point in them. And yeah, I mean, nobody swimming faster than whatever 110 pace on, on them on Ironman. So if you can already do 50 meters in, in 30 seconds, which many people can, for instance, or even 35, which is 110, then you know that you’ve already got that, that speed we need to do is have the endurance and the strength to keep it up. If you know what I mean? So, uh, it’s not really about swimming fast. It’s just about having a strength to, to keep, keep that pace going, especially as I said before, like with the, with the wetsuit, it does bring an extra resistance. Um, but yeah, so mainly, mainly I am, uh, and then, and then just, yeah, I don’t know, just long, hard set if you know, I mean, not, not sets of loads of rest. We don’t, things that are just boring, you know, I mean, swimming, yeah, I mean, well, triathlon and an endurance sport in general is, is relatively, relatively boring. And sometimes you just have to accept to do

whatever it is. I don’t know, five times 800 or, you know, just, yeah, long, long sets to hurt your arms. Yeah. And what have you got a couple of go-to sets that you, that you’ll do on a pretty regular basis?

Um, so we had leading into the start of the season, this winter when we got a bit of a routine. We had two, two sessions that we do.

One was just a straight 3.8K swim, which, which the first time I did, I mean, I do a short warm-up and then I just do kind of a, a straight 3.8 tempo swim,

3.8 because that’s the, the Ironman, uh, swim distance and just kind of that’s, that’s what we decided to do. And the first time I did it, I was just like, bloody hell. I didn’t, I didn’t realize how hard it was if you know, I mean, to just swim continuously on that because

and Ironman, you often neglect to swim because like, you know, it’s only we only spend 45 minutes in the water and then we’ve got five hours of cycling and it’s the three hours on the run, if you know what I mean, or four hours and three hours, whatever. Um, so you often forget about the swim. And it was when I did this for the first time, um, this winter and I was like, bloody hell, it really is hard about it. And so then we did it. I was like, right, I want to do this every week, so until it becomes easy. And, uh, so yeah, I generally do that about 115, kind of 115 per 100 pace in a big pool in 50 meter. And then, uh, and then the second, the second key session is 40, 100s going on, like a very short rest and depending on depending on where I’m at with my fitness levels. Um, yeah, I can, I know that before, before Gran Canaria, where I came out in front of the yarn of the water, I knew I was in a good place because I did 40 100s

going on 115. So yeah. One course.

No, that was short course, actually. Yeah. It’s still pretty tiny for 40 100s. No, it is. Yeah. I was, I was, I was happy with that. Um, especially like, I mean, swimming like me doesn’t get much benefit from short course or long course because my turns and my push offs are terrible. But that, that is also something that is although, although, yeah, lots of traffic saving about returns aren’t important. It is, it’s still important. I mean, especially the push off is, is very good to teach your body to be streamlined in the, in the first place if you know what I mean. And if you start every, every lens with a bad position, then you’re not going to swim very streamlined if you know what I mean. So I do, I do, I’m still a, a big believer in, yeah, making, making them turns important. Yeah. And I get asked that a lot too. It’s like, do I, should I learn how to tumble turn or flip turn or can I just keep touching and turning around? But it’s like, well,

you’re going to be doing this for probably the next couple of years at least and

take a couple of sessions, but you’ll figure it out. And then your body will get used that feeling of being streamlined off the wall. And the more you can sort of familiarize yourself with that faster position, that faster feeling, you know, everything starts to move that way. So while it’s not important, it also is in, in some ways. So I think, yeah, certainly. Yeah. It’s, it’s worth, worth learning because it seems like a hard thing to do off the bat. But if you just get perhaps a little bit of coaching with it, you get the right advice, you can pick it up very quickly with the turn. Yeah. A lot, lots of things, especially people who come into swimming late and stuff, they just, their bodies never even been in that position, if you know what I mean. And the amount of times I’ve seen my dad, like what holding, he generally like, picks them up in the water, you know, and just like holds them like that. So they kind of realize kind of how

streamlined they need to be. Yeah. And, and then, oh yeah. And then it, yeah. So there’s, so I think mobility as well is something that people overlook. And even I probably should do more of it. But when you see, when you see some people’s mobility, if you know what I mean, no one, there’s no wonder, if you know what I mean, they can’t, they can’t bring their, bring their shoulder back, nice and elbow high, if you know what I mean, they can’t. So I often tell my athletes just to like, at least once a day, just get a towel, you know, and like, with your straight arms, push it, like bring it over and back over and try and get that, the grip on your towel a little bit, narrow every, every day, you know what I mean. And it takes like a minute of your day. Yeah. I’m a big believer in just doing at least a little bit of that stuff on a regular basis, because it’s just, it’s just like that sort of movement astrophys, you just lose it if you don’t,

if you don’t use it. And I found that when I wasn’t swimming for a couple of, couple of months last year, I was getting so stiff because I’ve swum since I was, I was a kid, like I would never miss, like, I would never miss a week in the pool. And then as of last year, couldn’t swim for a few months. And I just like, I did not have that range of motion that I had had for forever. And so if you don’t use it, you certainly lose it. And I’m a big fan of like the, like those hard rubber massage balls that even like, if you’re watching TV at night, just roll it out through like, yeah, between the shoulder blades in a couple of years. So good. And even just some basic stuff on the foam roller can help a lot too. And stuff with the towel. It’s because if you can’t, if you can’t get your arms up like here, we’d like trying to get them over comfortably in your recovery, or get some sort of catch. How do you, how do you find that you feel

through the shoulders and with your range, spending so much time on the bike and running? Is it, do you feel that impact? Yeah, certainly. The whole kind of just flexibility in general is a bit of chicken leg situation in triathlon because for swimming and cycling, you have to be very flexible.

But running, I’ve found that I even spent like two years doing yoga and stuff. And I felt, I felt a bit loose like when I was running kind of, which is not what you want in for running. You want to be quite springy and if often the best runners in the world, I mean, they have like really short tendons and they’re just like, just like a springy, you know, where for swimming and cycling, it’s the opposite. And I do, I do remember particularly on my old bike, where I used to have quite an extreme position on the,

and it used to really affect my swimming. It’s, you know, I mean, if we’ve just, if I’ve just spent 150K or whatever in a really like severe time trial position, and then you go swimming the next day or whatever, and you just, yeah, it’s just, you can’t, you can’t move your arms how they should. And now, I mean, that’s one of the other, I’m one of the guys who has really least what we call aero position in triathlon, but I’m just comfortable, you know, and it’s, one it’s good. I prefer it for racing, but equally in training, it means that I can, I can swim if you know what I mean, without it having, also I can bike without having too much impact on my swimming. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. And, and so going, going forwards, yeah, what have you, what are you, what are your main goals going forwards? You’ve got the, and also what, like what are those main things that you’re, you’re focused on? Because obviously the swims, of real strength,

how about the bike and the run, and what does the next couple of years, hopefully pan out for you?

Yeah, I mean, I’ve always, I’ve always wanted to keep my, my swimming up, even though, in certain races, it doesn’t necessarily have a big impact, but because my main goal is in the long-term, is like championship events. So let’s say Hawaii or, or like World, World, I’m a world long-distance triathlon championships.

As soon as you get to like a championship level, then there’s obviously lots of other good swimmers. And that’s when it’s important in our sport to, to be a good swimmer, but you get out in the first pack, although it’s not drafted, you still get a dynamic for the race with other guys. And you do get, still get an effect at 12 meters, which is a draft legal zone.

So, yeah, going forward, I mean, this year, certainly I would,

I’m just trying to be a bit more consistent in my racing. I used to be very, very good at peeking for one race.

And then having, then having a massive loss, you know what I mean? But as a professional, or want to be professional, a young professional eventful, call me, it’s difficult financially to do that. Especially like last year, when I prepare for one big money event race and then it got canceled, then it goes down the drain, if you know what I mean? So this year, I’m not, I haven’t yet reached like peak fitness. I’m just trying to stay a bit underneath that and just trying to, trying to be more consistent over the season, just enjoy racing. So the next goal is, is Ironman Bolton, where I’ll try and qualify, hopefully for Kona. And if I do qualify for Kona, I shouldn’t have probably be the, probably be the youngest pro there, which would be great. And if I don’t qualify, then I’ll likely do a flat Ironman to try and be the youngest person to go under eight hours. That would be, that’s my goal for this year. But certainly, swimming,

I’m at a phase where luckily, I don’t have to go to the pool every morning, which I know that some athletes do. And I’ve seen this and I actually got asked this in a recent PTO interview after my races. I got said, what tips can you give like the bad swimmers? Like they said, you did said Sam Long and Sanders and stuff. And so, and in my eyes, they swim too much. They go into the water too much, if you know what I mean, four triathletes anyway. And they talk about this, getting the feel for the water. But the problem is there, I get the feeling they’re swim sessions, they’re swim sessions and either one thing or the other, it’s never too hard to have an adaptation of it and recover. And yet it’s never too easy and that’s what I used to do before.

Yes, and they talk about having this feel for the water and being not fighting the water, but I’m not a big believer in that. It comes a point where you just have to swim to the extent where your arms drop off and then recover and then do that again.

So yeah, that’s the one tip I would give them or anybody else to do this. Yeah, that’s interesting. And so what have you, how close are you to that eight hours? What’s your best time?

When I was 20, so before COVID, two years ago I did 805 in Barcelona.

But to be honest, the race, I wanted to do it when I was 20, but I’d had lots of problems. I had a broken rib during the summer and it affected training quite a lot. I really had to rush my fitness right at the end. And also I was doing stupid things, like trying out low-carb diet and yeah, just anyway.

And honestly, I did 805, but I felt like I was running on one cylinder, if you know what I mean. So I knew I had it in me. And even now all I need is just a flat course. And I know I’ve got it in me. It’s just, it’s not necessarily a priority, if you know what I mean. Well, one with COVID, there hasn’t been that many flat courses. And yeah, so if the opportunity comes, then it comes. But I still think I’m not sure what the youngest person is to, I think he’s like 24, so I should be able to do this year. And I read, I was reading on your side as well, that like this was triathlon was like something that you really aspired to as a kid.

There’s not a whole lot of people where as a young kid they’re seeing triathlon, like on TV and that sort of thing, and going, that’s what I want to do. I’ve certainly heard a couple, but it’s not as much as you get like with the Australian rules football here or soccer or football over in the UK or France. Like it’s quite a unique one. So where did that sort of come from?

So my parents came out to move that to France, we were British originally moved that to France to set up triathlon training camp business. And so I just, I just grown up with seeing triathletes at home and everything. And from a very, very, very early age, I’d been watching Kona or not on TV and staying up late at night. So it’s obviously not in our time zone. And I was just like, right, I want to be, I want to be that guy, you know what I mean? So from a very early age, I wanted to win Kona and that’s always been my dream. And luckily enough, luckily enough, I’ve had like really supportive parents who also believed in that dream.

Actually, I left, I left home to go to like a triathlon training school, or sorry, like a more sport school where I could do triathlon. And so I left home quite early at 13. And I started going down the short course route just because opportunities came about. And in the short course, short course triathlon, there’s some really amazing swimmers, especially in, I was in, I was in, I was on the French Grand Prix series. And in my, in my team, we literally had like five guys who, who were all like around four minute, 400 meter swimmers, if you know what I mean? So they were certainly very rapid. And, and that kind of opened my eyes to, so that’s why it was good to go through the short course because Austin and Ironman, it’s, it’s neglected. But I think it’s come into a point where swimming is becoming more important, even though it’s in percentage terms, it’s like about 10% of the race, if not less.

You can still lose that race and then the 10% and the last, last time Kona went about 2019. It was the first time I’d seen any way that like the lead swim pack actually stayed away right to the end, if you know what I mean? And so that was good to see. And hopefully it will motivate a few more people to swim well. Because that’s, that’s all you need really. It’s just two or three or four guys to, to really,

like, they’re going to swim hard, if you know what I mean? And make the race hard. But it’s difficult because certain races, it, like the race I did last weekend, the national championships, it was, there was, there wasn’t much point in being a good swimmer because I mean, I came out with a minute lead. I was on my own and then, and then you’re on your own, if you know what I mean? And there’s a pack of 10 guys behind, a minute behind. So the chances of them catching you up are very likely. So, but then I know, I really know that when it’s a championship race, they won’t have that, they won’t have that opportunity. Yeah, it’s exactly right. They’ve, yeah, in some races, it’s like, you can have that minute, minute lead. But it’s like, I’m going to probably get caught anyway. But then when the time comes, you know, when you’ve got perhaps another two or three swimmers who are at that similar speed and you make that pack,

yeah, it’s going to be a different story. But yeah, my dream, my dream race would certainly be like to create an event that was like a three hour swim, a three hour bike, and a three hour run. That would be pretty cool. I’m not sure, I’m not sure financially it would, it would like be great because there’s not many age, but there’s like, I mean, swimming’s often their weakness. You’re not going to get them something 12 or 15K.

Just out of a, I think 3.8 will be enough for most people.

In terms of either getting in contact with you or finding you, what is the best place to do that?

So my name’s just Sam Laidlow on most of my Instagram, Facebook and all that. My website’s equally Sam Laidlow. And then, yeah, my parents try from training camp businesses called Sincture Sportif. And yeah, I truly believe that, yeah, my dad’s, like that’s one of the best swim coaches, I mean, in the world. I’ve seen him, not just the top end, but he’s gotten people through who couldn’t swim like 25 meters to easily do it in an Ironman, if you know what I mean. So, yeah, and he’s been in the business for so long. He used to swim for Great Britain and then, yeah, he stopped. He moved into triathlon because he like missed the Commonwealth Commonwealth Games by some stupid amount. I can’t remember if it was a tenth or whatever, it was a second and so it kind of, he was just a bit like, well, all this effort to not go, if you know what I mean. So, and at that period triathlon came along and yeah, he jumped into that and yeah, it wasn’t a bad decision.

Yeah, fantastic. Well, thanks for being a guest on the podcast, Sam, and all the best for what’s to come. I know you’re recovering at the moment from a full distance two weeks ago or a week and a half ago and a half distance the following week. So, yeah, I’m sure anything else will feel easy after that.

Yeah, let’s hope. Yeah, thanks, mate, all the best. All right, cheers, man.

The post How To Beat Jan Frodeno Out OF The Water With Sam Laidlow appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, I am chatting with Phil Rush, who has the fastest double and triple crossing of the English Channel. In this episode, we chat about a number of things including how can you get better at adapting to the cold, the type of training that you need to be doing if you are looking to do a marathon swimming, what are the important factors when you are thinking of the training that you are doing. Is it the distance that you are doing? Is it the speed? Feeding? What are some aspects of the training? If you are into open-water swimming, cold water swimming, or looking to increase the distance that you are doing, then this a podcast for you.

03:21 Successful Crossing Despite The Pandemic
4:13 Everybody’s Body Reacts Differently In The Cold
05:27 Strategies If You Find Someone Getting Cold
10:31 No Filter, No BS
15:50 Getting Into The Right Mindset
19:01 Controlling Your Mind
28:35 Cold Water Adaptation
31:52 What Is The Best Way To Train For An Open water Swim?

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In this episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast, I’m chatting with Phil Rush, who has the fastest double and triple crossing of the English Channel. So he’s a bit of an open water marathon swimming legend. And in this episode, we chat about a number of things, including how you can get better at adapting to the cold, the type of training you need to be doing if you are looking to do marathon swimming. What are the important factors when you are thinking of the training that you’re doing? Is it the distance that you’re doing? Is it the speed that you’re doing? Is it how you’re feeding? What are some of those aspects of the training? So if you are into open water swimming, cold water swimming, or looking to increase the distance that you’re doing, then this is a podcast for you. Let’s get into the episode. 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 is someone who’s been on twice before. So, Phillip Rush, welcome back. Good to see you, Brenton. Yes, you too. Well, it’s been nearly coming up on two years since we last caught up at Thailand. You’re someone who’s come along to our Hell Week camps over there as a coach. And obviously, we didn’t run those last year. They’re not happening this year. We’re hoping for next year, but we’ll just see what happens. But I wanted to get you on the podcast to talk a bit about what you’ve been doing with the cold water swimming stuff in New Zealand. Because as an ex-marathon swimmer, you got a lot of experience in the area. But now, the primary thing that you’re doing is helping people do some of the marathon swims over in New Zealand. So when did all of that originate and what’s it like at the moment when you haven’t got people flying in from overseas to do the cook straight

and Lake Taupo and all those sorts of things?

Good day, everybody. It has been difficult. Obviously, COVID come in in March, the year before, and we had the best where we don’t get good weather here in Wellington. We had the best weather we have ever had for that year that everyone was locked out and wasn’t allowed out. And probably I missed out on 10 successful cook straight swims. And that’s the month that we have everybody coming in from overseas. And literally, it just stopped. The phone started ringing. We’re not coming. We’re not coming. So from there, we have to look at what we’re going to do.

You know, I’ve obviously got the fire services, my background business, but, you know, getting people across and coaching people. So we had to look at what else we could do. And obviously, New Zealanders

have always played second fiddle to the international swimmers. And I’m not saying that’s the right thing, but it gave them a lot of opportunity to get some swimming done, to get some training done and have an opportunity to either get in Lake Taupo or cook straight. And of course, it would be this year that we’ve just been. We’ve had the worst weather we’ve had in years. Normally, we’d be swimming in December, January, February, March, April, May. Our first swim started on the 20th of March this year, due to incredibly bad weather in Wellington, very much like Melbourne’s weather, cold, windy and wet, but we have got everybody away this year. So New Zealanders, we’ve got seven New Zealanders across cook straight.

And we’ve got eight New Zealanders across Lake Taupo, ranging from all different levels of skills. And they’ve all been successful, apart from one, which we, and I’ve always been a wee bit, anti-double swims. And what I mean by double swims, you and your mate come along and hop in and away you go and you swim together. And the rules we have, you swim together, you finish together, you start together. This one got slower and slower, and they were both really good swimmers. They swam with me. I would have never suspected there was going to be a problem. One suffered from hypothermia faster than the other, and then we had problems. So we had to pull one of them out and the other one luckily succeeded. But it just shows that you have to give your full attention to that person. No matter how well trained they are, no matter how much time they’ve done in cold water, everybody’s body reacts differently in the cold.

And that might have meant we just had to, with the one we had to pull out, maybe we had to feed them more warm drinks and things like that just to keep her going. Both very good swimmers, both very fit, very healthy and had done a lot of work together. But the cold just varies things where, you know, you and I would probably be different. I might be able to stay in there longer because I’m used to the cold. My body’s different and your stroke rate might slow down a little bit and then it’s just a downhill stretch from there. I’ll put my toe in and it won’t even get in. So that’s the difference between you and I, I think, filled with cold water. But with dealing with the cold, it’s obviously a huge factor when doing these marathon swims because you’re in there for a long time. The water is quite cool. What are some of those strategies that you’re using along the way when you find someone who’s getting quite cold?

Right. What we did a four year study with Otago Medical School and some of the things that came out were quite simple. If you’ve got 15% or less body fat, you need to take up darts and eating pies

because, you know, we shouldn’t be putting you in there. It’s not going to happen. The swim is not going to happen. The water is too cold and, you know, we’re talking 15 to 17 degrees. The water is too cold. Some of the positive things that came out from it.

We give them warm drinks all the time. So you have warm. You’ve got warmth in your stomach all the time. Warm food, things like that. Warm, whatever drinks you take, whatever, electrolyte replacement, carbohydrate drinks are all warm. So that works from the inside out. The second major thing was stroke rate. So you keep the stroke rate, stroke count up as soon as that drops back and you start getting cold, you can never survive. It just keeps going. And it may cold, maybe you’re feeling warm in the water and just a cool breeze on your back. Some of the things we do, we make sure there’s grease, a good coating of grease over the shoulders and the kidneys to keep those warm. But once again, once the cold gets in, it just eats away, eats the way, eats away. Now, in their training prior, I always talk speed over distance. And that’s something we’ve always discussed. It’s about if we can swim an extra 100 meters an hour,

10 hours, there’s another kilometer closer. So there’s a kilometer out the way that we need to. If the feeds are quick, just recently I took a young lady across.

It was two weeks ago. So the water temperature dropped. It was sort of 14, 15 degrees. We made it and she was an ex swimmer that was on my open water high performance team. So she could swim 4Ks in an hour. Bang, held 4Ks in an hour. Feeds were 10 seconds, no more than 15. So we was we weren’t wallowing around in the cold, getting cold. We were swimming. We were generating. She didn’t swim 100 meters more than 4Ks an hour. She didn’t swim 100 meters less. She got across cook straight in horrific conditions in just under seven hours. So that’s the difference from being able to hold pace and hold stroke and keep yourself warm at the same time. Once we start getting down, if we’re halfway across Cropstraat, we’ll have the conversation. Brenton, I’m sorry, mate. We’ve got here your gray bag. We’ve still got eight hours to go. It’s not going to happen. Let’s call it a day before we get too, too bad. If we are a couple of days away,

I will push you until you can’t talk anymore or you’re not making any decisions. But if we can get there, we will.

I am trying to ride the ambulance so we can make sure when you come out, you know, we we look after you. And it takes it takes a little while to bring you back to normal. But if we’ve got a chance of getting there, we will we will go there. What I’ve said to everybody and anybody that’s listening, who’s looking at doing these swims, we need it’s not just a matter of wallowing around having a feed every half hour and drawing the ambiances out there. You need to swim at pace. Even if your pace is only two and a half case an hour, three case an hour, four case an hour, five case an hour. As soon as you go off pace and start getting slower, you will get cold and it will end one way.

And we had so we had Rebecca Hinesworth on. We had John Hancock on talking about their swims. And one of the things that I said to them was about that for you as someone who’s taken them across, like your your main thing is the safety and the survival of the swimmer and doing what you can to get them across there. And you’ve got a no no filter. There’s no BS with you, which I which I really enjoy. And I really have enjoyed that on our camps as well over in Thailand. With that, and I think that like that approach is what is needed in the situations that you will find yourself in with the swimmers taking them across. Is that how do you how do you go with that? Like you’ve got to make some tough calls. People have put a lot of time, a lot of money into these sorts of things. And it’s and there’s a lot riding on it for them. And you know, you have to get down to it sometimes and say, look, that’s it. We’ve got to call it here.

How’s that? How’s that go for you? And it’s very uncomfortable at times Rebecca’s swim was very uncomfortable. We had to make some decisions. I like to try and engineer that the swimmer makes the decision. But they have the information given to them that really there’s only one decision to make.

It’s some of them. It’s cruel. I I I you and we’re actually going to an award ceremony on Saturday night where this lady is going to speak about. We took a lady at Double Crossing of Lake Taupo trying to have a go at completing it.

We got within two kilometres of the finish. So we’ve been swimming 28, 30 hours. And she just started smiling at me

prior to that halfway back on the second lap. I said to her, I said, just deep breath and I don’t know why. You know, sometimes you see something brent in your thing. Just do that and you don’t know why you’ve said it. But it’s right. And I said, I said, just just breathe. Just breathe properly, your shallow breathing. Stop it. Anyway, two K’s from the end at the pace she was swimming. We had half an hour, 45 minutes to go. Just. And then I. So, you know, we got we got we got within two kilometres to the end that she’s bouncing up and smiling at me. You know, we’ve done 30 hours. Was she tired? You know, all these medical things are going through and I stopped and she’s just laughing at me, laughing and smiling and just bouncing up and down in the water. This is a good swimmer. And so I sort of look at her and think, you know, what’s wrong? What’s wrong? Maybe it’s just lack of sleep, lack of sleep, etc. Being stopped, you know, gave her a little bit of a slap

on felt, whether it was hypothermia or it wasn’t hypothermia. And she was still just laughing. I said, look, just swim on your back. Can’t do it. I’ve got two K’s to go. The river’s running down. You will have done it. And she just laughed. She kept laughing. And so I gave her a caffeine tablet. I thought, is she tired? Is she, you know? No, that didn’t work. I said, just kick, kick. And she was just laughing like she was drunk in the middle of the water. Anyway, we got to the point where she went up and down, up and down and then went down, leaned over, pulled her out, got her on the big boat, sat her there five minutes later. She’s talking as if nothing’s going wrong. This is after about 30, 31 hours by the time she was on the boat. And, you know, I was in tears having to make that decision. The land was there. I could see the finish. There was people sitting on the beach, pulled her out. And what she had, she’d been shallow breathing.

She had hypoxia, which is just, and was fixed like that. Honestly, it’s the most heartbreak. I can still see her face. It’s the most heartbreaking thing that I could ever see. And she was there. The swim was over. I’d said halfway back about, and I don’t know why I said it. But she never followed on with the shallow breathing. And she was just, that he offered chops on no oxygen. Wow. So she’s speaking at this event you mentioned. She’s speaking at the event in the weekend. And she hasn’t done a lot of swimming since. And so it’d be really interesting to see her side of it now. But those decisions are what I get paid for. And sometimes they’re very harsh. In the early days, I used to push, push, push. No matter how good a swimmer you were, I would take you to. And I know that people give me 110%. And that’s what I’m after. If you don’t get there, you’ve still given it 110%. You know, we’re pretty successful. It’s not often, it’s severe hypothermia that will,

that will cause me to put you out of the water. But, or just exhaustion. Now, exhaustion brings on hypothermia, et cetera, et cetera. So, but it’s still, I have sleepless nights. I mean, we’ve, there’s certain swimmers that, you know, scared of the dark. And I’ve had a one young lady, and I can still hear her crying in the dark, as we’re swimming. She’s whimpering away. And she literally leapt onto the rock at the end and leapt into the IRB and just grabbed me. Like, well, and, but just from being scared. And you’ve just got to try and fill them full of confidence the best you can. And, you know, some people think I’m an absolute prick out there at times and, you know, but it’s just about her getting the best out of them. And, you know, I don’t have a filter.

Well, speaking of, yeah, of perhaps some of those swimmers. So I watched the, the Swing for Vogue documentary. I think it was at least about a week or two ago of a young New Zealand girl, Kaitlyn O’Reilly. And the youngest to do the New Zealand triple crown, which is the Lake Taupo, Cook Strait and the Favot Strait. Oh, yeah, Favot Strait. Favot Strait. And it was fantastic. So it’s available on Vimeo for anyone who’s listening. It covers that last swim of the Favot Strait and show some of you giving her support along the way, some supportive words. But I’ll tell you, that’s the feel that I’ve missed for the last two years at camp. But it was, it was fantastic. So she’s 14 years old. She’s now, she’s now 16. She started, she was a youngest female to swim, Cook Strait. And then we got her into Lake Taupo and she just did a great job where the plan was for her to do the Ocean Seven.

And what I, and obviously due to COVID, we haven’t been able to. So Favot Strait come up. And I think it was, it shows in the documentary, she was petrified of sharks of what was in the water. And it didn’t really, you know, we talked about it prior. And once again, this is all about, you know, that mind of, and letting your mind run away with you. You know, we talked about it prior. You’ll see on the video with any of the swims. I’m within touching distance at any time to be able to pull you into the small rubber boat.

And the last thing I remember with Caitlyn, before she hopped in, she came over to me, growl, me really tight and said, what happens if I see something? I said, you just stop and tell us. I said, we’re all watching, we’re all, the effect that that had on her for the day, there was some other issues with pilots and things that we got over, but we were winning as such. We had a beautiful day, the water was 15 degrees, which it’s normally 12 or 13, but that small thing of eating away in her mind, she was gonna see a great white shark, which, you know, they are inclined to eat a little bit if they do have a frenzy, but we see nothing. But it was still that mind overtook and a teenage mind as such overtook what she was trying to do. She was a seven and a half hour swimmer, eight hour swimmer, it took her 10 and a half hours and some very harsh support, I would like to go as far as saying,

but at the end of the day, you know, afterwards, I was never gonna let her out. We were always going to get there because the conditions were right, everything was right, it was just a matter of getting her in the frame of mind to finish what we’d spent a lot of time to do.

Yeah, and it certainly shows, and it’s that tough love, it’s being straight up about what the situation is. And like for you, it’s basically telling her, like, you’ve got to pick it up, this is not gonna work for you, what you’re doing right now, you’ve got to change it up. And you mentioned before the call that you had some harsh words, and then she managed to sort of turn it around a little bit and picked it up from there on. Oh, yeah, totally. And I think, and afterwards, obviously afterwards, you know, all is forgiven, you know, where we’re still. I’ve never spoken to, I’ve never had to raise my voice to her. For any of the swarms that we’ve done, so it was really difficult sort of to give up

the message and because we were about, you know, the huge cost of getting down there for everybody. We’d had all some other issues to get into the water. I mean, and she was letting it go because it wasn’t, she couldn’t get her head around it. And she was swimming terribly, Brent, terribly from what she could do. And we had the conversation and I just explained why. And afterwards, we obviously had a little debrief and talk about it. She said, I wish she’d said that to me sooner. Oh! So, you know, once again, it’s a fragile mind, it’s a fragile, and that’s the sort of things that, you know, I meet a lot of the people that come in and I follow a plan. And most of the time the plan works, but what works for you isn’t going to work for Caitlin. And what works for somebody else necessarily doesn’t work for you. So it is hard trying to work through. I mean, you’ve mentioned one of the chaps, John Hancock. Now, there you have a very active mind.

We will go as far as saying and he, you know, John, we had to put some strategies before we even started because he was just gonna beat himself up mentally. Physically, he could do the swim, but mentally, because there’s just too much going on up there. And so we put some strategies in place and I’d ask him some questions. I would wait for the next half hour before I got the answer. So he had time to work it out. You know, he’s a great man with the electric cars. So we asked how many times he had to charge his car, driving to Taupo, how many kilometers did he get out of it? Things like that, that took his mind away from, oh, I’ve gotta be swimming faster, I’ve gotta be swimming. And that activity is slowing everything down because you have to slow the mind down. If you’ve done the training, it works. And I’m a firm believer you do the work, then you train the mind and we can get good results. And we’ve had really good results this year

and everybody’s had good preparation because they’ve been had nothing else to do but swim and get themselves in good shape. And then it’s just a matter of teaching them how to control their mind.

And one of the strategies he said that he would use to occupy the time was he would run in his mind, he would go through a route from his old house to school and run these old, like a map basically, pretend like he’s driving from one place to another and that would help him pass the time. And I’m thinking, all right, that’s great for an active mind if he’s going through all these rows and trying to remember where he was living as a kid and going to school and all this sort of stuff. Was that something that you gave him or something that he… Well, no, we worked on that with John because we, well, two years out, he said to me, he said, I’d like to do, I said, John, but you’re mine, you’re mine. And I could see the issue. It was never going to be about the swimming, it was going to be about controlling this thing up here and talking to him, he’s so enthusiastic, he’s so, and he’s such a sponge as well to deal with.

And like in the early days when I was swimming, I had real problems with it. And I was a dustman in Dunedin, so I would literally, when I was doing the distant swimming, I would walk through it, lifting each burn, emptying it, checking it, so that then what happens is once you, you might do 10 minutes of it and then you’ll just go off and you don’t really remember too much of that next half hour, you stop and drink. The nighttime was always the very, very best to do that. And that’s why we try and start Tao Po in the dark so we can get 10Ks out of the way and it’s like it never happened. And it’s pitch black. There’s no lights, there’s no nothing. It’s pitch black, so we get that first 10Ks out in the dark and you’ve only got 30 left. So the mind then sort of wakens up and daylight comes and then we sort of just work through it. And a lot of it’s just your mind saying, you know, all of that are guts full of us.

You know, we’ve talked on the camps before, you know, about controlling that mind and if you can control that mind and you’ll fit and have done the work, you can do anything you want to. And that is what has been so great dealing with the people this year. We’ve taken them from very green. Water swimmers, we’ve built them with different swims. We’ve got them fit. And then it’s just a matter of controlling the mind and if they’re fit, they enjoy what they’re going to do.

And with those that are overseas that have planned to do, so they cook straight for many years and they’ve had to put it on hold or put it on ice for now, from what you can sense, how are they coping with those sorts of things? Some of them are coping very well. You know, if there’s any of the Australians that are listening to this, that are waiting for an email, just phone me.

You know, but it’s just a matter of, I think everybody’s had something they’ve been able to do. You know, the people in England has been some English channel swims.

In America, they’ve had different sorts of swims they’ve been able to do. It’s just the international travel. Now, we’re going to, you know, next year, hopefully the border will be open. I am not holding my breath. I think our bubble will stay as long as you behave yourself, Brendan and Melbourne. I think our bubble will… You’re trying. Our bubbles will stay connected. And that’s good for, I’ve got most of the New Zealanders out the way. I can get the Australians out the way. And they’re all saying, oh, I was booked to go to the English channel or I was booked to go to Catalina. But we’re not going to be able to get there this European winter. So I think everybody’s just put their life on hold, really.

Yeah, I imagine that all the Kiwis are pretty happy about being able to do these swims and even some that weren’t necessarily planning it. Like John, for example, it just looked at it and thought, all right, I’m ready to go for Taupo and train with it with a couple of months. So there’s certainly been some positives for the local crew down your way. It’s very interesting on training methods and things now. And what happens is we’re an instant sort of world, aren’t we? People want to… I’ve made a decision, I’ve got a goal. Where maybe a few years ago, it would be a three or four year goal. No, I’m going to go and it’s from my Taupo. And John came to me and I said, well, he’d been doing a lot of cycling. And it’s a very interesting philosophy. He was exhausted, he’d done a cycle tour and done a lot of cycle, bugger all the swimming.

I said to him, I said, right, well, here’s the plan. Let’s try this and see if it works. He doesn’t have a lot of time. He’s a businessman, et cetera, et cetera. So I said, go away, rest over Christmas. Do a little bit of swimming. Don’t go crazy, but rest the body, rest the mind. He came back from there and we did 350K weeks, which were a real struggle for him.

But we built up to it and then did the 350K weeks and then went into Lake Taupo. It was successful. The moral of that story is if you are fit and being able to do those three intense weeks, one after the other, then we may get away with it. I’m not a firm believer of it. I think we still need a three month plan, but it worked for somebody who had huge fitness, three weeks onto it. I wouldn’t advise it for everybody, but it does if you’re fit. Yeah, and look, he’s swum for a very long time and good swimmer at that as well. So that got that in his favor too. But absolutely, you’d want at least a couple of months leading to a 40K swim or something like that. I’m a firm believer, a minimum of 12 weeks, but 16 is good just in case you have the off week and you can build into some good miles.

And the last question I just want to ask you here is in terms of cold water adaptation, what are some of those things that you suggested to the swimmers that are going to come in swim the cook straight? How do you get them used to the cold? Well, we’re obviously all coming up to winter. I mean, I think Melbourne temperatures, what you get down to about 12 or 10, it gets pretty rough, pretty cold there. I’m very much for bloody, like burning your bra, burn your wetsuit and you just don’t get back into it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

You get rid of that wetsuit and you just slowly build up. You get in, your body will change. Your body type will change. You know, you wear, you know, you don’t put the puffer jacket on, you just wear the sweatshirt and t-shirt underneath. You don’t put the coat on when you go out when it’s cold. You get your body used to feeling cold and then it doesn’t feel cold.

Cool showers, no hot showers in three or four times a week. And even if it’s just starting off at 10 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes in the cold, out, warm yourself up straight after and just build on that. Your body type will change and it will get used to it. It’s a bit like the heat. You know, a lot of people can’t cope with the heat. We, I go to be going to St. Lucia over there and it’s 33 degrees. So instead of putting warm into the body to keep it warm, we’re putting ice in the drinks, ice into their crushed ice into their stumps, you know, the swollen crushed ice so that they’ve got the coolness cooling them down because they’re cooking. Basically, it’s like being in a pot of hot water.

And it’s very hard to adapt. It’s the same, you know, works both ways. So, but the cold, you just have to keep building on it a couple of years, a lot of the time till you can really, you can really get used to it. And then it doesn’t necessarily, I had a swimmer this year, we went in November and he’d been swimming for four years all year round. No wear suit in Wellington, it was cold. We had a cool breeze on his back. We got eight hours of good swimming. The last two hours were a struggle and we didn’t have 15 minutes more. And we got there. But it’s very touching go because it may well just be that air temperature that does it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, one of the things that I’ve realized with what we’re doing in terms of clinics is as of last year, there’s been a huge, huge amount of people start doing cold water swimming in the Bay because that was their only option here in Melbourne. And so we had a five cave radius from your house

that you could go. And so we’ve had so many Bay swimmers come to our clinics now because they just took it up as of last year. And so it’s really grown in popularity. And I imagine we’re not the only city or the only place in the world where that’s happened. It really seems like it’s taken off a lot. Have you encountered that over there? Yeah, we are. And now there’s a lot more cold water camps being run, things like that. So people are learning how to cope with it and they’re wanting to swim in the ocean rather than the pool. I still have to push that clock

on the end of the swimming pool is the best clock you can swim against because it doesn’t lie. It’s got no tide. It’s got no current there to push you off. We’ll tell you that you’re doing better than you are. It is exact meterage against exact time. Now, that is what we need. And that’s what you need in open water swimming because it’s all about, it’s not about going out there for a long time because if you’ve got tides and weather like we have here in Wellington for Cook Strait, we try to eliminate risks. So the faster you swim, average fast pace. We’re not trying to make you go crazy for the first couple of hours. But if we’re just swimming 100 or 200 meters an hour faster, then per hour, then at the end of the day on 10 hours, there’s two kilometers. Two kilometers could be the making or breaking of that swim. So it’s about holding good average pace. Combination of in the sea and the pool is the best form of training.

I had that question today. We had a Q and A with our members and that question came up. What’s the best way to train for an open water swim? So in the pool for the most part, you talk to any of the elite triathletes, elite open water swimmers, majority of the swimming is happening in the pool because you know exactly what time you’re doing and you can make sure that you are hitting that pace. So that’s a good explanation of exactly why. Most of it is confidence in the sea. Most of it is just getting your confidence in the sea. And once you’ve got that, the word goes in the pool. Yeah, absolutely agree. Well, Phil, thanks so much for being on the podcast again. It’s great having you on and hopefully next year we can tease something up in person and get back to some warm weather. Good on you, Brendan. Lovely to just speak to you all again and good luck with your swimming. 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 It Takes To Be Successful In Marathon Swimming with Phil Rush appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Peter Bloor from Vietnam. I invited him on the podcast to talk about the impressive results he has observed after day two of the ‘5 Day Catch Challenge’. He shared about what he had changed and did to make such an improvement.

1:00 Swimming Background
3:35 Did the ‘5 Day Catch Challenge’ Each Day Twice
4:45 Less Tired And Feeling Better
5:45 The Importance Of Slow To Fast
8:19 One Focus A Day Is The Way To Go
10:05 Watching Swim Videos On YouTube
12:11 Training Sessions
13:53 8th Week Program

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

So by the end of your day too, which is kind of the fourth day for me, I just had been putting my times into a little spreadsheet and it had taken nine seconds off the 100 meters intervals from the first day. And that’s, yeah, as I say, I’m not particularly fast, but that really blew my mind because I’d spent so long not really getting any faster. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast to show that helped 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 Peter Bloor and you are a Brit located in Vietnam and you’ve recently gone through our five day catch challenge and in the comments you had some pretty good results. I think it was after day two and I thought I’d be really good to get you on to talk about what you’ve changed to make such an improvement. So first of all,

welcome and can you tell everyone listening a little bit of your background on how you got into swimming and why you’re swimming at the moment? Sure, thanks Brenton. So I moved into an apartment about two years ago and it had a pool and I’ve never been a strong swimmer at all. I would never swim freestyle for example, it was always breaststroke, paddling around and I thought it’d be a good opportunity to really learn how to swim. My wife then starts suggesting to triathlons and going in for Ironman because I’ve got a background with cycling and a bit of running. So yeah, just kind of took it from there and I spent about 18 months training. I was doing an 80-20 plan from Matt Fitzgerald depending if you you’re familiar with this whole kind of approach. Not too sure, what’s that about?

It’s just about doing 80% of your work below the lactate threshold so most of it’s quite easy and then you 20% of the time you’re above that doing intervals and all the rest of it so that applies in cycling, swimming and running. So I was following his plan just basically just trying to make sure that I had the endurance to be able to do a half Ironman. So 1900 meters it seemed ridiculously long at first. So I wasn’t really focusing on the the technique so much just about trying to make sure I could do it. The Ironman because of Covid the Ironman kept getting cancelled and delayed. So I’ve done these 19-week build-up plans three times now and the event just kept on it’s honestly so disheartening. We’ve just had one recently so it’s supposed to be May, again that’s the third I got cancelled. It’s now done for August and I’m not really that confident it’s going to happen again but anyway. So I would watch

your videos actually and I would try and take that into the pool but then just go through the normal plan as it was in the as it was in the plan that was given. So not really doing the drills not really kind of focusing that much on on it and that’s that’s something I kind of really learned from this this catch program is that doing the drills really really makes a difference like having the intention to kind of do it using with with your mind is all well and good but it just doesn’t give you the same kind of isolation of the the different parts of the technique. So yeah I really realised that and then yeah after so after that about 18 months I that that last Ironman got cancelled and I thought I’d use time to try and work on the swim because that’s by far my weakest discipline of the three. So then I saw just coincidentally your your course come up and kind of went for it also partly because I’ve been sort of watching

your videos for free for so long I’ll have a photo of it so you’d probably deserved whatever it was and I saw someone in the comments saying that they were going to do that you know repeat the days and that that kind of felt right for me so I did each day twice and so by the end of your day too which is kind of the fourth day for me I just had been putting my times into a little spreadsheet and it yeah it’d taken nine seconds off the the 100 meters intervals from the first day and that’s yeah as I say I’m not particularly fast but that’s that really blew my mind because I’d spent so long not really getting any faster and then did so then obviously that was a few that was a couple of weeks back and I’ve now finished it by the end I think it was 11 or 12 seconds but a big part of that was just not just the time it was the kind of energy so not feeling so tired afterwards feeling more comfortable rather than doing it kind of you

know muscles a bit more relaxed and less tired afterwards I haven’t really been done any endurance swim since part because it’s not that phase in the plan and I just didn’t get around to it but I’m really interested to see what effect it will have on the on the kind of average speed for those longer swims but yeah just really really impressive results I thought. And one of the things you mentioned in the in the comments was that you this is like the second day or perhaps four days into it if you’re doubling up the days but you didn’t feel like you were faster but when you look at your times you were you were quicker can you explain did it feel any different or did it or it felt the same but the times were just quicker?

It’s quite it’s kind of difficult to remember I guess the day two I think was the one where you kind of go in you put the brakes on and then down and that definitely I noticed that a lot in the the final drills so you kind of catch position just being better yeah feeling better I guess not yeah not feeling so much faster but definitely less tired and that was throughout throughout the intervals I guess so I had more gas to give in the final one than I did on the first day and would have done in the past and so on as well. I mean the other just thinking about it I haven’t reached the end in day five the one that had the most effect on me I think was just the importance of slow to fast um I think that’s the way you phrased it but you know I think I’ve pretty much been going through just as beginners do you know pushing down on the water instead of waiting for the engine to go up and but my general stroke was pretty even in terms of

the motion and then this has completely changed the way that works and so I found that it’s probably meant I’ve put in less energy into the kicks um my kicks I’ve got that thing of runners like heavy legs so kicks has always been an issue in fact for the longest time I was faster with a pull boy than when I was kicking which is pretty depressing um I know a lot of people are

um and but yeah like as I say so moving from slow to fast it’s felt like it’s completely changed the the timing and I don’t know the way the stroke feels and maybe that’s a spoiler for people who haven’t got there yet but yeah that the day five was really big for me as well ah that’s good and so for you and what we’re talking about with slow to fast is um essentially a lot of people will turn their arms over at a constant speed like they’re turning the pedals on a bike but in swimming it’s it should be slow to fast so when you reach forward you begin to catch move through that a bit slower than you do out the back of the stroke and um and for you was it more that taking your time out the front and then accelerating through the back part that changed it or was it just that it gave you felt like you had a little bit more more time um to like to to reach forward so it kept your heart rate down felt easier was it changing the speed in

both ends of the stroke or in just one more in the in the the second half honestly yeah so more just the acceleration out the back um it meant I was able to deliberately push us fully through the up through the back as well and I think particularly when I was getting tired in the past that would have been the form just falling into pieces so probably wasn’t pushing all the way out whereas now that’s that’s just front and center in my mind um and and then definitely to just the tiredness and the energy um so I don’t know I don’t know the numbers but I whether it feels like half as difficult but it definitely feels easier um and you know this they’re not sprinting so the numbers that I’m kind of going off when I I’m just been doing your drills kind of thing is what I would call kind of zone three so a little bit above threshold um and so yeah faster than I would do for for an Ironman but not definitely not sprinting and uh yeah it really feels a lot

easier and that that’s kind of like that’s part of what I wanted yeah oh that and it’s that’s such a good um good thing to hear and I think because I was thinking about okay why why people getting really good results with this with this catch challenge like it’s super simple and but I think having that pretty much one focus a day um is is the way to to go um because if you’re trying to do two or three things sometimes that’s just overwhelming and so with one thing at a time keep it really simple um for me that feels like um why we’ve had had such good results with it what do you for you what do you think it it was that um that helped you sort of make those changes just from someone doing the course I absolutely agree yeah it’s gonna have to isolate the um the each different part of it um because as I say none of actually I think I’ve probably seen most of what you said in that course in your videos already um I’m pretty sure

I mean maybe not the slow to fast thing but maybe I haven’t got through the to that part of your videos yet but it was one of the four hundred years yeah got two young kids so I’ll get there um it was yeah the isolation and doing the drills so um I would really recommend everyone get the snorkel as well for me that um that just took the breathing out of the equation and so it was even more so kind of just isolated on getting those um those kind of positions right and getting the different parts of the stroke right um yeah so I’ll just the isolation I think that’s absolutely what it was for me yeah I think a snorkel is good to use because I mean the breathing is the thing that can bring in so many other flaws into the stroke because often turn too far or you know you just sort of it really takes the focus off what’s happening in the water so snorkel makes a makes a big difference and when you first started um swimming or swimming consistently about 18 months ago

with your with your technique did you have um sort of much an idea of what it was that you should be doing did you um get any coaching as a kid or did you come into it with a bit of a blank slate and then you started watching some some videos the second um it’s one of those things I’ve noticed so I’ll I might I spend that amount of time um swimming 18 months probably three times a day sorry three times a week I’d say at least as part of the plan and then kids guys who just learned when they were kids and I like nailing my times on on Strava like people I know here who barely ever swim but they just got the muscle memory and the technique from when they were a kid um and it was yeah it was that I didn’t have any any coach here and I like I say knew how to swim but never did swim and um so I just I kind of went to YouTube there’s not really uh that many coaches that I know here anyway um or that I’m aware of so yeah I just kind of tried to do

on YouTube and it’s as I say it’s I think it’s what you said um trying to I’d watch the videos during the day maybe thinking I’d go and swim at night but I’d have three things in my mind that I wanted to improve so got right into do this and work on that and hire both thing and you want that um and yeah I think it ended up being just not really not really effective yeah yeah that’s it because often I’ll have people who come along to clinics and um that watched a lot of videos and they’re trying to do so many things that at once and some of it’s just like they don’t even need to worry about it’s like let’s say it’s the train tracks right you’re trying to stay in um in line with your shoulders when you enter if someone’s already doing that and they’re really hyper focused on it it’s like well you could spend your your time focusing on something else and it’s um yeah and so you want to make sure it’s right for you and it’s specific to you

and um yeah but I think you know with the catch you know if you get that right to me it’s it’s the 80 20 of your stroke if you have a good catch um it makes such a difference across the board and so I think that’s why um you can see such big improvements like you had which I think was um was fantastic so um so going forwards in terms of um uh racing with your training do you you are you doing some um sessions where it’s you’re going it around you know like one and a half to two k maybe broken up into intervals where you’re looking to maintain that sort of race pace um if you do ever get to do your half line man um yeah so I haven’t I’m supposed to have started the plan again or for for august but like I said the motivation is a little bit lower at the moment but so I’ve kind of been working through the the five day catch thing again um I think I’ll do that for this week and then I actually joined the video membership of the um

of your kind of effort swimming site so I’m planning to kind of use that and go through some more things um the way I picture doing it now is once I get into the plan again there’s my warm-up should probably normally about 500 meters three to 500 meters um I’ll do drills from from the site or I mean some from this this program I guess but some just from the site as well ymca and that kind of thing um and then go on with the the normal things and yeah sometimes it’s intervals sometimes it’ll just be you know a big swim in zone two sometimes it’s uh mixed intervals there’s a little bit of variety going through it um that yeah we’ll be fine of Matt of Matt Fitzgelstin as well that 80-20 so it’s nice to be able to kind of mix them up I guess um through the first part focusing on the form and then the endurance for the second part or whatever yeah that’s good and that’s why I sort of made it that way too is because

um people like yourself you’ve got a coach or you’ve got swim programs that you’re already doing and so you can often just get those technique changes to happen as part of the warm-up and um what I’m in the middle of creating at the moment is um you might have seen me mention it but like an eight-week course kind of like the five-day catch challenge where it’s going to go through the whole stroke so we’ll work on on body position and kick and rotation all those sorts of things just in an eight-week program but you’ll just have a short warm-up that you can include as part of your session so it’ll sort of cover cover all those other things and I’m sure you’re about to find a couple seconds here and there as well so um yeah in the next probably two weeks or so it should be up in the membership which um which should be good because I’ve had quite a few people ask about all right can we do it for like body position

can we do it for um the other things as well and um yeah and so that’s um that’s what’s going to be uh be next because oh yeah often there’s a lot of time we found in those things as well awesome yeah I look forward to that for sure cool and uh I just yeah thank you very much for um for being on the podcast and uh fingers crossed that come August you can you can get your race on I feel for I mean I think we’ve got um so this coming weekend there’s the first Ironman to be held in Australia since since last March I think it is and um and our state here in Melbourne um by the time we were recording this um so our state in Victoria so we’ve all been locked out of Queensland so I’ve had friends that have have trained for a very long time for this event and they can’t go so um yeah it’s uh I can understand the pain in a way but I haven’t done the training for it but uh yeah it sucks but fingers crossed you know you can get it done

soon oh no that’s one 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 9 Seconds Faster Per 100m with Peter Bloor appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Jeff Grace from Swimming Specific Yoga. Jeff has been in the podcast before. Now he is coming back to talk more about body awareness, mobility. preparation and many more.

02:26 Moving Better With Yoga
04:55 Body Awareness in Overhead Movements
06:55 Thoracic Mobility
08:18 Increasing Thoracic Spine Mobility
12:36 Rock Not Roll
13:21 Cross-Body Connections
15:05 How You Perform Drills Is More Important Than How Many Drill You Do
17:04 Activation and Relaxation
18:44 Effortless Effort
23:10 The Breath
26:02 Preparation

Take a look at this 6-minute warm-up sequence you can use before training to help you perform better in training:

Jeff is holding a 50% off sale on the Swim Specific Yoga membership which contains dozens of yoga routines that will improve your swimming. Check out the Swimming Specific Yoga Annual Membership here:

(Use the Coupon Code: ‘effortlessswimming’ for a further 20% off)

Swimming Specific Yoga YouTube Channel
Join the 5 Day Catch Challenge:
Join the Effortless Swimming membership:

They are some of the fittest guys on the planet, but the thing that’s stopping them from getting quicker is their form and their movement. And so I think it’s very similar to it’s like how you perform drills is much more important than how many drills you do. 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.

Hey guys, welcome to today’s episode. Before we get into the episode with Jeff Grace, I just want to let you know that Jeff’s online yoga studio, which is specific to swimmers, he’s currently got a 50% off sale, which you can find at swimspecificyoga.com. Use the coupon code Effortless Swimming on checkout and you’ll get that 50% discount. I’ll also put the link in our show notes as well. This is great if you find that you’re very tight and that you do have problems in getting getting into the right position with your technique and and you need to improve your mobility. Yoga is one of the best ways to do it and I know firsthand how beneficial it can be, but I’ve actually had a lot of swimmers that I’ve worked with in the past who have been very tight and restricted, particularly through their thoracic spine, through the shoulders, those those areas that are so important for swimming and one of the ways that they’ve

helped improve their mobility is through yoga. So I can’t recommend Jeff’s yoga courses, his online studio enough, if you find yourself in that position. So I just want to let you know about that 50% off special brings it down to something like $60 for the year at half price. So it’s very good value and you find the link in the show notes. Let’s get into the episode. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Jeff Grace from Swimming Specific Yoga. So Jeff, first of all, welcome to the podcast and welcome back because I’ve had you on before. So how have you been over the last probably two years since we last spoke, I reckon? Yeah, been great. It’s been a journey. I think it has been for everybody, an interesting one. But yeah, I know things have been great.

And we were talking before the call about there’s been a big shift obviously online, which is which everyone knows about. And we’re also talking about a swimmer that I used to coach who started doing your online yoga. I think you said November or December last year and she emailed you just recently and said, I can tell you that this works because I just had a swim meet and my times were a lot better than they were in the past. So what I want to chat about today is how people can just move better as swimmers because from my perspective, people when they come to clinics, majority of them are in their 40s to 50s, I’d say most of them. And what we see is that their range of motion is very limited, particularly through the hips with a lot of triathletes sitting down and riding and running and sitting at the desk like the range of motion through the hips is very poor. And that just leads to a whole host of issues that create drag. And so if people can just

learn to move a bit better and be a bit more aware of what their body’s doing through certain phases of the stroke by using something like yoga, it can have such a big impact on your swimming. And if you combine that with the technical side that I teach, I think it’s just a very powerful combination to really make huge changes in your swimming. And so you’ve worked with swimmers for a long time with yoga and I’m sure you’ve seen these sorts of things time and time again. Yeah. And I mean, I couldn’t agree with you more when you talk about master swimmers. I mean, just everything that’s involved in our daily lives that teach us how not to move. And I’ve just I’ve found, you know, because I come from the swim coaching background and coming at it and and trying to discover the best ways to do dry land and testing out different modalities. I’ve just found that yoga is such an all-encompassing modality. It has the body awareness element to it when you touch. So when

you’re talking the overall movement, right, I love that you put that in there and not just mobility. Because when you look at it, you’ve got the body awareness, overall awareness when we’re talking about breath, then you’ve got the strength element, and you’ve got a rhythm element to it. So you’ve got all and then you’ve got the mental component to it. So you’ve got so many different aspects that you’ll get hits on. And when you’re talking about an adult athlete, you’ve got a whole bunch of years of motor patterns and habits that sometimes need to first bring awareness to and to be able to start to get them to move in the way that you want them to to be efficient in the water and to be let’s face it for some people just comfortable in the water. I mean, one of the things that I’ve found most interesting in the last couple years is that the what people think they’re doing in Australia because obviously a lot different

than what’s actually happening. But more than anywhere, it’s out in front of the head. So the overhead movements from the entry to the reach and the catch like it’s just that the proprioception there is very, very poor, as well as other parts of the body, but particularly out in front of the head. Is that something that you’ve seen in the yoga that you do? And I know it’s like a very small part of it is overhead movements, but I’m just curious whether that’s something that that you’ve seen with the guys that you work with? Absolutely. I mean, when you look at it, I mean, that is one of the major things that when

designing programs are specifically for swimmers that you have to look at because or you have to really address and focus on. Because how often are we actually putting load or doing precise movements in our everyday lives in an overhead way? Right. And in fact, the majority of what we’re doing is restricting all of that. So when you look at not only, you know, a typical swimmers posture of that rounded shoulder posture, but that’s just for almost anyone who is not doing a job that takes an extreme amount of movement, right? Anyone who’s at a desk it for any period of time. But then also when you look at what you’re talking about with triathletes, what are you doing when you’re on a bike? Right. So really getting that body awareness with the overhead movement is a huge aspect. And I think when you look at it, you look at the shoulder mobility and then you look at the thoracic spine mobility. Those are the two biggest areas that affect that. And then

just plain and simply getting an understanding of moving in different ways in that overhead, with those overhead positions. But yes, it is something that I see a lot of. Yeah, and particularly that thoracic mobility. So just before we started this podcast, I was doing analysis videos for our members. And one of the swimmers he’s just joined, we’re working on not over rotating through the shoulders and through the hips because in both directions, he’s going too far, legs are spaying out and it’s impacting his catch as well. And so one of the things I suggested was probably going to have to start looking at just better thoracic mobility, like the side to side thoracic movement. And obviously it’s something that you do a lot in yoga. And one of the tests that we used to do at clinics when we were doing this sort of testing was we’d get them to sit on the edge of a chair, have their knees, have their feet together, their legs together. And then we’d get them to have their hands out in

front, put the palms together and get them to rotate as far as they could without the arms bend without letting the knees come apart. And most people couldn’t get past about 45 degrees if 90 degrees is all the way to the side. But when they’re looking at elites from as they want them to be able to get to that 90 degree range, otherwise they’ll look at some corrective exercises to help it. But yeah, it was amazing how tight people are side to side. And so if you are tight there, it’s going to cause your hips to rotate too far along with that shoulder rotation. And that’s going to cause the legs to spay and a whole bunch of other things. So what sort of things can people do to help that? And what sort of time period of people looking at to be able to see even a minor improvement in it?

I think when, first off, when you look at, I’m just getting aggressive time period aspect first, I think when you look at that, just bringing the awareness to what’s going on in that area can create a very immediate improvement, right? Because I don’t think very many people, like if you have people simply just sit there and try that movement, just an awareness of how to move through that area, how to do that movement sitting in a chair, I’m sure that when you did that once with someone and then got them to do it a second time, you’d probably already see it just from them recognizing the pattern that they’d have to go through. So by doing the body awareness aspect of it or the body awareness aspect of the movement around the thoracic spine, I think you can see some very immediate change on that. Stabilization of the hips I think is something that’s really important because when people start working on thoracic spine stuff, so

there’s two movements that I like to, there’s three big ones when you’re looking at that rotation through the thoracic spine that I like to use. One is lying down and that’s a little bit more where you can keep the hips a little bit more, can be stabilized easier and have better body awareness around that. But the other two, one’s in a lunging position where you then keep one hand on the ground and then you’re rotating through with the other arm. So you’ve got, so I’ve got my right leg forward, I’ve got my left leg back, I’ll have my left hand down and then I’ll open up with my right arm. Hopefully that all made sense. But the first thing there is teaching people how to stabilize through their hips because one of the first things you see is people will go to do that thoracic twist and they’ll allow their hips to just go with it because they feel like oh I’m getting more mobility but actually all you’re doing is you’re letting

your pelvis move. So this is where that body awareness aspect comes in. So learning how to stabilize the pelvis and then actually moving through the thoracic spine itself, which is something you talked about with doing that chair test. And I think that’s one of the things that’s most important when people are thinking about doing poses, doing movements, whatever it is to increase thoracic spine mobility is you’ve got to understand or you’ve got to make sure that you are actually moving through your thoracic spine and you’re not just letting your pelvis shift side to side to actually feel like you’re moving through your thoracic spine.

Yeah that’s a good point. One of the swimmers that I’ve started working with online was, he was watching a Dave Scott video, the triathlon coach, and he was talking about stable hips and the concept that he had in his mind that he had to do for his stroke was not rotate the hips at all. Obviously that’s not the case. We need to rotate the hips. They shouldn’t stay completely flat. But one of the things Dave Scott talked about was think of a coffee cup on your hips. You don’t want that to spill but whether or not you use that analogy or not, maybe that keeps the hips a little bit too still. But yes we need to rotate it a little bit but if you go too far and they’re unstable and we’ve bent through the hips and the waist, there’s just very little connection that’s going all the way to the extremities from the out the front with the catch and so on. I think with that ability to be controlled

through the hips, it makes such a difference. The way that I’ve conceptualized it is it’s like your hips are on their hydraulics. You think of that side to side movement. We need that control through there to be able to connect up the power from the catch and so on. Whereas if they’re just like, I don’t know, I haven’t thought of the other side of that, but I think of them being on hydraulics with this fairly stable and controlled movement through the freestyle stroke. I’m going to give you credit for something that I use all the time in my coaching, which is the Rock Knot rule. I’ve got to give

credit there as well because I didn’t actually come up with that one. So that was Carl and Pipe, so I’ll pay that one for with that with her. So I think it’s a great one. Yeah, Rock Knot rule. Yeah, it’s awesome. I think it really gets the message across because the overrotation thing is it’s huge and so finding that middle ground between flat swimming, which is obviously a big problem and then over rotating and I think that that simple saying of Rock Knot rule is huge. One of the things that you’re saying there that I loved was and talk about combining, but is the cross body connection, is that connection of the right hand and the left foot and starting to understand that connection and control through the core because that’s going to help through your rotation. So when you’re asking me some of the things you can do to help with the thoracic rotation and then thinking about overhead movement, but going from

kind of a tabletop position, working on your bird dog pose. So that’s where you’re raising right leg, left arm, but really having the awareness and the control where once again, when people do that pose or that exercise so often they’ll think they have to get their leg as high as they possibly can and what that does is once again that shifts the pelvis right and learning the control through the core across the body and learning that control the pelvis and getting that really set in and then going and doing a thread the needle movement. So where you’re bringing whichever arm you’re using right arm up and out to the side or even having the hand back behind the head, which I think isolates through the thoracic spine even a little bit more and combining that with kind of that cross body connection is huge for developing strong freestyle in those two elements that you were just, well three elements I guess that you’re

talking about the control, the rotation, the thoracic spine mobility and then the awareness of overhead movement. And I think one of the things that I’ve seen sort of swimmers move to when it comes to whether it’s drills in the water or exercises like this is two reasons why they might not do me as one they’re just like it’s a waste of my time it’s not going to help I just want to get in there and train more or the other thing that they do they’re like all right I’m going to do it but I’m just going to rush it and I’m just going they go through the movement in a really poor way and I’ve done two videos recently on Lionel Sanders and then one on a guy Sam Long so two professional triathletes and what I’ve really enjoyed watching their YouTube series on is they’re both not great swimmers they aren’t front pack but in their journey to get front pack they’ve had to change the way that they think about swimming as they’re not going to

the pool to get fitter at least not straight away it’s they’ve got to go to the pool and their focus is on technique and slowing it down and being really aware of the movements that they’re making in the water because they are some of the fittest guys on the planet but the thing that’s stopping them from getting quicker is their form and their movement and so I think it’s very similar to it’s like how you perform drills is much more important than how many drills you do like the purpose of the drills is we want to make sure that we do them right and it’s just very easy to brush through them without actually thinking of what’s the purpose behind it and when I’m running clinics like people you know most people are doing the drills wrong to start with and so I’m correcting them all the time and then same thing with these movements out of the water you know if you think of that bird dog position if I’ve ever taken people

through it most people their foot’s up really high their arms like not up at shoulder height it’s too low and so if you can just get them to become aware of this stuff then and they can change it maybe they’re looking in a watching themselves in a mirror and they can become more aware of where they’re at that’s that stuff that will translate into the pool 100% of the time because it’s much easier to change the stuff out of the pool than in the pool so I think it’s a really good place to start yeah and I think you know I’ve had a number I’ve had I’ve had a good number of conversations with um coaches especially when talking about body awareness out of the water and body awareness in the water right because space at completely different environments right when you’re looking at gravity versus buoyancy and the way that your body feels in in each of those two environments but what I always come back to is the more where you are of what you’re doing with

your body anywhere you’re going to be able to make adjustments right so the more understanding you have of how to engage and how to relax you’re going to be able to do that out of the water you’re going to be able to do it in the water right because it’s the understanding that activation and relaxation which is what actually gives us the ability to create the movement that we desire to have that’s good activation and relaxation that’s yet a good way of thinking about what I try and talk a lot about it’s like when we’re swimming we want to have the least amount of tension possible just enough to hold the shape in the water anymore and it’s it’s wasted and that’s a very hard thing to do that’s kind of mastery of the of your swimming when you can get to that point because a new swimmer is going to be probably quite quite aggressive with the stroke or very tense and but it’s there’s elite swimmers that you see

just gliding up and down the pool that have really got that balance in place of activation and relaxation and is there something that you have done or you’ve seen swimmers do through through the yoga to help them be able to get to that place that’s I mean that’s that’s a huge thing in you I know I leave is in our first conversation I brought up the saying that I do really like to use which is effortless effort right and being able to have that sense of you know Bill Sweetenham got brought into my mind when you talked about the drills and him saying you’re doing a drill 90 99 right is 100 wrong and then he also has the talk of easy speed and I really think that that’s one of the biggest things I’ve seen people be able to take from the mat into the water is that understanding of allowing not forcing of finding flow within their movement finding rhythm within their movement and understanding when you’re in a pose and you’re in a pose for whether it be two breaths ten breaths

but how to actually make subtle adjustments to be able to create that proper activation in the muscles you need to hold the pose hold the shape and then be able to relax everything else around it so it’s exactly what you’re talking about in the water so I really feel that we can teach that on the mat in a very effective way to be able to take that in the water number one is that the communication of how you’re able to do that can be consistent and really give a person a lot of feedback while they’re in a pose and then the awareness aspect is built into yoga where sometimes you know for us as swimmers like to hammer up and down the pool right and there’s not always the greatest awareness and that awareness piece is naturally built into yoga when it comes to breath right so you have you you have to have that when you’re doing a yoga practice and doing it in a very intentional way you’ve got that awareness

that increased awareness then allows you to understand that activation and that relaxation and it’s brought back into the actual practice where you’re very much encouraged to find that in each one of the movements or each one of the poses that you’re doing so once again when you can find that on the mat I truly have seen that you can find that in the water

yeah that’s right the more you can do it in other environments the more you can do it in the pool and that’s something that I’ve been focused quite a bit on with my surfing lately it’s like I move down the coast and surfing pretty much every day and when the surf gets big like I’m just I’m wanting to get out there and be able to get as comfortable as possible in the in the bigger waves and I was listening to this surfing podcast of a surf coach who I think is really good he’s great with analogies and I think he coaches in a similar way that I feel like I coached so I get a lot from it and I actually translate it into my own swim coaching and one of the things that you talked about was like when you if you’re going out in big surf a lot of people will be panicked and so they’re paddling out and they’re spending all their energy trying to get out out the back and get past the waves but that water that you know

the waves is is carrying through it’s eventually got to have to sort of come back out to sea and it’s got to it’s got to calm down and so if you spend all of your energy trying to get out there by the time you’re out there you’re more panicked and you’re not going to be able to relax so I’ve just even if the surf’s big it’s like you know just take your time paddling out and then when the waves are coming in and I was out on a pretty big day probably the biggest day I’ve been out in like ever this was a couple weeks ago and I was paddling into you know some waves and like I was just focused on my breathing and just trying to relax the whole time the takeoff is easier the the drop and then the bottom turn heats easier and then you just surf is so much better style when you’re relaxed and you move better and it’s no different when you’re when you’re swimming when you’re going through a hard a hard like a you’re

going through a race if you can have that sort of like relaxed feeling and you’re focused on your breath and you’re just making sure that your heart rates aren’t up too high then you will perform so much better as well and so if you can just transfer that across all these different areas of life it really starts to make a difference across the board there. It’s that whole concept of float right and being able to be in the moment and the breath is is really kind of that key I mean when we when in yoga the thought of the breath is really the bridge between the body and the mind right and that whole connection when it’s all working together that’s when everything that’s when everything comes together right that’s when you feel that effortless movement that’s when you feel those times of just being you know the typical sports saying of it in the zone right when you’re present and you know there’s there’s a great episode I can’t remember

who it was that you had on but I know you did work with them on breathing and that is something that that is huge and one of the reasons that I think yoga is such an effective practice for swimmers is just how built in the breathing aspect is because

unlike all other sports we don’t get to breathe whenever the heck we want right so being comfortable with that aspect and having greater awareness and control of the breath and that connection is so so important for a swimmer. Yeah absolutely and a good way a good way to use your breathing as well this is not necessarily a movement thing but is one of the one of the ways to kind of set your your rhythm in your stroke and I think this is best kind of used when you’re training is set up by your breathing pattern so for example this morning with a squad that I was training with we did 10 200 set it’s four of those at 70 percent and then three at 75 two at 80 percent and the last one’s at 85 percent now as I was going through those those 10 twos the way that I sort of focused on my rhythm or found my rhythm was through the breathing pattern so we’re in a 50 meter pool and I was breathing it was breathing two and then

three three two so it was like yeah two three three two yeah so that was for the first like six no first seven of those two hundreds and that way I could keep the heart rate down and and I found my rhythm that way now when I had to pick up the pace I changed that breathing pattern to for the first half of it I’d keep that rhythm for the first hundred and then I switched to breathing every two because I needed a little bit more yeah yeah because I was pushing harder but just coming back to the breath is a really good way to to find your rhythm and get into that state of flow but if you’re just breathing like all over the shot like two four three two like it’s you’re probably not going to get into that that rhythm and flow so you’ve got to find that breathing rhythm first and foremost well and I mean even before that point kind of going back to you what you’re talking about with this surf is the preparation aspect right and when you’re

preparing to go off on a repeat or you’re preparing for the next set or in the case of what we’re talking about when you’re preparing to get in the water right I like to have one working with athletes before we get in talk about we’re not only training you know what you’re thinking typically of your body to be prepared to swim well you’re you’re you’re warming up your breath

right you’re getting connected in that way and you’re really preparing to use your breath in an effective and efficient way by bringing awareness to it and manipulating it in different ways yeah yeah that’s that’s exactly right and it sounds like again it’s one of those things where look you can you can go fine without doing it but I’ve found personally that when I when I do focus on my breath or I do focus on on moving better like I go I swim a lot better and so it’s these these little one percent changes that that for me really make a difference and like this morning as well like I woke up at it was like quarter past four I just woke no sorry 4 30 I woke up and then so I had about 40 minutes I had to get up and go training and so woke up had a coffee and then I just went through a couple of yoga moves just on the carpet just to start to you know warm up and then I grab this yeah those that aren’t watching won’t be able to see it but then

I just lay on this thing for a couple of minutes I think it’s called a sow back so back or so writes the company that make them so and for me that just opens me up through my my shoulders and I’m generally pretty tight through there from surfing and swimming and so just like yeah this little routine beforehand and I swam I haven’t swung this well since like February and so look a good night’s sleep will help and a couple of other things but yeah just doing these little things and I had a great session so I gotta keep doing that every time I mean it’s it’s like you said right that that one percent what what can you do to just get that little extra extra advantage and when we go back to where we started and talking about how tied up adults are after a day like just doing a couple of movement patterns a couple of blows to open up through the shoulders to get some overhead movements going before you actually start in the water never never mind breath never

mind body when everything we’re talking about in this conversation taking five minutes to do that before you actually hit the water right that is going to make a huge difference that’s almost maybe I’m setting a challenge for your listeners right now to do kind of a flow before you get in and just really do it consistently for a couple of weeks and just see how it changes everything for you in the water right and I truly believe that’s you know physically mentally and when it comes to the breath for me I mean I’m going to take it on a coaching end when I coach a morning practice for me to be ready to get on deck and perform in the way I want to and that’s you know not only mentally emotionally but also physically moving up and down the deck in the speed I want to how I want to interact with the swimmers I get up and I do at least half an hour of yoga before I go to a morning practice so that might mean I’m getting up at four rather

than five am but when I get on deck you know when I was coaching a group of master swimmers for a couple of years I guess right before the pandemic they used to look at me and go what the heck is in your coffee mug man and can I get some right and I was just like that was all because of the preparation that I was doing you know on the map before I got to the pool and that got me like I said everything from mentally emotionally physically everything prepared to perform at my best now that’s not in the water that was out of the water but the same obviously is going to go free in the water yeah definitely agree there and so

for you like where can people find out exactly what you do and if they’re looking at if they want to get better with their movement if they want to be a better swimmer through being able to get into better positions and I can’t advocate enough for for doing this with with what I’ve seen with all the athletes that I’ve coached over the last couple years is like I promise you you will swim better if you do just you know some of these routines or some of these exercises on a regular basis and before we sort of go into where people can find you can you just don’t need to use her name necessarily but the swimmer that we were talking about before the call that I had coached before can you just talk about what her results were and sort of what she did because I think this is a really good sort of testimony to what doing yoga can can do if you’re swimming well I was it was interesting as I was telling when she first

got in touch with me she basically said like I never thought that yoga was was going to be a thing for me and really said flat out that she looked at it with a huge amount of skepticism that had never enjoyed in the past and then was like you know I got I don’t got much else to do it’s pandemic right so I’ll give it a try and she came to enjoy it and then when she got in touch with me about a month ago after her first swim meet her the first line I believe in her email was I have proof that swimming specific yoga works and what she had said is that she went in and she felt kind of bad coming out of the water because she went in and she was actually making improvements on her times whereas her teammates were just not feeling great about never mind time-wise but just how they were moving and that was you know the two biggest things she was like I’m coming I’m coming out of practices I’m not having the aches and pains I used to have

and then I had the water in my first meet and I’m swimming better than I have before

so you know that’s it’s it’s amazing to see for me having the feedback I’ve gotten from people who have you know come to this through the pandemic and then gotten back in the water and just giving me the feedback that their bodies are feeling so much better after training and then being able to get back in the next session and train better that’s a huge thing

absolutely and so where can people find it and what you’ve got out here

a sale on your membership at the moment as well which let people know about so the the website is swimming specific yoga.com and there I have the online studio there’s a seven day free trial of the online studio and the online studio has over a hundred classes that range anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes in length and so that’s one access point and then I also have a youtube channel where you can experience some of the practices there as well the youtube channel is also swimming specific yoga and then the sale coming up is going to be a half price on our annual membership so excuse me that price is going to be uh $59.99 for unlimited access to the online studio for a year and there’s going to be a few different bonus products in there as well

fantastic so we’ll put the links in the show notes and look if after seven days if you’re finding no benefit then feel free to cancel but I would be surprised if you found no benefit at all after seven days so yeah thanks for that Jeff and I wouldn’t have it on the show if I didn’t think that what you teach is worthwhile and helpful to the people that listen to this show and yeah we’ve known each other for a number of years and it’s a funny how our kind of worlds have collided I guess with the swimmer that you just mentioned and I’m sure there’s probably quite a few more as well because one of the funny things about having a podcast is like you just don’t know who’s listening and it’s like we can talk and I hope someone yeah listens to this that would be nice but the amount of people that I’ve had who have come up to me say I listened to your podcast and I really like it and like just people that I’ve met at pools and stuff it’s like that’s really cool that yeah that so many people do do

listen to it so I hope that this can really change someone’s swimming and not only just their swimming but also you know if you move better in swimming you’re going to move better in day-to-day life and maybe get through those aches and pains and a whole bunch of other things so it is a worthwhile thing to do because there’s nothing worse than getting older and just getting worse posture and you look like you see it with people but if you can move well look you’re going to defy age as you get older. Well I was going to say two things one please I am very open to you to to correspondence send me an email if you have any questions on anything at all and that’s swimming specific yoga at gmail.com and then I was going to share just a quick story with you that master’s group that I that I taught out here in Vancouver I had one of the swimmers coming in the morning and this this was an Irish guy and it comes over he was Jeff I just got an email from one of my mates in

Ireland and it pulls up your podcast with me on it and I’m like that is hilarious.

That’s so cool yeah it’s um yeah it’s um yeah it’s very cool to um to be able to do this and yeah I’m sure people will benefit from it so Jeff thanks again for being on the podcast and uh yeah and I appreciate and all the best with uh with what you’ve you’ve got coming up that we spoke about before the call and uh yeah I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

The post How To Move Better On Land (For Better Technique In The Water) with Jeff Grace appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Bevan Mckinnon. He is a coach at Fitter Coaching and he hosts a podcast called Fitter Radio. Bevan coaches multiple pro triathletes who have won several Ironman and 70.3 Distance Events. He has also won the Age Group World Championships in Kona and other long course events. In this episode, we are talking about some of the lessons that he has learned over the last several years of coaching and how they might apply to triathletes and swimmers who are looking to get better at swimming.

8:41 Environment And Coaching
9:57 Being An Objective Coach
11:27 Coaching Pros and Age Groupers. Is There A Difference?
12:47 Art of Coaching And The Science of Coaching
14:56 Teaching Teachers How To Teach
18:21 Giving The Athletes The Power To Decide
27:52 Swim Chute
33:40 Increasing Stroke Rate
Finding The Right Resource

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ambition and motivation to succeed is similar across both populations. Will we, in point of fact, given the extra pressures of trying to be an age group or amateur athlete and the more balls that you have to juggle to fit in training and work and family and everything that goes with it, the obsessive traits, and I use that as affectionately, is probably as heightened, if not more heightened in those athletes than in the pros who have a bit more time to get things done. So they aren’t dissimilar, the two populations, they’re motivated there to succeed and whether it’s to win a professional race or to do, you know, achieve your next goal as an amateur, it’s not different. 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 Bevan McKinnon. He is a coach at Fitter Coaching and he hosts a podcast called Fitter Radio and Bevan coaches multiple pro triathletes who have won several Ironman and 70.3 distance events. He has also won the age group World Championships in Kona, the IT long course event and the 70.3 distance at World Champs. So very accomplished coach and athlete himself. In this episode, we’re talking about some of the lessons that he’s learnt over the last several years of coaching and how they might apply to triathletes and swimmers who are looking to get better at the swimming. Some of the things that I quite enjoyed in this podcast was we talked about swimshoots or swim sponges and how training with resistance can help you increase your stroke rate. We also talk a little bit about how you might approach your training, whether you should do the sets that your coach gives you or should you go more based on how you

feel. We also talk a bit about changing diet and using fasting as a way to get rid of some of the crap that’s in your body and we also talk about swim technique and how if you marry the right swim technique with the right workouts, how that can be a very powerful combination. So let’s get into the podcast with Bevan McKinnon. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. Episode number 179. My guest today is Bevan McKinnon from Fitta Radio. So, Bevan, welcome back. And the last time I think I had you on, I think you’re about day three of an eight-day fast. So you’re looking much happier, much chirpier than last time. Am I looking skinnier?

I don’t know if the effects last that long, but yeah. It’s a loaded question. You didn’t know where to go with that one, did you? I hope I rigged my way out of it well enough. Yeah, I actually think I was probably closer to about day maybe eight or nine of what ended up being, I think that my partner Chris said to me, she said, this is getting ridiculous because I was deep, deep into ketosis at that particular point that the desire or the drive to eat was virtually minimal. So it’s sort of how long is a piece of string. I could have just kept going. But no, that was an interesting exercise. It was a valuable exercise. It taught me a lot about fasting. It probably reinforced a lot of what I had read about fasting as well. I do think there’s some massive health benefits from the odd extended fast in the athlete population. However, I think it’s been used potentially for the wrong reasons because I was looking at that a lot of the health mechanisms behind it as opposed to just

improving body composition. But like anything where you restrict your food, a lot of people are motivated to do so because they feel they’re going to change their body composition. But no, it was a pretty interesting exercise. I’ve done two more not of that duration but of at least between three and five days, I think since then. But that last one would have probably been about a year ago. So yeah, no, it’s a very, very interesting exercise if ever you’re motivated to give it a go. So you’re saying you do for another one very soon, huh? I don’t know really because my first attempts, which was the one that we last spoke about when I was on the podcast last, was the most elongated. And I think the effects were the most profound through that particular fast. And just to remind anyone that may have heard me talk about this in the past, in the first 48 to 72 hours, this is not something that sort of the western science picks

up on as much as the eastern practices. But there was quite a detoxification happening in my kidneys at that particular point. And I experienced some fairly, I can actually say quite extreme pain across my lower back. And it felt like I had the worst case of flu without any other symptoms other than body aches. And that was in theory removing a lot of very, very long held toxins. And the body was actually purging itself at that particular point. And every other extended fast I’ve done since then, I’ve never experienced exactly that same level of pain. I haven’t even got anywhere near it. So I think I almost did all I needed to do in that very first fast. And the others have been beneficial, but by no means is probably pronounced as the effects from what I experienced from the first extended fast that I did. That’s interesting. And what about other people who, perhaps any athletes you’ve recommended to do it? Have they had any similar experiences?

Yeah, it’s funny. I say, don’t do what I do because I’m such a lifelong self-experimenter. And now that I’m not competing myself, I can afford to be a little bit more adventurous in some of these pursuits because training and adaptation to training is obviously going to be heavily compromised if you starve yourself at the same time. But like anything with our podcast, I would talk about one of my experiences and then you’d hear a dozen accounts of people who had gone off and actually tried to do exactly the same thing. And to a certain extent, the health outcomes were never really reported. There were definitely some body composition improvements, which is a nice benefit to have from it. But I know that a lot of people have actually utilized it and continue to utilize it in some way, shape or form, even if it’s time-restricted eating, which is just to condense that eating window into a six or an 80-hour period where you finish your last meal at six o’clock and don’t eat until maybe

10 o’clock the next morning or something similar. I think there’s a spectrum that people have operated on in terms of fasting. And I still know of a lot of people that actually implement it to this day, to varying degrees of success for whatever they’re trying to achieve from it. And you’ve recently moved from the big smoke of Auckland out to Taupo or Taupo as some of my Kiwi friends would insist that I say. And that’s a pretty recent change. We were talking about this just before we jumped on the podcast. But how’s that been for you in terms of perhaps how you’re coaching, how you’re thinking about life and lifestyle, what’s that change been for you moving out where it’s a bit quieter? And I mean, one of the best places you could probably train for triathlon if you’re thinking of across the world, it’s just almost like the boulder of New Zealand. I agree with you. I think, look, it was not, it was no for no other reason than initially we were looking to downsize our house and to

attempt to buy a potentially a holiday home here while still retaining a residence in Auckland. And we ended up finding that some of the real estate here was just absolutely spectacular. And it offered us the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a place that we come to so frequently for races and training. And I don’t actually think you’re that far off the mark by talking about it being one of New Zealand’s training makers, if not possibly the best place to come and train because of what it affords us in terms of the lake. There’s plenty of quiet roads to ride on. There’s plenty of trails to take your gravel bike or your mountain bike on. There’s plenty of off-road running. Two pools, so two 25-meter pools, one indoor, one outdoor. The population of the town isn’t particularly huge. We’re talking about that just beforehand. I can go down there and pretty much at any time of the day be guaranteed a free lane

to swim in. So that’s always a bonus. But I think the biggest effect in only having been here say nine days at the moment is we talked about it offline before about lifestyle. And there’s quite an obvious clawing back of time that you get, that you don’t realise you haven’t got when you’re living in a big city and you’re surrounded by just a busier environment. So

we’ve always benefited from working from home. But you can feel that the community is just operates at a slightly slower pace. And I think that you can sense that and you feel it and you can actually plug into it and it slows you down a little bit. So yeah, no, I think it’s definitely a lifestyle change that we can sense. And it’s for the better because my job doesn’t change at all. I do everything that I’m not working with athletes face to face is then done online and over zoom. And so we’re able to just keep everything rolling. But it just feels like there’s a little bit less tension in the air and a little bit less stress and I can I can notice in my sleep that we’re just on the edge of town where it’s a little bit more rural. So at night there’s not a sound. It’s just pitch black and it’s just completely and utterly quiet. And I think that sort of you can recognise it because I don’t wake up as much.

I sleep a little bit later. So there’s a whole host of benefits about it. And yeah, look, we should have done it years ago. But it is what it is. We’ve got plenty of time left on the clock. So we’ll just enjoy it while we can now that we’re here. Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I think we moved in February down to the coast. And for me, it was the big change for me. If we relate it back to coaching and work with people is if I’m coming from a from a place where I’ve been able to swim, been able to surf headspace wise, I feel like I can coach really well there. And in terms of just that, you’re talking about a slower sort of pace. I mean, I moved from a place that was probably even slower than this than where I am at the moment. But I think that kind of gives you a bit of perspective and a little bit of the ability to just sort of sit back before you make a decision. And it’s like you can kind of just weigh up your options a bit more and do that for your athletes as

well. So I’m thinking of the people that I’m coaching online, we do the stroke analysis, like for me, I’ve been able to, it feels like in the last couple of months, get better results for them, have a sort of better, just a better long term plan with those guys, because for me, I’m coming from a better place. And as much as I’d like to think that the environment that you’re in doesn’t matter, like you can just you can perform, you can deliver every single time. There’s a lot of truth to the environment that you’re in and how you’re feeling that does determine how well you can do something like coaching. I totally agree. I think I said to one of my athletes, a pro the other week, I’m meant to be

this very calm and considered person who’s not highs and lows of emotion. You’ve got to be very objective in your decision making, dispassionate in some way. You’ve got to care, but you’ve got to try to remain on an even keel. But anyone who knows me would not describe me that as my personality. And I can be as affected by the highs and lows of an athlete’s training as the athlete themselves. But the ability to be more objective and not as reactionary to the information that’s being fed into you is key to being really effective and as a decision maker, as a coach, you know, I’ve got to act as a funnel to take all that information in and then disseminate the right stuff back out to the athlete. And I’d love to say that in nine days of living in Tohupua, I’m a completely existentially I’ve changed. But I do believe that I’m changing slowly and I can sense it in my interactions with athletes so far. They

may not be able to sense it as such, but I can sense a small change in it. So literally, yeah, if you can remove some of the other external stresses that do influence you as a human being, then I think you can be a bit more objective in your practice and art as of coaching. And thinking back to the last, say, 10 years, 15 years or so of coaching, how is it that you’ve changed your approach? And the other question I’ll add in there is you work with a lot of pros and a lot of age groupers. Is there a difference for you in how you coach those athletes from a pro whose main job it probably is to get results compared to an age group who’s working outside of that? No, really, as long and the short of it. And it’s literally the cause ambition and motivation to succeed is similar across both populations. We, in point of fact, given the extra pressures of trying to be an age group or amateur athlete and the more

balls that you have to juggle to fit in training and work and family and everything that goes with it, the obsessive traits, and I use that as affectionately, is probably as heightened, if not more heightened in those athletes than in the pros who have a bit more time to get things done. So they aren’t dissimilar, the two populations, the motivators are there to succeed and whether it’s to win a professional race or to do, you know, achieve your next goal as an amateur, it’s not different. What has changed for me is in working more on the art of coaching than the science of coaching. I think that the science of coaching is always evolving and I always keep incredibly abreast of what’s happening in the world of sports science and it’s a big part of my continuing to try to perfect the training program for the individual. But I actually do believe and it’s become something that I work more and more on because I

don’t work with a significant group of athletes in terms of numbers. I definitely don’t believe that you can coach effectively on the outside of the coaching practice if you’ve got too many athletes to deal with. But the psychology of performance and the psychology of getting the job done is as volatile as training, if not more, and helping an athlete navigate emotionally, decision making, how they interpret workouts, how they execute workouts, how they execute races, the building blocks that need to be put in place for long-term success as well require an element of patience which not all athletes have. So I’m working a lot more with relationships, getting to know the athlete, getting to the athlete and the coach being very, very comfortable to cross-pollinate ideas and information. The greatest successes we’ve had in coaching in recent times has been more on the psychological and emotional component of performance as it has been the physical component of it. So I wouldn’t say

that I’m a psychologist or a counsellor or anything like that but there’s an element of that in me which I think allows me to get the best out of the people that I’m actually working with and that’s more about the art of coaching. So yeah, the art of coaching has become a really, really big focus for me and especially the last five years as I’ve worked more and more in this one-on-one sitting. Yeah, I tend to go that way as well. It’s like with feet that say the technical side of swimming, that’s obviously important but the thing that I think is more important is how do you teach that, how do you frame it and how do you get the person to take those things on and have belief that what you’re teaching or coaching them is going to work and so you get that full buy-in. So I went to a course in New Zealand about 12 years ago, run by an American guy living in Australia called Rich Shalon and he’s an educational

psychologist and he basically teaches teachers how to teach and my dad sent me to this course when I was maybe 20, 21 years old and said I did this course five years ago, one of the best things I ever did for coaching and so he sent me over and I did it and it was amazing because even six or seven years later I retained or remembered all these most of the things that he taught during this two-day course and that would be if not the only like one of the very few actual like courses I’ve gone to where you actually remember it and you can actually use those things and so last week he had his last course here in Australia so I went to that two-day course again, the same course but he sort of updated it in like those 12 years and it’s just like I just thought wow if I think of all the swimming coaching conferences I’ve gone to yeah if they had a people would be 10 times better going to this two-day course that I went

to last week learning how to coach how to teach and get people to basically learn compared to getting that technical information because it’s just it is just chalk and cheese between the difference that it makes because like yeah you know it’s it really comes down to uh can the people actually do the things that you’re trying to teach them can they remember it and will they then go out and actually do it because if they don’t what’s the point so it was just um yeah such a good such a good course for that and the guy’s name is Rich Allen he’s got a lot of books out there um I think one of them’s called uh it’s like he’s got a lot but like a power to train but um I’m gonna do a podcast on it and some of the things that I learned but um boy it was um it was so good yeah I almost uh I wish I’ve had access to something similar because again it’s uh a little bit of trial and error over the years um and maybe it was just a something I was

born with but I do I must have had some sort of ability or uh an affinity to be able to to understand people and maybe get my message across but it’s definitely not so it’s something that could be improved on um you know I if I was to be honest and say do I do I have five strings to my bow when I meet an athlete and go oh this is how they’re gonna learn or this is how they’re gonna learn um you know you you just do an attempt to find a way of getting the message across um you probably become unconsciously better at those skills over time but I couldn’t agree more uh you know I could I could deliver the same conversation around a particular workout to two different athletes and get two different results from that workout because one of them just didn’t understand it in the same way as the other uh and and then that’s so totally true and I’ll be scratching my head say but I thought it was so obvious um but the way I might deliver a

message or learn and in my in my own right may not be the way that that athlete does see you just have to be you’ve got to make sure that you take a step back and and be honest with yourself to go is there a betel is there something I’m missing here you know why is it and I had this situation just recently actually with and it was very it was a very challenging situation for me because you know as a coach of professionals and an age group is like who said significant amount of success fortunately enough you become when you’re dealing with some simple concepts um you think that it’s uh there’s no point in the there being too much discussion around these things you know just just follow my instruction and do it um you don’t need to potentially understand this is not a complex issue that we’re dealing with here just just believe in the program and off you go um and this is with a runner that has has had a horrendous

injury history that we’re really really struggling with to work out why these injuries are turning up because we’ve eliminated it being a mismatch between training load um and recovery from training load and that these these injuries are still coming and I was challenged by the athlete to say can I take over the the run component of the program and run when I’m emotionally ready and believe that now is the time to run um because sometimes when the when the session’s in the training program I and I’m feeling a bit flat or I can feel a bit of a niggle coming on but it’s in the training program my obsessive traits go I have to do it but I I’m reluctant to do it I don’t totally believe it’s the right time to do it and so we worked out that with that maybe this resistance she was feeling to executing the workout when I prescribed it could be removed and that extra stress she was feeling could be reduced if she fitted it in at the right time

when she thought it was was the appropriate time very difficult to do as a coach because when you’re trying to balance swim bike and run in a in a long-term program you’re getting the timing of those sessions right is is pretty important but also I had actually said I I don’t know why these injuries are still coming if it’s a belief that’s required and when the session should be conducted and the stronger belief is going to come when you decide to do it then let’s give that a go for a while and that’s what the pathway that we’re on at the moment which is handing over some of the reins to the athlete to make the decisions which is quite a new challenge for me so you know it’s it’s definitely something that you’ve got to be aware of but not have a big ego about as well yeah yeah that’s exactly right and it that’s that stuff is exciting because let’s say it works let’s say that removes the injury it’s like all right how could that work for the other athletes that I’m coaching

totally totally it’s a new scenario that we’re going to explore you know ultimately the brain decides a lot about how we’ll execute move adapt you know intensity duration how long we can sustain things you know it starts and the decisions in and around our emotions and our brain and and what that drives in terms of the performance at the muscular level but then also the the belief the emotional belief that this is the right time to do this workout that does matter um you tell an athlete to the to harden up and go out there and do a workout when most athletes are pretty tough anyway and they really don’t want to do it and at their core the hating doing this workout at that particular time that could be the worst thing for them to do you know as opposed to say take a day off and let’s do it tomorrow when you feel you’re better prepared for it or they could say I’m going to take a day off and do it tomorrow when I’m going to be up for it well that workout that they do when they’re up

for it is going to be a far more productive workout than the one that they do when they’re forced into doing it absolutely like that mental component is you know a lot of times it is the the more important one and um and especially that that belief it’s like yeah if you if you think oh I’m not feeling great I’ve got a little bit of a niggle and but my coach is making me do this yeah it’s like well all right I’m going to do it but I’m probably going to get injured and then you’ll do it’s it’s going to lead to that so um yeah it’d be interesting to see how that’s um how that eventuates and hopefully it works out um you know if it’s not completely fixing the injury at least not running into it as often um absolutely yeah absolutely and it empowers the athlete as well I mean there is an education process that you have to get to with each athlete to know that they’re not going to go crazy and they’re not going to do

stupid things if they take over a little component of the program and we’ve we’ve done that due diligence in this coaching relationship that I’m talking about um she’s definitely not going to do anything ridiculous and go off for a marathon run or a half marathon or anything like that um but yeah no it’s I think it’s a it’s a it’s an interesting uh challenge as a coach and one that I’m excited to see what the outcome of because um the owners of responsibility shifts a little bit um but the buy-in from the athlete increases uh with you know taking over that component of it so um fingers crossed that we might be onto something here yeah absolutely we uh I was you know in a session a few weeks back and uh I’ve been writing the programs for this squad that I’ve been coaching and uh one of the terms that we use is best average so trying to sustain your best possible time across the entire set so you’re not looking to be here

at the start and die at the end it’s like we want to be consistent and I remember at the end of the session um one of the the ladies in the group she was talking to one of the other swimmers and she just couldn’t understand what best average was and it wasn’t until um the very end of the session after we’d gone through it that I like I chatted with her and she um she thought it was like I think it like suited about 60% like an average speed but your best average speed so it was not surprising like if you’ve never been explained the concept of it um how would you know and so there’s all these little things that we just take for granted as everyone knows this but you’ve got to go back you’ve got to really just uh make sure that it’s that it’s clear so yeah and there’s a heap of those things I’ve got the same workout I’ve got four by eight minutes best average effort uh on the bike uh and the misinterpretation of that

by some athletes to others is you know my more seasoned athletes and a lot of the pros they just pick up on that straight away right okay um he wants four eight minute the efforts at very very high power with not a lot of fade um so that’s what we’re after here but equally so there’s an assumption that they’ve done enough of this training to realize what best average effort actually means um because anyone slightly new to it could do exactly what you just described as oh okay but so I just have to make sure that the averages are the same but it doesn’t necessarily constitute high intensity it’s just like make sure I’ve got the best average yeah yeah that’s right yeah all they see the term average and I think oh so I just like average pace like I just kind of go what you consider average like you can never you can never yeah exactly right so um no I think that’s that’s that’s really important and um in the next couple

weeks I’m going to be releasing like a um like the the couple workouts that I’m writing for this this squad I’m going to publish those and um have so people worldwide can they can sort of join in on these and and we’ll have like a discussion thread there and people can ask questions and make sure that they’re doing it right because I’ve just like it’s I’m amazed that I’m not amazed but like there’s a lot of um people who who starts me they’re one or two years into it and they they don’t know what constitutes a good training program um and again why would they if they never come from that that world and so I think this sort of stuff can make such a difference because I’m so focused on the technical side of things that um we do a little bit with workouts but um we haven’t focused a whole lot on it but if you combine those two the right workouts the right technique it’s like that’s a that’s a powerful combination that um if you get those

two right it’s um yeah it’s a large part of swimming better yeah absolutely no I agree and I think it’s a great way to get feedback so that that you can fine tune how those workouts are actually presented to any athlete based on the interpretation of it so put it out there let let a few people try it find out who gets it as you hope they would and who doesn’t and then you can change your whatever messaging you need to to make sure that everyone gets it yeah definitely and one of the one of the guys I’m coaching um he’s over in the States he um he’s got a triathlon in in July he’s pretty new to the sport and um technique wise we’re working really well um but I hadn’t asked him about his like his training programs and um when he told me what he was doing in a session he’s got 45 minutes with how long they can swim for their pool walking um and he basically run through like the drills that I give him he’d do that twice and then a couple

laps of freestyle at the end and I was like all right we’ve got to we’ve got to work on this we’ve got to get you ready for this triathlon it’s not a huge swim it’s like 750 750 meters but um all right so I’m missing this component of um yeah of your training and uh so let’s let’s get this sorted and so um that’s kind of what inspired me to go all right let’s let’s uh make sure that we cover the our other base as well instead of just just technique don’t oh his catch and pull is is magical but there’s fitness yeah that’s right it’s like you don’t want to forget that part of it yeah yeah she’s pretty important yeah um and uh and one of the things that I know you’ve talked a little bit about recently on on a podcast was uh the swimsuit or like a um we’d have like a swim sponge similar sort of concept what’s the benefit of using a swimsuit

well it’s probably trickled down a little bit from my thinking in and around my pro athletes uh where the start of the swim is vitally important I think uh when we look at you know even half Ironman and Ironman uh swims 1500 uh sorry uh 1.9 ks 3.8 ks uh long long swims uh where you know fitness and muscular endurance is really really important um but in the pro race uh your takeout speed is is is could define um you know where you end up at the end of the swim now swim doesn’t win the race but in in this day and age being in the right bike group um is going to be hugely influential and and if you can get into that bike group um you might not get dropped from it so uh the swim is so important but however if you break the swim down from a pure fitness perspective um after about the first 400 meters to maybe 600 meters most athletes can swim the rest of the race at about the same pace um but the first four to 600 or the first two to 400

is is almost crucial to the outcome of whether they can get into that group that they then end up swimming the same pace at uh and takeout speed for the especially the non elite swimmer who doesn’t come out from a swimming background as such um tends to be the the difference maker and a lot of my pros um that I work with uh none of them actually come from uh elite swimming backgrounds so all of them are self-taught swimmers with with no uh no not even surf lifesaving so I’m trying to solve a problem uh where the swim parachute is concerned in trying to hold on to normal technique uh but create um load over and above what the athlete’s going to experience even with the use of hand paddles and pullboys so that that first you know 50 meters to 100 meters um that we can improve stroke length through good force production good catch and pull with resistance from the swim paddle but stroke frequency um we can keep uh it’ll artificially

promote uh a higher stroke rate to overcome the resistance of the parachute so I’ve been sort of playing around with it a bit myself um I in in all honesty uh I’ve only used it over the years in one or two swimmers um but I’m going to bring it into my winter program for a lot of my pros uh who do have the a strong enough technique I’m not going to use it on any of our pros and there are still a lot that many pros who don’t have very strong swim techniques but they’re very fit um but their technique still leaves a lot to be desired and I wouldn’t impart a swim parachute and on a technique that I didn’t think was uh robust enough to not be affected by the extra drag but I am going to use the the drag parachute on a couple of the the pros and elite age groupers because the thing that we want to improve is is stroke frequency over the first two to 400 meters

that’s I think I’ve used the tempo trainer and we swim a lot with form goggles that gives you that metric display on the inside of your eye but without the extra resistance of a swim pad or just asking someone to upregulate their cadence or their stroke rate by a few strokes per minute is not as easy to do as being forced into doing that and that’s what I see the swim parachute providing us is that extra resistance where the only way to overcome it is by increasing that stroke rate uh and if we can hold on to good mechanics still um stroke length is going to improve by default because of that extra force production that’s required to to move that water backwards so it’s something that we’ll be using over over the winter period for sure um again it’s not a blanket uh offering across every single athlete I don’t want this the paddle I’m sorry for people with poor body positions or a lot of uh mechanical deficiencies

where they may be crossing the centerline or so forth you throw a parachute onto those swimmers and then all of a sudden you’ve got somebody who’s going to drown

but for the athletes that have uh got a well uh honed stroke um we’re going to apply it to them we’re going to just do some work to see whether we can improve that first 200 uh and that will be the focus of the use of the parachute over winter yeah fantastic I um I mean I think think of a lot of the top sprinters like if you’re thinking of pool swimmers um a lot of them will do a lot of this resistance work and I don’t know if you’re standing at the pool they’ve got like a just big sort of stand um they’ve got buckets that you can fill with water or you can have the weights in there there’s something against it so it’s a lot of that resistance work to build that strength required to to have it the speed so yeah um yeah I think that stuff is really good well I’ve you know as I said I’ve tried to um to manipulate stroke rate over the years in many different ways um it’s not an easy thing to change long term I think you need something like a tempo

trainer uh to emit a beep so that you can follow that stroke rate it’s you know we’re all built in or in built with our own um neuromuscular and biomechanical patternings as we become swimmers and and up regulating or even down regulating your stroke rate is not an easy thing to do but you know one of the motivators for me was I watched Lucy Charles swim the British 1500 meters trial and nearly win it as a as a triathlete and we reviewed her or I reviewed her stroke on the podcast and you know she’s swimming 1500 meters at a at a stroke rate of 90 strokes per minute um which for many triathletes out there uh they’re not even close to holding 90 strokes per minute um and that’s an even in a pool swim you know um she was higher than the rest of the other swimmers because she’s done a lot of open water swimming and therefore has up-regulated her stroke rate the other girls were in the low 80s um who finished second and third but you can’t go past

the fact that the Brownleys uh swim and a lot of the ITU athletes and some of the best open water triathletes in the world all have that high cadence rate as well so we’re just we’re just trying to move the the the dial a little bit with some of our athletes because a lot of our athletes are down in the 70s um and in an open water swim that can prove to be a little bit uh that can you know reveal some of the flaws that a 70 stroke rate will will will encounter when you get into choppy water um or surrounded by a lot of other swimmers um so we’re just going to see what kind of effect one something by the incorporation of a swim parachute has on some of our stroke rates and if uh if someone’s listening to this in there let’s say they’ve been swimming for two or three years and they’re doing triathlon don’t try and go for even like a 70 or an 80 might be too high for you right now um because uh but um but certainly stroke rate is one

very important aspect to to look at and I was I was reviewing someone stroke yesterday and um his time to come down I think he said his next goal was to get um uh was to break 120 he he’d just done a 124 just in terms of 100 um but but then his goal was to do a k at one minute 30 pace so he’s like improved really nicely and he’s sending his stroke and I didn’t give him any technical feedback because he’s he’s coming along well but it was all about stroke rate his his cadence was around 58 59 um and then when I showed him like he was entering very gently recovery was very slow very controlled and beautiful but it’s like all right now we can up the now we can up the stroke rate and so uh I suggested to get a tempo trainer and um you know when you’re doing some more race pace sets where you’re going at like one to one and a half k sort of effort um you might set it to maybe 64 to start with and just over

time we’ll just gradually increase it and get you more comfortable with it because if if you go straight to 70 you’re probably going to gas out totally yeah totally yeah and I also think it’s even two to three strokes per minute as a set uh to just to so it’s subtle enough so they know that they’re actually increasing it but it’s not so much that that all of a sudden they lose feel for their stroke as well so I agree with you you know going from say 58 to say 64 is probably going to be enough to feel like he’s moving or moving things a lot more quickly um but and I also like to see you know what is the relationship when we have those lower stroke rates uh between the stroke and how you know how heavy is their kick because with those lower stroke rates we do find that um a lot of people are six big kickers you know and quite aggressive six big kickers which is actually quite a uneconomical way to try to get through two k’s or or 3.8 k’s in

the water so you just got to try to find that that nice trade-off of where we can maybe just dampen down the velocity of the kick keep it there for balance and and helping with rotation but then to transfer some of the propulsive element of the stroke to taking a few more strokes per minute yeah yeah that’s that’s a good point because um I mean if you often when people are getting the stroke rate up they will kick harder and they’ll turn it into a six-beat kick and yeah one of the things that has worked really well with with a lot of the guys I’ve coached is learning a forebeat kick and that forebeat kick for a lot of people it ends up being one kick on one side three on the other so it’s like duh duh duh duh and that’s like that’s very economical you can get great rhythm especially if you breathe through the one side yeah and um and you can do that that pretty comfortably and so it’s good to have that in your in your tool kit

to be able to pull out when you need it and um yeah and if you can do a two-beat a four-beat and a six-beat kick and you can adjust that like it’s it’s reasonably advanced it’s not an easy thing to do especially if you’re new to the sport but um that’s a really good way of developing those those gears and being able to just like sit at a a good pace but make sure that you’re not burning too many candles along the way yeah yeah definitely yep no I um I totally agree and um so that’s uh that’s sort of most of the things I wanted to to cover and um I know I said we’ll be about 30 or 40 minutes but uh I think we have a uh we’re pretty good at talking you and I so uh but that’s that’s that’s what a podcast is all about so um any uh sort of final final thoughts any words of wisdom for uh for someone listening to this and wanting to become a better swimmer yeah I would get on to your website and I would actually do some online

coaching with Brenton Ford and I’m not saying that for any other reason other than one of the greatest difficulties I’ve ever experienced as a as a coach um you know in this coaching business uh we’ve fine tuned our ability to work with athletes in remote coaching relationships um you know zoom as I’ve mentioned before uh you know does help build rapport with with athletes as such biking and running um running is a technical base sport to a certain degree but I’m not a big uh coach who is uh very big on trying to change someone’s a technique unless it’s a for the high injury risk um I do believe that the running mechanics is something that that is best left untouched swimming however um it’s not always easy to get really really good considered swim advice for people who understand the demands of triathlon I think it’s uh you get a lot of pool swimming advice from your local coaches and so forth but the difference

between the open water swim stroke and a wetsuited open water swim stroke over distances of 1.8 or sorry 1.9 to 3.8 k’s uh has different requirements than what you might find from what you’ve been told to how to swim in the pool um and there’s not a lot of coaches out there that actually understand that and you can go and spend a lot of money from a coach at a local pool who’s never done a triathlon never won a wetsuit only works in the for the swimmer club and they’re going to miss some really big rocks on what you could do to change your stroke so I like what you did with your five day catch challenge I know a lot of our athletes signed up for that and got involved in some really good feedback about uh you know the catch and pull the mechanics of the catch and pull if I like the way that the evolution of of technical coaching has actually moved into the online platforms as well um because you can send through some videos

and do a very very thorough analysis of someone’s technique and what you guys are doing there and you know there are other organizations around the world that are doing it to that degree um but I really like what you know your understanding you’ve done a triathlon you’ve done an Ironman swim you know what the open water’s like uh I think that if you’re going to get some some technical advice do it in swimming but explore the online world as much as what you can get from your local pool so I I’m not just because I’m on the podcast Brendan I’m not saying that I’ll pay for it later don’t worry because I do agree that that’s the biggest hurdle to getting into and completing your triathlon is understanding how to swim and bringing down the stress and anxiety of um of both worrying about whether you can swim or not and also trying to take that into the open water so yeah we had a lot of athletes love the five day catch challenge I see it in my

training piece all the time like I’ve done my recovery swim but I did three drills from the five day catch challenge it’s little things like that that I think um help because it’s not easy to find good uh swimming resource there’s plenty but but not all of it’s good um so no I think that that’s something that people should definitely get on board with yeah I appreciate that a lot and I um and for people who are um looking for coaching so there’s you and obviously a lot of other coaches as well um so best place to just search feeder coaching or feeder radio what’s there yep so all uh feeder radio the podcast is on all the major streaming platforms so you’ll be able to find it but uh it’s fitter.co.nz uh for any coaching inquiries and so forth we have other coaches that work for us as well um you know uh coach Tim Brazier uh Crystal Hopley does a lot of our nutrition coaching um you know we have an in-house uh physiologist

in-house strength and conditioning coach um so all of those uh those other coaches work directly with our athletes as well um but you know look we’ve uh been around doing this for a while now so we thoroughly enjoy what we do and it’s always good catching up with you guys because you do such a great job over your neck of the woods as well. Yeah thanks so much for having I appreciate having you on and um yeah looking forward to getting you back on sometime in the future maybe um when you’re deep into the next fastest is when we’ll um we’ll do it and we’ll see see how you’re faring all right all right i’ll talk to you again soon. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlessswimming.com

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In today’s episode, I want to go over an article that I was sent recently by Bevan Mckinnon who hosts the podcast Fitter Radio. I thought it is going to be worthwhile going over this article that he sent because when I first read the title and when I read the first couple of paragraphs, it kind of got my hackles up a little bit, thinking that this is not right but as I continue to read through it, I found myself agreeing to most of this.

1:50 This Isn’t Right
2:49 Drills Change Certain Aspect Of The Stroke
3:14 Knowing The Purpose Of The Drill
4:17 Making It As Simple As Possible
5:32 YMCA Drill Progression
10:36 Make Sure You’re Doing The Drills Correctly

Swim Drills – Do They Work?
YMCA Drill | Is This The BEST Drill To Improve Your Catch And Pull?
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Come, you know, come sort of six years ago when we started running clinics, I had to get very good at understanding the purpose behind the drills because we started with about 24 different drills and we gave people 24 different drills when we started doing our clinics and it was confusing. It was too much and people just sort of left going. So that’s a lot of information and they didn’t really retain much of it. And then I, after that, I thought, okay, I’ve got to make it as simple as possible. I think that is the best way to do anything. Take away anything that doesn’t, that’s not going to contribute to the end goal and just strip it away to the bare essentials. And now we only have really five, five or six drills that we do at clinics and they just build on one another. 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 back to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. In today’s episode, I want to go over an article that I was sent recently from Bevan McKinnon who hosts the podcast, Fida Radio. And he sent this article through as a bit of a discussion starter for an episode that I was a guest on, on his show at Fida Radio. So you can go and check that out. And I thought it’d be worthwhile going over this article that he sent because when I first read the title and I read the first couple of paragraphs, I kind of got my hackles up a little bit, like, this, nah, this isn’t, this isn’t right. But I continued to read through it and I thought, okay, I actually agree with most of this. So the article that I’m, that he sent through was called Swim Drills, Do They Work? I look at the controversy over the benefits of drills. And this was published in Trathon Magazine, Canada only a couple of weeks ago from Clint Leanne, I think it’s called.

Now there are a few, I’ll read you the first paragraph because I think it’s, as I was going through it, I was like, nah, this isn’t right. But then I kept reading and tended to agree. So it starts off, there are a few conversations in the swimming world that generate as much controversy and heat as the debate over swimming drills. Most coaches and athletes argue fervently for one side or the other. It’s a black and white issue for them. The evidence they use to fortify their stand is almost exclusively anecdotal because to my knowledge, there hasn’t been much in the way of peer reviewed study on the issue. Joe Rodriguez of Tower 26 has been known to give single arm sessions that has many shattering at the shoulder while Joe Filio went viral with his 20 rules for swimming fast in 2012. Rule number two, read, read, traditional drills don’t work. There’s actually no daylight between Filial’s position and my own on this matter.

But it’s important to note that Filial goes on to say the type of drills and the way that most triathletes do them don’t actually have any material effect on swimming technique. It’s the type and the way they’re done that matters. So it wasn’t until I got to that end part where I was like, okay, I actually agree with that because with the clinics that we run, the people that I coached online for our stroke analysis, I know that drills help change certain aspects of the stroke. And I’ve seen it, and yes, it’s anecdotal, but I’ve seen it with so many swimmers over the last, well, 13, 14 years that I’ve coached, particularly in the last six or so that we’ve run these clinics. So I just want to talk about this because I would agree that the majority of people when they’re doing drills, they’re either done incorrectly, they don’t know the purpose of the drill and they’re just not done in the way that’s actually going to change their stroke

because they’re not done with the right intent, the right purpose and the right focus behind them. And I say that from personal experience as well, like when I was sort of growing up, for a lot of the drills that we did, I didn’t know the real purpose behind them. And even when I started coaching 13, 14 years ago, I would just give drills because that’s what I was given. And I wouldn’t really explain the purpose behind them and I didn’t really understand it, to be honest. So come sort of six years ago when we started running clinics, I had to get very good at understanding the purpose behind the drills because we started with about 24 different drills and we gave people 24 different drills when we started doing our clinics and it was confusing, it was too much and people just sort of left going, that’s a lot of information and they didn’t really retain much of it. And then after that, I thought, okay, I’ve got to make it as simple as possible.

I think that is the best way to do anything. Take away anything that doesn’t, that’s not going to contribute to the end goal and just strip it away to the bare essentials. And now we only have really five or six drills that we do at clinics and they just build on one another. So it’s a very simple step-by-step way at changing the stroke. And it just kind of builds up in a way where if you’re going through it, you can see the relationship between the first drill and the second drill and then the reason why behind doing them. And often when we’re doing clinics, I’ll be correcting people’s doing the drills. So if you’re not doing a drill correctly, you’re not really going to change that motor pattern or that movement with whatever that drill’s focused on, particularly some of the catch drills. So two years ago, we were two or three years ago now, I was looking at the drills that we were doing and it’s like, oh man,

we’re taking a lot of time just to get people to do this drill correctly and to teach them this part of the drill. What would be the simplest way to get them to learn the movement of the catch and the pull? And so I came up with this YMCA drill progression. It’s basically three drills that takes you through the four key positions that we want to get in freestyle. So YMCA drill. And you can see this on our YouTube channel which I’ll link to in the show notes. And with these drills, we often find that what people are doing when we film them and we analyze their stroke, those flaws in their catch and pull would show up in the drill. For example, if someone was pulling really wide where the hand is the widest part of their arms, they’re out super wide, often that would show in the drill. So as they’re going through these four positions in YMCA drill, they’re going through it too wide. And so if we can start to change that in the drill

and we correct them and say, all right, you’re out here, you’re a bit too wide. If you want to go faster, you’re going to have to get your hand to come in a bit closer to the center here and they change it. That’s the first step at changing their technique. But if no one corrected them on that or if they didn’t know that they were doing that, then they’d just continue doing that drill incorrectly until infinity. So that is why I tend to agree with this. And often when I’m working with people online with our stroke analysis coaching, I’ll get in the same videos of them doing some of these drills. And I’ve been back two, three, four times getting people to refine how they do the drill. And it takes them two, three or four times to actually get it right. But when they do get it right, we start to see their stroke changing. And when we go into the nitty gritty of these drills and why we need to make sure that they’re done right,

they have a better understanding of the purpose behind them. So within their warm-up, they’ll be doing 200, 300 meters of some drill and some swim with very intentional focus and purpose behind each one

and they know exactly why they’re doing it. And that not only is very motivating because you know that if you can do this right, then a couple of weeks, a couple of months down the track, it’s gonna come into your full swim stroke. But it’s also motivating because you know that, okay, look, I know I’m doing this the right way. And that way I know that I’m gonna get the results there. So yeah, that’s why I thought it’d be worthwhile talking about this article because I just, yeah, I was a little bit like what this like drills don’t work, I know that they do work, but yeah, they’ve got to be done right. So I’ll just wanna keep reading this. So the short answer to do they work question is no, but sometimes yes. I rarely if ever give traditional drills in any of my swim sessions. Like for the old, I’ve just not seen your return on the training investment, but don’t stop reading here. It’s important to understand what a drill is

and what separates it from just swimming. We might think about a drill as being a method of inspiring stroke correction by isolating the variable of the stroke. Take something as simple as fist swimming by removing your paddle. You might be motivated to get your elbow up and find more surface area with your forearm. While that could work in theory, work it rarely does. And I’d agree with that as well. Some of those traditional drills, while the intention behind them is good, I don’t find, if you’re just, let’s say you’ve got a very poor catch, you drop your elbow and you start doing some fist swing. You’ll probably just continue with a dropped elbow, but with a fist now. I find stuff like that doesn’t often work. And that’s why in our five day catch challenge that where we go through one aspect of the stroke at a time, that people have got such good results, I think, because it’s kept really simple. You’ll get one or two drills a day

on that aspect of the stroke. And those drills I made sure were very specific to the thing that we focus on. And it’s not something just like fist swimming, which might just continue you, make you continue swimming the way that you were without actually changing any aspect of it. So it continues the challenges that too many coaches will prescribe four or five fifties of it. The athlete thrashes through the set and then move on. Creating a new neural pattern requires repetition, a lot of it, and the movement needs to be correct. Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. And even if you master swimming with fists, then you have to be able to open up that fist and apply what you’ve learned to the full stroke. Here again, we see the gap between time invested and skills gained. Anytime we learn to do something new in the water, I think we, in a small way, become better swimmers. But we’ve got three sports to work on.

We need to do our core and strength work. And somewhere in there, some of you need to make a living and check in on the family once in a while. But I wrote that sometimes drills work. When? Well, if you wanna work on your dropped elbow or your weak initial catch, and you wanna do it by putting on a snorkel and doing some single arm work, then it’s possible you might succeed, but you’ll need to do it many hundreds of meters of this every time you swim. And you want to break it up so that you are constantly following the single arm with straight arm. So the set might look like this and it goes through the set there. So I thought that was a very interesting and it was a good article. So if you are currently doing some drills, make sure you know the purpose of them and how to do them correctly, 100% correct. And I think I’ve mentioned this before in the podcast, but we’ve got a course, we’ve got a program called the Virtual Freestyle Clinic.

And this was recorded about two and a half, three years ago, I think it was. And this is where I got someone to come in and film me going through a clinic. And we only go through those couple of drills. It’s like five or six drills. And some of the feedback I’ve got from people when they first watch it, particularly the first one to, yeah, the one and two drills, the first two, they go, this is too simple. But the thing is that I’d guarantee that the people who’ve watched through those first two drills, they’re not actually doing those drills correctly because there’s a lot of nuance to how they should be done. So for example, like the first drill that we do there is front kick. And there’s sort of three focuses that we want to get right in that front kick drill. The first thing is train tracks. So make sure that your hand enters and reaches forwards in line with your shoulder. So get your alignment right, swim on the train tracks.

The other thing we focus on is the right position to start your catch, which is fingertips at about underarm depth. And we want the fingers blow wrist, wrist blow elbow. So we want to make sure we get that right. And the other thing is we want to make sure we’ve got our head position right when we’re doing that front kick drill as well. And I would say, the probably less than one out of 10 people when they initially go through that front kick drill at a clinic, less than one in 10 will be doing all those things together. So often we’ve got to just go through it step by step, get those things right. And then by the end of that drill, everything’s in place and they’re doing it really nicely. And you see them moving through the water so much more efficiently and so much better. And so while it’s very simple and if you don’t go into the detail with it, you go, all right, that’s easy front kick, yep, I’m just gonna do it.

But those things probably aren’t in place. So I’ve said to those people who have written back in the beginning, I said, just go through those drills, make sure you get that stuff right because after going through drills one and drills two, we find people are already swimming better because the first couple drills that we do are working on minimizing and reducing drag, which is the first way that you swim faster. And so when all those things are in place that I just mentioned, people tend to not only sit better with their body position but they tend to be better aligned, their head position’s better, they move better because they’ve got this better posture. And so if you were just to leave it those two drills and you got those couple things right in the stroke, we would probably find that that alone will help you swim faster because you’re reducing drag. So don’t let simple things, don’t brush over them as this stuff is too simple.

It’s often those simple things that can make the biggest difference going forwards. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode. If you don’t want to get a copy of the virtual freestyle clinic, you can get it inside our effortless swimming video membership, which you’ll find on our website under membership. So that’s included for all members. So you get a copy of that. And obviously there’s a lot of other stuff in there, including our workouts, our five core principles training videos and also the five day catch challenge as well. It’s all in there in the video membership. So you can check that out on our website at effortlesswimming.com and it’s under the membership headline there. So thanks very much for listening. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Enjoy the rest of your week. Thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

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Joining us in this episode is Kris Martenstyn from Singapore, who had some great results from the 5 Day Catch Challenge that we recently run. He will talk about the improvements he has seen and what he may have changed about his stroke to get these results.
1:02 Swimming Background
2:56 Bringing In The 5 Day Catch Challenge Into My Workouts
4:19 The Entry
9:09 It Was Good To Come Back To Basics
12:00  Good Technique And Relaxation In The Water
15:33 Stick To The Routine
16:39 Swimming Makes You a Better Runner
17:58 Going Forwards
19:39 Achievement Unlocked

5 Day Catch Challenge

Effortless Swimming iTunes

Freestyle Clinics

Become An ES Member To Improve Your Swimming

Video analysis

In day one of the catch-challenge where you spoke about entry and getting that sort of a snap in the water, the moment I felt that it was sort of groundbreaking, you know, everything sort of, you know, the rhythm improved, it was feeling good, I could feel myself going faster without putting in like a hard effort. 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 Chris Marsenstein, based in Singapore. I got in touch with Chris recently because he said he’d had some good results from a five-day challenge that we had recently run. And I just wanted to get you on the podcast just to talk about what sort of improvements you’ve seen and what you feel like you may have changed about your stroke to get those results. So Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. So what’s your background swimming-wise and sports-wise, and what is it that you’re training for at the moment? Okay, in terms of swimming, I picked up swimming quite recently, actually. It was just like a couple of years back I learned to swim. The whole point behind swimming was to compete in triathlon. So obviously, I swim and run and do the whole

bit of training around triathlon that comes with the sport. In terms of swimming, I’ve been focusing a lot on it because my running is very limited because of injuries, and I’ve been using swimming to keep the cardiovascular base going while I recover from those injuries. In terms of where I am in my swimming, I swim with the master squad here in Singapore a few times a week, and we swim based on threshold times, the CSS time. So I always do a lot of my work around that CSS4, CSS5 sort of time because I know if I was competing in an event, I would probably swim at that pace. And you mean by CSS plus four to five seconds? Yeah, correct. So in terms of events, as soon as things are open, I’d like to compete in a 70.3 and maybe an ocean man. Of course, that’s in the future. And see where I was in terms of time. Around the beginning of April, we did a CSS test with our squad. I was around 154. So that meant I was swimming my CSS4, CSS5 in the region of 158, 159. So then I started bringing

in the five-day catch challenge into my workouts. So I used it as a warm-up. I started every workout that I did on my own with one of the day’s schedules. And I managed to bring my CSS4 down to my CSS. So it was very interesting the way it just came down. Because I mean, I can swim four seconds fast on CSS at any time. I mean, that pace is there. But what I’m really interested in is having that sort of comfortable pace that I can hold for like 2K, 1K, the longer sets.

It was remarkable the way it came down. Like a good sea, like from the first day onwards, all right, there’s something happening here that feels very good in the water. I’m swimming slightly quicker. And it’s not hurting me as much. The effort wasn’t increasing. That’s so good to hear. And talking before the call, you said you can’t pinpoint exactly maybe how your stroke has improved, but the times have improved. Did your stroke or does your swimming feel any different compared to before? Yeah, definitely. I mean, in day one of the catch challenge where you spoke about entry and getting that sort of a snap in the water, the moment I felt that it was sort of groundbreaking, you know, everything sort of, you know, the rhythm improved. It was feeling good. I could feel myself going faster without putting in like a hard effort. Like I wasn’t as out of breath as I would normally be. So I’d say that. And then I think on day five, you spoke about

rhythm, which was also a revelation because I never realized like I was pulling right from the point of the catch. I was going in and slapping down, down, down, down, and then, you know, bringing, pushing the water behind. So then I figured, okay, like let’s wait a bit, wait a bit, wait a bit. All right, now pull. And that really changed a lot in the stroke. It became fun. You know, I really enjoyed a bit of it. Oh, that’s, yeah. It’s good to hear. And like all these little things that we cover in those five days, these are things that I’ve picked up along the last 12, 13 years that I’ve been coaching. And I’ve, it took me sort of that long to learn all of them. And I’m glad that, you know, when you kind of get them condensed and keep it really simple, we really focus on one or two things each day. I’m glad to hear that it’s, that it has, it’s had that effect for you. And with that, that entry, I found, I sort of picked that up from

a coach Sheila Tiamina, who’s got a great books from Space Secrets to highly recommend it. She, so one of the things that I got from her was with the entry, you know, you think that you should spear the water and everything should follow your fingertips in, but it’s not the case. It’s actually that if you, as long as you get your fingers in first, you’ve got your elbow up, you can actually then just straighten your arm. You’ll actually hear good swimmers that elbow will kind of slap down. And so, you know, we go through some drills to help make sure that you do that, you’re not overreaching on entry. But when you get it right, you can really feel this nice drive with each entry and with each reach forwards. And it sounds as though that’s what maybe started to happen in your, in your stroke. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you get this real feeling of, like, you know, the picture of Superman, you get Superman flying over and he’s

got one hand back like that. You really feel that in the water, you know, going forward, right, the next, the hand comes in. And also the hand that’s, that’s recovering, doesn’t seem to take, take any energy anymore. You’re not hoisting this hand up. It’s just, it’s just swinging over in a very crisp way. And, you know, that, that really changed the swimming. You know, even my coach was saying, you know, there’s something really nice going, you’re, you’re entering in the right place, you know, entering near your front dress. And the, and you know, the whole recovery is right to swim in straight. Because, because previously, like, you know, I was swimming straight, but you know, there was a slight bit of a zigzag. But the moment the rhythm comes, you know, both sides become even. It’s usually like, you know, if you’re right handed, you slightly move to the right, even though you’re bilateral breathing. But once you get that rhythm, you know, it’s straight.

And there’s no, there’s no questions about it. The other thing you mentioned was the, the timing or the rhythm at the end, where it sounds like you just, you slow down that reach and that catch phase to help with the timing. And one thing I see a lot is that when people, if they’re quite new to swimming, they feel like they just need to get straight into that propulsive part of the stroke. So pull back straight away. But if you do it too soon, it throws out the rhythm of the timing of the catch and how it connects with the, with the hips. And we say it’s really, really common. And I think sometimes too, like, there’s so much nuance to all the little things in swimming that it’s easy to hear something like a phrase or a way that someone might explain a part of the stroke and just take it at face value. But there’s a lot of nuance and detail to it. One of those things that I’ve heard often said by more triathlon coaches than anything, but it’s just like, get the hand in,

get a big, you know, handful of water and pull it straight back as hard and as fast as you can. But it’s, that can work for some people. But in most cases, it’s like, no, you’ve got to actually spend that little bit of time to reach forwards and give yourself a bit more time to set up the catch. Because otherwise, just the time you get straight out and you’re going to be working a lot harder than what you otherwise would. And so I’m glad that you got that connection. Because when you do get it, as you probably know, it’s just like it feels good, everything comes together and you’ve really used your whole body to swim as opposed to just your arms or just your legs. Yeah, of course. And see the other thing that I really like was in the drills. I mean, I’ve done, you know, a version of these drills at some point, at some place, I’ve done all of them before. But, you know, you swim a lot, you stop thinking about, you know, what’s going on in

this drill. I can do in 616. All right, you know, we’re doing 616 to get the roll right, and so on. But then when you start thinking, okay, 616, you can also use it to practice your entry, for instance. And you get, you know, it brings brings a lot more awareness behind that drill. And you get more out of it. Because I really felt like my technique, I was doing technique stuff. But at the same time, I wasn’t engaged in it. I was like, you know, doing okay, we do this color and we do everything. All right, these are going to help. But I wasn’t thinking how it was good to, you know, come back to basics, you know, come back to thinking about what’s behind the drill. And I felt that really helped a lot.

You know, actually, yesterday when I was swimming, I was like thinking, okay, there are certain things that now feel sort of out. And I need to come back into these five days. So probably run these five days again, because I feel, you know, it’s not a matter of, you know, finishing bang one, two, three, four, five, and then all right, you know, that sorted out. It’s a matter of revisiting. And I feel if I do it, again, I’ll be able to knock out another couple of seconds. Because the moment I feel uncomfortable in the water, I know, okay, the stroke’s not working, you got to work on technique. It’s not a question of the time. I mean, time will always come. You swim hard, you can knock down three seconds. But that’s not the point behind the sort of a sustainable routine, so to say. Yeah, that’s great. Because it’s that awareness of it as well, that you don’t go through the five days, you’re one and done, and your catch is just magically transformed forever. You’ve got to either

revisit some of those drills or some of those points that you’re focusing on to reinforce those habits. And I’m just about to create another, just like a final module for that five day thing about how to take what you went through and then implement it so that that stuff becomes a lot more permanent. Because it often takes about six weeks to change a habit. And yeah, and it’s just, it is easy to go back to what you were doing when you’re not focused on it, or if you’re just thinking about other things as well. So the fact that you know that is

the first step is realizing that, yeah, it’s this slow trajectory that you’re going to keep improving, but sometimes you’ll go back down. But yes, if you keep following that mountain that you’re climbing, and yeah, you can really maintain that continuous improvement, but it’s not always just in the same trajectory. Of course not. No, no, it’s not about the time and like like improvement. It’s a question of how you define the improvement. I mean, I could define the improvement as okay, CSS reducing by a second every few weeks, every few months or so on. But but it boils down, you know, am I enjoying the swim? You know, is this something that I can go on doing on and on? Or is it like just hell? You know, if it’s hell, it’s difficult to come back and repeat that session. But if it feels good, you keep coming back for more. The training becomes a lot more pleasant in terms of adding it into an overall

triathlon routine because it’s not just the swimming. If you’re stressed in the swimming, you know, the bike is going to be very difficult. The run is going to be a lot of earth. So it’s good when swimming is the nicest on the body. You recover from it a lot better. But if you’re doing swim sets that are so hard that you need to spend a day to recover from the swim, everything else falls down. It’s really good to have that nice technique, to have that relaxation in the water. And yeah, yeah, it’s a very fulfilling feeling. Yeah, that’s fantastic. I did another podcast recently with somebody who went through the challenge and he was saying that aside from the improvement that he had in his times, the thing that he enjoyed the best about it was the feeling that he’s got when he’s in the water, when he’s swimming. Like he said, I get to the pool, doesn’t matter how I’m feeling. Whenever I get out, I feel so much better. And it’s like, yeah, that’s what it’s about.

You know, it’s just when you do have a good session and your stroke feels good and

you have this nice flow of the water over your body. And it’s such a great feeling. For me, there’s really something about being in the water, whether it’s in the pool, whether it’s in the ocean. There’s something about that water element that really is very relaxing and it feels great. So there’s very few swims that I’ve had, very few training sessions where I’ve got out and regretted it. So it’s, yeah, it’s such a great feeling and especially not necessarily coming from a swimming background by the sounds that like to be able to get to that point where you can really enjoy your swimming, the way that it sounds like you are. It’s a, to me, it’s quite a, it’s no small feat. It’s a big achievement to be able to get to that point because it means you’re putting the hours and the time and that consistency to learn something that is quite a complex movement and skill. And if you can, if you’re where you’re at, then

that’s a great place to be. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so the way I treat swimming is like, you know, when I’m tense, I get in the water. When I’m feeling stressed with work, all right, we’ll get in the water. It’s not always about, you know, knocking out that training session and you’re doing, okay, like three, three hundreds and all right, we got our days training. It’s more about, all right, let’s take a break from the day, you know, get into the water, get recharged and get out. I had the luxury of a pool very nearby where, you know, I can look at it outside of my window and it’s there. So, you know, I had that

luxury. So I swim whenever possible. It’s like, you know, even a few times a day, it’s not like I’m killing myself in the water. It’s recovery almost. Yeah, yeah, especially recovery for the legs after possibly a big weekend on the bike or running from what a lot of triathletes tend to do. And it’s like, you’re right. I mean, I had a big day on Sunday. I had three clinics. It was about 12 hours of coaching, three hours of travel time with driving and come Monday morning, I was, I’d probably got about four or five hours of sleep. And I was, I woke up at 430. I was thinking, do I get up and go to training? Because I know I’m going to train like crap. And it’s, and I’m so tired and exhausted. But I was like, okay, if as long as you go, you’re going to feel so much better afterwards. And I went and I’m glad I did. Despite my times being about five seconds slower per 100,

I knew that was going to happen. But the rest of the day went really well. And it set me up right. So that’s why as best I can, I’ll try and just stick to the, that routine that I’ve set, no matter what, what has happened the day before or the night before, because it’s always going to be the right thing to do because I always regret it when I don’t get up and swim. Yeah, of course. And I feel like the fitness gains from the swim, that translates so well onto the onto the run, especially like that ability of being able to push through on sort of a sort of in a relaxed state, like, you know, without your heart rate, you know, going, going to the roof. Once you get that ability in the water, I feel transferring that ability onto the run is so much easier, especially if you’re on the heavier side, like, like, like I am my heart rate, and it shoots up on the run. But, but I find that building that swim fitness and keeping that a sort of, you know, base fitness, it transfers so well

on the run, and I can hold my heart rate a lot better. And I’m sure it transfers under the bike as well. But you feel it a lot more on the run. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, the one, the one year that I did triathlon, I was doing a lot of running as well. It’s like my, I felt like my swim fitness from the previous years had done, it carries over very well to that, yeah, to that running, because it just forces you to have to control your breathing, because it’s, you know, you’ve got to, you haven’t just, you can’t take as much air in as you like, you’ve got to be very measured and controlled with it. So I think that helps in a big way. And for you, going forwards in the next couple of weeks and couple of months, where do you, where do you feel like after going through the five day challenge, where do you feel like you’re, you can go in the next couple of months in terms of your, your speed and your

swing. Do you feel like you can get under that 150 and that there’s room to, to get under that, and that’s a possibility for you? For sure, for sure. I mean, if I can sort of really bedding these as good habits, a second, a second and a half every month, totally doable, because right now I know, I know my threshold pace and the threshold pace keeps coming down. But in terms of that comfortable pace, definitely I should be able to bring it down into one, into the 140s. Let’s keep that as a, as a wide goal. Yeah, I think it’s doable, definitely, bit by bit, you know, month by month, it’s possible. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that’s the right, right frame of mind to approach into, like it’s seen it happen so many times that some, yeah, it’s, it’s absolutely possible in seeing those four or five seconds within the five days. Yeah, it’s not sustainable yet, but it’s, it’s going to be, and then it’s just going to keep coming down with the focus on the right things. And I’m looking

forward to seeing what happens in the next couple of months, because, yeah, hearing about where you’re at and what you’ve, what you’ve gone down to now, it’s, it is well on that trajectory. So good luck for the next couple of months. And I appreciate you sharing this on the podcast. Thanks. It was awesome. Like, there was one, I mean, to share one really nice thing that happened is, you know, there’s one squad that I swim, but I cannot keep up for my life with, with the swimmers in that squad. I mean, when they go, they lapped me. And somehow I managed to just get into that draft last week, during the last swim before lockdown, I think, okay, if I’m in that draft, I’m roughly about 5% behind them. And, you know, that was like, really fulfilling. I mean, that was very satisfying. Like, you know, achievement a lot. Yeah, that’s right. Got a taste of it now. Yeah, yeah, so nice.

Fantastic. It’s, I love it when I hear stories of people who, like, they, they, you know, move up a lane, or, you know, they, they get on, on the group that they just, they were just too far, just that little bit behind. It’s just like, that’s exciting. And the thing about that is like the swimmers in that lane, like they, it’s like you’re, you’re sneaking up on them. They don’t know, you know, you’re just, you’re working your way up there and they’re doing their own thing. And soon enough, you’ll, yeah, be right with them and then hopefully overtake them and they won’t know what hit them. So that’s, that’s the goal. Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. It doesn’t matter who the swimmer is, whoever is there. So yeah, servers in the next lane. Yeah, I know that feeling. Yeah, thank you, Chris. I appreciate it. And yes, all the best. Thanks man. It’s been great talking. Thanks. Thanks for all the help with the program.

Definitely do more of these. Yeah, awesome. Thank you.

The post 4 Seconds Faster in 5 Days with Kris Martenstyn appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest today is Quang Pham who recently had a significant improvement with his swim time. I thought it would be useful to have him share what he has done to improve. Listen to this episode, you might pick a couple of things that you might implement on your own.

1:40 Benchmarks

04:29 What Made The Difference

5:48 Swimming Has Become Easier

7:18 What Works Best For Me

8:37 What Got Me Into The Pool

12:00 The Next Step

13:59 Having A Structure

15:52 Initializing The Catch With The Ring And Pinky Finger

Effortless Swimming iTunes

Freestyle Clinics

Become An ES Member To Improve Your Swimming

Video analysis

Hey guys, welcome to the podcast before I get into it I just want to let you know about the course that our guest today is talking about it’s the five-day catch challenge You might have seen this if you’ve seen our videos on YouTube recently But it’s a five-day course designed to improve your high elbow catch and just make you much more Effective through the water and we’ve had some really good results from it The the promise is you can improve your fight your 100 meter time by five seconds in the course of five days And we’ve had people do more than that But the results we’re getting a great. So I just want to let you know that’s available at effortless swimming doc coach forward slash catch challenge now it will also be in the show notes So just go to the website and look at the podcast and you’ll see it there as well But the five-day catch challenge is the the course that he’s talking about here

And we’ve had over 600 people go through that already with some awesome results So quang fam who’s the guest he’s based in Singapore. He had some some really good results I wanted to get him on just to talk about what it is that he changed in his stroke And you might find that you pick up a couple things to be able to implement in your own here. We go Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water become a better swimmer and live a better life Here’s your host Brenton Ford

Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast. My guest today is a quang fan and We I got in touch with quang recently because he’s had some really good improvements in terms of his time And so I thought it’d be useful to have you on to share what you’ve done to To see these improvements in your speed. So welcome to the podcast Great. It’s great. It’s good to be here And so do you want to talk about um, where where your times were in in march and where you’re you’re currently at And then maybe just some of those things that you’ve changed in the last couple of months to um to get where you’re at now

All right, sure. Uh, so I actually uh Star swimming in just january this year So I just started breaststroke and progressively moved to freestyle So, uh in midge match, I want to have like a benchmark something that I can improve on So I uh start I look at my, uh, css in midge match So the timing was uh, 225 in a short course meters And also, uh, I think at that time I couldn’t swim for long distance. So I couldn’t swim 500 meters or so on So that was my starting point So, uh, I start to look around and see, uh, what are what are the changes that I could make to improve my techniques So and then I saw your five days cash challenge, right? Uh, and I took that so basically the I just followed the cost, but actually actually I took like eight sessions to finish the to finish the cost because I noticed that there’s some Uh, uh, I noticed that my left side was a lot weaker than my right side. So I basically

Uh, spend three more sessions on I think they won day three and day five to kind of uh improve my techniques because those sessions they involve Uh, three steps works on only one side and that’s what my weakness

So, uh, I think what it was the start of may Before I took the challenge I tried to swim 500 meters And I swim a couple of hundreds to see where I was at So my 500 meters time was 12 minutes a bit more than 12 minutes on the long long course meters And the 100 meters I would at I think to 225 something 225 So after eight sessions of doing the cash challenge I took the same test again. I swam 500 meters And a couple of hundreds so the timing for the 500 I reduced to I think 10 55 And uh And the uh, the couple hundreds I think on average it was Two two minutes. Yeah So I basically took like 20 seconds off the hundreds Yeah, that’s fantastic. And what what do you feel like? What do you feel like made the difference for you with this the speed? What about your stroke had had changed? Yeah, surely the uh, so the first thing I feel that

My uh, I I can pull with my forearm not just my palm So that was a big chance. So I can feel the water a lot more So what happened was, um, my stroke count per 100 degrees a lot and um Yeah, it’s uh, it’s also reflected in my uh, dwarf core. So those are some uh, like uh, noticeable changes and also, um One thing is I felt a great I feel a lot more comfortable doing doing the 500 So before taking the test I was like gas out after 500 And now after after the test like I could swim 500 a lot more Easy And I also try to swim longer distance, right? So I try to Uh jump to 700 and recently I could do like one kilometers non-stop Yeah Yeah, right. And what and what do you think it’s um become easier for you? Do you think it’s because you’ve got more propulsion now because of a better catch or is there something else that has changed to make it Feel a lot easier Looking back at this I think, uh, more

I think definitely more Proposal is one thing And uh, the second part is I think I got the right techniques. So I think uh, So basically what I was I had a minor Uh, so the Soda is easily on my left. So my left shoulder is not as flexible as my right shoulder So before the challenge, right, I kind of cheat myself So the the left stroke is kind of fast to get myself back to the right stroke So that I didn’t notice So when I took the challenge like the first drill the uh, um The arm entry drill where I kind of isolate my right arm and Do the left arm left arm entry I noticed that immediately I think I think like a rock So but that’s that I focused on improving it So I got some rotations and uh, I think that’s just make the stroke feel Easy on me. Yeah, so I just could just swim more. Yeah

So yeah, you thought you were too flat before because of the way that you were entering the water and Then changing the entry to be fingertips first a little bit earlier was allowing you to rotate side to side and that Really helped. Um, just feel a whole lot easier Yeah, yeah, so I think I think the of course, it’s just amazing. But what works best for me are the drills that like Works on one size only So the the one hands entry the one arm school and one arms freestyle So those just I think really works really well It uh, basically, uh, it improved my uh, left strokes Yeah Yeah, great. And I say that a lot actually typically, um It’s more oftentimes the stroke that you’re when you breathe to the side Let’s say breathe to the right the left arm is often the The arm that’s not going to have as good a catch because that’s when people they sometimes Overrotate and their arm goes very deep and so by For a lot of people there’s not much opportunity at least on one arm to improve their catch

Whereas one side’s often they’re pretty pretty good. And uh, if that’s 50% of your strokes There’s there’s a lot of room for improvement there Which um, which it sounds like it’s made a big difference, which is fantastic. And just for um, i’m curious What uh, what got you into the pool in january to To start swimming because it’s it’s not something that you’ve Um done as a as a kid by the sounds of it. So what got you into the pool and uh and started on this path? Yeah, sure. So uh So actually it starts uh last year So, uh, I had an injury last year like February where I fell off the stairs and broke my bike broke my heels So I basically had to stay home for like two months I couldn’t do exercise a lot. So after two months we uh, we got the corona pandemic and Singapore went to a kind of a lockdown state So I had to stay home for another like four five months So basically, uh, I lost the motivation to do exercise for like

more than a half year so after the lockdown I look at my uh physical My physical state and I was not in a good shape And this really affected my mental health as well So I need some changes. So I was looking for some form of exercise that I can do And the exercise need to be like Not so intense because of my injury And uh swimming was one option back then So I started swimming back in uh, I think august august 2020 So I just started going to the swimming pool and uh I think Over time I just uh realized that swimming makes me feel Better maybe feel great. So basically I feel Better after leaving the pool compared to when I just went in the pool so at first I swim like two times a week and just

I start to increase the session like three times a week four times a week Sometimes five times a week because maybe just feel better. It makes me like improve my fitness and so on. Yeah So uh at the end of 2020 I had a chance to look back at my year So I see that while uh swimming has just been an important part So I just really enjoyed doing it So I decided to like Maybe we can focus more on it Like not just for losing weight getting fitness, but maybe getting improving at it So on January this year. I just spent more time swimming. Yeah

Oh, that’s fantastic. I can 100% relate to Feeling better after swimming. I mean my I’m swimming three times a week at the moment Which isn’t a huge amount compared to what I’ve done in the past But those three sessions when I get out and I’ll do them in the morning like I just feel All right, I’m ready to start the day and you’ve had that physical Exercise and a bit of exhaustion there and there’s something about just hearing the the water come over your ears and shoulders and hearing the water for an hour hour and a half and And just spending some time. It’s just like it’s real meditation in a way and it’s it’s so good For mental health as well. So can yeah completely relate to to that and

you know Seeing how much you’ve improved in such a fairly short period of time I can really see you continuing that in that improvement because it’s been so Short that you’ve actually been been swimming. So, um, you know, you talked about your your css Wrote this in the email this morning that your css pace was was it two 220 or 225 and it’s down to It’s down to 210 now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sorry So, um, yeah, just watching that that pace come down. So they um, that’s that css pace I don’t think will be too far away from you know getting under the two minute mark Which would be a kind of that next step, isn’t it’s that next Next part of the the journey and what for you? What do you feel like? Where’s the next improvement lie for you?

Oh, I think for now I’m still working on improving my Left side that’s wrong because I think For the catch I learned only spent for now until now it’s only three weeks So still a lot of room for improvement to catch up with the right side So that would be my immediate focus for now And in the meantime, I’m so looking for some What is the next step to do so that part? I’m not sure yet. Yeah Yeah, no, that’s that’s fantastic. One of the things that I’m uh We’re all about to put together. There’s like an eight week eight week course We’ll have sort of workouts and stuff that’ll cover all the parts of the stroke So that’s going to be inside the membership in in june So that’s kind of outside of the the catch. It’s going to work on breathing and body position and and each part of it So because I’ve had that question from a lot of people have gone through the five day challenge Is we’ve had some awesome results from it and now they want it for other parts of the stroke like a better body

Body position and so on. So um, yeah, that’s going to be the the next thing but um, yeah I’m great to hear how much you’ve um, you’ve improved in that in that time. So Um, and it’s all pretty new too. Like if you I’m guessing this is kind of like your first It’s not even formal swim coaching, but um, this is the first time you’ve sort of Had some sort of I guess structure to the way you’re going about your swimming. Um, and so it’s With another few months practice even just on the catch alone I can say it really really changing. Is this the first sort of thing you’ve you’ve done for the use of me Yeah, this uh, definitely this is my first time having like some of the coaching So when I just started I just like I don’t even have any structure to get into the swimming pool Try to swim I just to just for fitness. Yeah, so when I just uh, look I was looking to improve my Assuming to get more out of my sessions and I just start to look for different resources. Yeah

Yeah, that’s awesome Well, um, thanks very much for um for for sharing that. I know you guys you talked about it just before the cold It um, just gone into a soft lock down there in singapore. So hopefully um, you can get to the pool Uh as much as you as much as you still like to but um, Yeah, it’s I mean, it’ll it’ll be over soon enough and you can just continue that improvement So I appreciate you being on the podcast and um, sharing what you’ve gone through the last couple of weeks because I’ve got no doubt people of um Uh, can probably relate. Um, and is there anything else that you um, want to mention or is that um Yeah Yeah, actually, uh, when I got the uh

membership actually found some uh, very useful tip in the membership area But it’s not included in the cash challenge, but it’s very uh, I think relevant So I think uh, maybe like the the side was all and you forgot a bit about something But I think one of the first thing in the membership area. I found is that uh, you mentioned that we should uh, initialize the cash with the ring and um pinky fingers I think that that tip was very very useful That’s interesting. I I I couldn’t found it in the five days cash challenge Yeah, so I think that’s very uh, something very useful and it’s just like a minor change that have like A lot of impact. Yeah Yeah, that’s good. It’s um, you’re right. I didn’t mention that part in the five day cash challenge because there’s um, although I think it’s I’ve for a lot of people That’s been a something that’s helped them tremendously and I I’ve got this from um I think it was from Eany Jones who’s a he’s she’s another swim coach who I’ve had in the podcast a few times

um, so if you if you um, put your hand on on a desk and when you press down with say your Your first finger you push down feel what muscles you use Okay, and then do it with your middle finger and then eventually do it with your Fourth and fifth finger the outside fingers and you find that when you when you do that you engage your lats a whole lot better It’s the the fourth and fifth finger And so when you go through the the catch if you can sort of feel for this outside part of the hand try and Hold the water there and sort of on the outside It tends to engage the lats a lot better compared to if you’re trying to like put that pressure on the Near the thumb or that or that first finger. So um, that’s interesting. It’s um, that’s good feedback and um, something that I I forget to talk about because there’s so much to to cover in in a lot of these things um, but it’s good to um to hear that that has um

Has helped you so uh, yeah, I appreciate that a lot and um, good luck for the next next year, right? So i’m looking forward to seeing where you get to Yeah, thank you so much 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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