Effortless Swimming

Here’s the third installment of our podcast episode with Sam Fenton. In this episode, Sam discussed what is Deep Core, the muscles that are involved in strengthening the deep core, and some exercises to improve it.

1:11 What Is Deep Core?
3:17 Stability Of Pelvis
4:11 Inter-Abdominal Pressure
6:40 Cross fitters Destroying Their Joints and Back
08:48 Serape Effect
11:34 Need To Learn The Fundamentals
14:53 There Are No Secrets In Drills
17:45 Leg Lift
19:38 Cat Dog Exercise
23:06 Control High Performance

Control High Performance
Core Level
The Perfect Push-Up In 4 Levels And What To Avoid

Like I said, there’s crossfitters out there that are doing, you know, multiple, you know, deadlifts with hundreds of kilos and hundreds of chin-ups and all of that sort of stuff. But, and it’s really hard for them

to, I guess, get their ego out of the way to rehab themselves and go back to those subtle basics. And then, but when they do, the performance benefits are great. But usually they do it when they’ve already been in a lot of pain for a long time. 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. This is part three with Sam Fenton. So in the last two episodes, we looked at the physical literacy method of developing swimmers. And part two, we looked at feeding ankles, how you can improve your underwater kick and your kick overall through better ankle and foot strength and range of motion. And in this episode, we are looking at deep core. So Sam, welcome back to the podcast. And what do we mean by deep core? What are we talking about here?

Yeah, thanks, Brent. Yeah, look, we, there’s a, I guess there’s so much movement towards Pilates, as you may know now. So there’s a lot of, especially with your physiotherapist now, nearly every physio’s got a clinical therapist, Pilates therapist that works with them. Lots of physios are doing their clinical Pilates qualifications. You’re seeing it all over the place. And I’ve been in the Pilates game since about 2004, 2005, and seen a lot of different ways of teaching Pilates and those sort of things. And what I find is a lot of even physios that have done their clinical Pilates and those sort of things are not teaching the exercises, but they’re not teaching how to do them properly.

So when we say deep core, there’s a group of muscles that work together in particular around stabilizing the lumbar spine. And this is where the argument gets a little bit funny, as to whether it’s everything’s, things that local muscles, where we call global muscles, your big movers, and local muscles, the muscles that are closer into the joints and stabilize them, whether they’re assisting in creating movement. If you think of, for swimmers, rotator cuffs is a good way to think about that. They’re local muscles. So are they there to create movement, or are they there just to stabilize and suck the bone into the joint? So what’s their role? So there’s a sort of a trio, I guess, that we don’t talk about a lot, which is the pelvic floor, which is the bottom. So the pelvic floor acts like a little trampoline that holds up your organs, but it also works in, connectively with everything around your pelvis too. So when you think of creating stability around your pelvis,

and you think it’s not just a bone, it moves at the pubic, a pubic symphysis at the front, and then you’ve got your sacroiliac joints and two cartilage joints at the back as well. And then you’ve got like your sacrum in the middle. So your pelvis moves, and it can be stable or unstable. And pregnant women know that this gets really unstable when you get pregnant, and they can have continuing troubles after birth as well around that area. So pelvic floor is important to provide stability there. So stability is important for the same, around the pelvis for the same reason that a chassis is important to use a car analogy. I don’t know if this is appropriate for readers or watchers or listeners, but integrity is really, really important to be able to transfer power through your body. So pelvic floor is really, really important. And for the other reason, that holds up your organs as well. And it works below your diaphragm.

So your diaphragm is pushing up and down with your breathing and your healthy pelvic floor will be working against those forces as well. And to create what we call intra-abdominal pressure. And it’s really important to have that intra-abdominal pressure so that we can transfer force up and down the body.

And the way I like to think about this in terms of transferring a wave going through your body is transferring a wave through a string, through a tin can phone. So I don’t know if you’ve ever made one of those before, Brent, but you can get two tin cans and a piece of string between them. And you just tie a little knot and a little hole in the bottom of the tin can and you pull it tight. And then you can talk through them like talking through a phone. And it’s the vibration that goes from your voice gets through. The string gets through to the other side. Soon as that string goes slack, the message doesn’t go through. And that’s very much what happens through your body. So if you’re trying to… Yeah, good way to explain it. Yeah, so if you’re trying to get your upper body to coordinate with your lower body, you have waves of energy that go through your body. And if you’re slack in the middle and the local muscles aren’t doing their job in the middle

and you don’t have integrity in the middle, then that message doesn’t get through and that wave doesn’t transfer through the body properly. So kicking suffers, upper body suffers, head-eye coordination suffers, everything sort of drops off. But the thing that what we see most in the Western population is back pain. So we see back pain, back pain in running, back pain in swimming and just poor movement. And you don’t improve that through lots of crunches. You don’t improve it through doing V-sits and you don’t improve it through doing planks. And apologies to anyone out there that’s offended right now. But there’s a level of quality of using things, the trio of muscles that I was talking about before is your pelvic floor, your multifidus and your transverse abdominis. So your transverse abdominis is like a kidney belt that runs around so when you pull it together, that’s when you pull your belly button in, that’s your transverse abdominis.

So you’ve got your pelvic floor, you’ve got your transverse abdominis and then you’ve got your multifidus which works actively to stabilize the lumbar spine and using those together. And again, you’re using these in a skillful way that you build up through awareness and very basic hip tilting exercises, activating your pelvic floor and tilting and then starting to do it under a bit of pressure and then you build that up over time. So often I’ve done a lot of rehab with crossfitters who look a million bucks, who’ve got a six pack, got muscles bulging out of everywhere, no body fat, look fantastic, but just destroying their joints and back and all of that sort of stuff and can’t swim fast and can’t crack beyond sort of basic levels of performance whether it’s in triathlons or whatever it might be. And as concerned as they are about injuring themselves, they continue to do it because the heavy lifting and the crossfit and the big ab workouts

and all of that sort of stuff makes you feel great and it makes your body look great and everybody notices that you look awesome. So it’s a pretty hard sell to get people to do the really subtle internal work that takes a lot of mindful attention and mindfulness to be able to develop that type of core strength. Great, I want to get into some of those exercises soon and doesn’t need to be a whole lot. And we talked about some exercises for improving your range of motion with the feet and that kind of thing. And I find like what I’ve recommended a lot over the last few years to a lot of the guys that I coach is just I’ve got this five minute TheraBand routine that I post inside our video membership and it’s a lot of your basic shoulder exercises with the TheraBand doing that before training and a little bit of that is can work wonders. Like you don’t need to be doing an hour of that once a week or anything, just five minutes of it

is going to start to strengthen those local muscles around the scapula and that sort of thing and just improve your range of motion as well. So I imagine it’s probably going to be very much the same for some of these core exercises as well. And I like how you explained the like I’ve talked about is you want to swim from the inside out as in you’ve got to have that stability through the core to then deliver that power through the extremities and to connect it all up. So if it’s like a wet noodle in the middle, nothing’s going to connect. And we see that very often when we’re doing video analysis. And one of the things that I learned about a little couple of years ago was the Serapa effect which is for overhead movements where you’re essentially connecting up it’s like this band from the hips.

These four muscles where it starts from the hips and comes up through the shoulder girdle and connecting that up like when you’re throwing a ball and it’s that wave effect and it’s similar in swimming and it’s I find it’s quite hard to kind of recognize and see and explain in swimming but it’s that exact same thing. It’s that coordination and connection from the hips and all the way through out the front. Yeah, look it’s really, really hard to see but when it’s done well, it looks great.

It’s almost like it’s when it’s done well you don’t even notice it like it’s just everything moves really, really nicely. Yeah, so Caleb Dressel just put out a couple of what he called it COVID something. Quarantine it was, I’ve reckoned that to a lot of people. Yeah, quarantines and so if you look at him and his mate that he pulled off the PlayStation to come out and do the size video with him. So, you know, and you can just see the quality of their core. So they’re doing actually very what same people and this is the I guess this is the big issue in teaching people this stuff is what they’re doing actually looks super simple and everyone’s like, oh yeah, I can do that. Like I can put my legs in the air and make a plank facing the sky and I can do a plank on my side and I can do a plank facing the front, lift my legs. But he’s got an Olympic level of core control.

You know, and I’ve done core workshops. I’ve done lots of core workshops over the years but I can grab any athlete that’s at that level and I can do any of the movements with them and they’ve never done them the way I teach them. But I know because they’re at the Olympic level. I’ve done it with Michael Clem and Ash Delaney. You just grab them and just get them to demonstrate and any of those guys can do that stuff absolutely beautifully. So if anyone watches those quarantine videos with Caleb Dressel, watch below his belly button. So you’ll see his belly button and then just below that when he’s doing all of those movements you’ll see a perfectly stable, super, super, super powerful transverse abdominates when he’s moving through that and so no movement through the lumbar spine when he’s doing his stability work and which gives him the ability to freely move with under a higher amount of pressure his legs however he wants to move them.

So, you know, on his side facing down facing up everything just works absolutely amazing and that’s because of what’s going on internally. So the answer is not just do these exercises that Olympic swimmers are doing or just do the exercises that the best athletes in the world are doing. You need to learn the fundamentals that they’ve developed over time and think about these guys are professional athletes that have the best high-performance coaches and strength and conditioning coaches working with them day in and day out just watching those things all the time like a hawk and correcting them all the time and making sure that those things are working properly and, you know, clinical parties, therapists and those sort of things. So, yeah, it’s, you know, when it looks good and it’s not, and again, it’s not the sexy thing like I just do these exercises and you’ll get instant results. It’s actually, it’s a lot of time and practice

in learning basics and going back to the fundamentals. That’s really interesting. It makes me think about when I’m running clinics where we’ve got six swimmers at most and we’re going through, we go through six drills. We keep it really simple. But I’m very particular about how they do those drills and sometimes people, I’ll stop them and say, all right, I want you to just bring it. I’m out to the side a little bit here. I want you to just sort of just a little bit here like very particular and they’ll kind of look at me like, yeah, okay, like they do it. And I think a lot of the times they’re like, okay, does this really sort of matter? But as it like, I’m there, I’ve seen thousands of swimmers do these drills and you, what I notice is that people, what people do when they normally swim will translate. More times are not into the drill. So they’ll often do these drills really well if they can swim well. And let’s say they’re not doing the drill as well.

For example, if we’re doing like a side-kicking drill and someone has a tendency to cross over when they swim, they will cross over in that side-kick drill because it’s just what they’re used to and it’s how their body moves. And then we start to get them to change it and over time it starts to change the way that they swim. But it’s really those fundamentals of some of these drills and being very picky about the way that they do them, that over time will help them then do it in the full swim strike without them really needing to think too much about it. Yeah, that’s right. And without thinking, that’s the key. So, and if anyone asks, why am I doing this? Why do I have to do these fundamentals? And you have to ask, like I think we’re talking about Steph Curry and the late Kobe Bryant and why do they do the fundamentals all the time? And that’s the reason why because when you’re doing a skilled movement, you don’t wanna be thinking about parts of the movement.

You want those movements, all of that stuff to be on automatic pilot and anything you don’t use drops off. So, that’s why you have to always do it and it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been at it for, you have to keep doing those fundamentals of your warm-ups, activating those muscles because if you don’t, they drop off and then so does your stroke or so does your kick or so does your awareness or so does your feel for the water. So, those things all disappear if you’re not using them. When I’ve done filming with high level swimmers and triathletes, because I’ve recorded them and put them in our membership so people can sort of see examples of really good swimmers. And when I do that, I’ll always ask them, yeah, what are some drills that you do in squad or when you’re training? Like what is it that you like to do? They’re pretty much all the same, like they’re pretty basic. They’ll do like, you’re doing two drills

or three drills. And particularly when I first started coaching, I was out there, what are some secret drills you can do and like, yeah, there’s gotta be some secrets out there. But it’s like, not at all. Like it’s very much the same stuff that people have done for a very long time. And like, well, we’ve sort of made up some drills to help teach some of the things that we wanna teach at clinics because particularly for people who haven’t been taught at a young age or they’ve only started swimming in the last year or two and they’re adults, then sometimes some of the concepts that these other swimmers are doing are a little bit beyond where I think some of the beginners are. So we’ve just sort of made up drills that still work on the fundamentals, but it’s just an easier way to grasp some of the concepts. So yeah, there’s no real secrets out there. It’s just applying the stuff that’s out there in the right way and being diligent about it.

Yeah, look, I think, but I think one of the big fallacies that’s put out there is around core strength. And that’s where I guess, yeah, even the stuff that you see in Caleb Dressel’s quarantine and those other things,

you kind of get the idea that doing these V-sits and planks and these types of things are going to make you better. For some people, they’re going to make you worse. So if you’re overly strong through your hip flexors, rectus abdominis, which makes you, which is a six-pack muscle, which its job is to make you hunch. And hunching is not a great way to swim, you know what I mean? So to teach your core to be long, to work in with your neck, to work in with your shoulders, to be powerful through the pelvic floor, through the multivitus and transverse, holding you together so that you can perform those really skilled movements through those big driving, you know, glute muscles and core muscles and, you know, and then out to your extremities.

It’s, yeah, there’s a lot of subtle stuff under there that’s really hard to teach. And so a lot of people just don’t teach it. It’s hard to teach. You’ve got to coach it. You’ve got to watch for it. Like I said, if you’re watching those calip dresser ones, watch below the belly button, watch how it doesn’t pop. And then, and then maybe watch yourself do it in a mirror and watch yourself when you load up, when you load up in a VC or something like that, watch what happens below your belly button. And if that pops and starts to, you know, and it doesn’t hold together and you start to feel pressure through your lower back, you’ve absolutely lost it. So, so apart from the performance benefits of learning core control and how to use your core properly, it’s the health benefits of enjoying movement and not having back pain, which is a huge thing now. Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of what are some of the most basic exercises

that people can do if they’re just starting out this kind of thing? Yeah, so just a basic, and again, I’ll just put the core level, you can just put the core level video in your notes for this podcast, but just laying on your back. Basic part is leg lift, but learning how to hold through, I don’t know if I can… There. So just being able to learn how to hold through belly, so belly poking out, being able to hold through here, but not crunching when you load your core up. So being able to lift through the top of your core, be strong through the bottom of your core, being able to lift up through your pelvic floor and being able to do that comfortably. And then from there, being able to move your hips. So being able to move your hips comfortably without doing stuff with the upper body as well when you’re trying to move your hips. So just being able to lay on the floor with your feet planted on the ground, knees at 90 degrees,

just being able to contract your pelvic floor and pull your hips towards you

without pushing on your feet, which is what a lot of beginners will do. When a lot of people do planks or bracing or anything like that, a lot of people will tend to crunch at the core rather than stay long at the core and be able to draw up through their pelvic floor and transverse and stabilise the lumbar spine. So just that basic learning and once you’ve learnt your hip manipulation, how to manipulate your hips and tilt your hips, that’s the skill. That’s it. I mean, it’s pretty basic. But then you do that facing down on the side and you’d be familiar with the cat dogs or the bird dog exercise where you’re on all fours and you’re reaching out with one leg and you’re pushing the other leg out. So the key thing with that is, so like you’re starting from, like with your leg at 90 degrees, is that if I can show my shirt here, as you’re kicking back there, is that you’re not, that’s crunching your lower back. That’s what you see most people do.

If you see your lower back there. So as long as you can hold your back in position and then forcefully and very powerfully move through there, which is a lot of glute strength through there,

then you’re gonna be pretty safe. And like you said, you develop that transfer if you do it immediately before your activities or your swimming activities, they tend to work a lot better. Yeah, this was a while ago, but I was coaching same time as Vic Santa was coaching a couple of years back and I saw their elite squad had Mack Horton in there and a couple of other Olympians and Australian swimmers in there. They were doing that bird dog exercise, same thing. And you look at that and go, okay, that’s what I need to do. But there’s so much nuance to it in keeping the hips still and all that sort of stuff. And that’s really the art of getting it right. So some of that stuff. And what do you do while you’re doing that? So yeah, so yeah, so are you holding those muscles together? Like I said, so that trio that we talked about before, which is the pelvic floor, your transverse abdominis and your multifidus, are they holding you together?

And you can see, because it looks really nice. Like I said, if you watch those kind of dressel videos, it looks really good. It looks great. And you just know when you see that Olympic level of strength, it looks amazing. And sometimes it’s like, it’s poetry emotion, but what’s behind that poetry emotion? Well, that’s what’s behind it. It’s being able to use those muscles really, really well. And then when you’re kicking that leg out, how are you using your glutes when you’re doing that? And is your leg popping to the side? Or is there other dysfunctional movement? Are your toes starting to turn outwards or inwards? There’s all of those little nuances of alignment and control that, like I said, needs good coaching. You need to be coached to it. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And yeah, that’s brilliant. And you look at Caleb Dressel in his underwater work, like he’s just, it’s amazing that he’s, so obviously, it’s obvious that he’s so much better

than everyone else in his underwater work when he’s against every other swimmer in the world. Like it’s just incredible to see that level of performance. So he’s really the gold standard for that kind of thing, is that core strength, because you can just notice it when he swims. It’s just amazing how strong he is and I guess that connection, how it flows through and he just makes it look so easy. So yeah. And for everyone that goes out and watches that video and tries to do those exercises straight away, just be aware, he’s doing those things at what I would call a level four. So we’d have like three levels that we’d work on before moving into that really high level, straight full body, you know, kicking one leg up at a time and those sort of things. So he does those things at a very high level, which for him, it’s not a high level for him. It’s just some basic course which on work for him. And you’re talking about, you’d have three levels before

that you don’t talk a little bit about your, well, about your business and what you guys do because we haven’t really talked about that yet, but I think that would be useful for people on the podcast. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so it’s control high performance, controlhighperformance.com is our website. So look, we focus on athlete development, but we do, you know, we do video coaching and we’ve been doing a lot of Zoom work this year. And we’ve been coaching everyone over Zoom and doing it that way. So which has been great. It’s certainly added to our skill set in coaching people in a completely different way. But yeah, look, we have a different approach, very different approach, I think, particularly like I was saying around the core work and those sort of things around, you know, developing the fundamentals. And like I said, it’s not a great, it’s not a great sales pitch. When we talk, yeah, I’m not doing a sales pitch here.

When we talk about, you know, these things, you’ve got to do the fundamentals, you’ve got to do the basics and it takes time. But it really does take good coaching. So if you want to improve all of the things that we’re talking about here, you can’t really just grab that off a YouTube video, especially a very high level athlete. There’s very, the works at a really high level

of performance and then try and replicate those moves. You might look like you’re doing the same positions, but internally you’re going to be doing something quite differently. So having a trained eye that understands and can observe how that, what level you’re actually at. And like I said, there’s crossfitters out there that are doing multiple deadlifts with hundreds of kilos and hundreds of chin-ups and all of that sort of stuff. But, and it’s really hard for them to, I guess, get their ego out of the way to rehab themselves and go back to those subtle basics. And then, but when they do, the performance benefits are great. But usually they do it when they’ve already been in a lot of pain for a long time. So pain or injury or something like that. But that’s how a lot of people get into Pilates as well, is that they find Pilates through an injury. And then they would never would have been able to slow down enough to do that sort of stuff

because it seems like there’s very little payoff to Pilates, which ironically has the biggest payoff out of anything you do athletically. So those things that are subtle and boring and those sort of things and internal and you have to be mindful and all of those sort of things, they’re actually the things that have the biggest payoff for your long-term health and your long-term performance as well. That old adage, it’s very hard to sell a prevention, but it’s very easy to sell a cure. That’s right. And up, but I think with how you’re pitching it is like, this is gonna take time, right? I think that way you find the right people to work with because if you’re saying I can fix you by next week and like it’s just, I think you attract the wrong kind of person to work with. And so over the last few years, I’ve been very mindful of the way that I frame how long it’s going to take to improve and the type of results to expect

because, and I’ve found that’s helped a lot with the type of people that I get coming to clinics and camps, like they are willing to invest the time. And they’re willing to go through that period of discomfort where it’s not gonna feel good and they’ll get frustrated because it’s not maybe happening that quickly, but they know that it’s gonna take some time. So I’ve found it to be a much better type of person to work with. And as a coach and someone who’s as detailed as you, I imagine you’d find it the same thing as you much prefer to work with those people who you know are gonna be with you long-term because they’re invested in it. Yeah, that’s right. And look, I’m very lucky. I work full-time as a lecturer and a researcher. So I don’t have to work with people that I don’t wanna work with basically. So yeah, I only work with people that I want to work with. And yeah, I guess it’s lucky to be able to do that and not to have to try and do the quick sell

or anything like that.

And yeah, the business is really just an extension of doing what I love doing. And enrolling other people in that. So I’ve got Trent as my equal partner in the business as well. And he’s certainly coming along in leaps and bounds and he’s doing his master’s degree now and learning really fast. So it’s certainly coming together. Yeah, that’s awesome. We’ll put the links in the show notes but control high performance. And Sam, thanks so much for this three part episode. This has been fantastic. I’ve learned a lot. And yes, particularly about the feet, the ankles, we’re talking about that but also just some of those basic core control movements because for me, I work so much on technique with people and it’s obvious to me when they’re not connected starting from the core. And look at it, it’s hard to just sit down with someone and in 10 minutes try to distill all of the stuff that’s going on in their stroke and put it in a way that they can hopefully take away

something and improve without getting stuck into the nitty gritty in the detail of some of the core control, developing your core and that kind of thing. But to me, it kind of gives me a bit more information that I can then hopefully package up in a way that people can implement that stuff and just over time improve their swimming. So thank you Sam very much. That was awesome. Oh, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Just, yeah, great to catch up with you Brent. Thank you very much. Yeah, likewise. Thanks Matt, we’ll catch you soon. Awesome, thanks mate. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post Deep Core vs 6-Pack Abs – Developing What Really Matters In Swimming with Sam Fenton – Part 3 appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Welcome to Part 2 of our podcast episode with Sam Fenton. In this episode, Sam talked about the importance of having ankle strength and flexibility; and how can you improve your stiff ankles.

05:15 Why Underwater Dolphin Kick?
06:15 Ankle Strength And Flexibility
07:43 Range And Strength
10:00 How Do You Improve Range And Strength?
13:18 Need To Have Strong/ Smart Feet
14:07 Improving Stiff Ankles
19:39 Improving Strength
24:33 Conditioning Takes A Long Time.

Swim Strength and Flexibility – Ankle Exercises to Improve Underwater Dolphin Kick

You can get inspired by a book like Born to Run and then just go out and start barefoot running marathons. If you’re a marathon runner, it doesn’t work like that. It takes years and years and years and different motor patterns to condition your tendons over a long period of time to adapt to a new movement pattern, particularly things that you do repetitively for long periods of time, like running or swimming or anything like that. So changes aren’t fast. They’re slow and conditioning is something that you do over a long period of time. 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. My guest for part two of this podcast is Sam Fenton. Sam, welcome back. Thank you. So in the first episode we talked about the high performance model and a way to basically

keep people who start sport at a young age, how to keep them in that sport for longer and how to have them, it’s almost like having a better attitude towards fitness and health later on in life and having them to continue that healthy, active lifestyle instead of the churn and burn kind of model. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So big change now from what we call a physical literacy model. So huge in Canada, they’ve institutionalized physical literacy right throughout the entire country and big in a lot of other countries, but Australia, we’re just getting on board now with it. So sport Australia is getting right behind it. Now that sport is under DHHS as well, so now sport and health are linked together by funding and politics, I guess. So it’s a really big thing in Australia now that’ll be rolling out over the next few years and getting into the school curriculum. And that’s where I’m doing my PhD studies in that space of getting schools to do

that stuff. So if you haven’t heard that episode, that was part one of the podcast series with Sam. And today we’re talking about something that I think 99% of our listeners will be interested in. And that’s talking about feet and ankles and how you can go from having an anchor at the end of your legs to a propeller. And I know from experience working with a lot of adult swimmers and triathletes that ankle mobility or flexibility is a real issue for them. And more times than not, their feet are slowing them down rather than assisting them. So we’re going to look at today a couple of things that will help you improve your range of motion with your feet, even if you think that it’s just done for if you can’t get that any better than where you currently are. We’re also going to look at how will some exercises as well that’s going to help you basically just become a better kicker. And I’m really interested in some of the things you’ve got to say,

because you’ve studied this in depth. And I’d say I know a little bit about it, but no, I knew as much as you. So let’s let’s get into it. OK, all right. So you’ll just have to allow the screen sharing thing so I can pop that up here. But just the way people listening, they won’t have any visual as well, I guess. But I guess this was a research project I did for my master’s as part of a master in high performance sport. And and I wanted to I was fascinated by research that had been done by a huge team by Dr. Rajat Mittle and a guy called Frank Fish, which is a pretty apt name. And a huge team of researchers and a big bucket of money by the US Navy to put together supercomputers and a huge system to

to analyze every particle of water. And every particle of a dolphin to to figure out what was the most efficient way to move through the water, obviously with the end goal for the US Navy was a submarine that can’t be can’t be detected. But then after that research that they they broke down every molecule of water, every molecule of the dolphin, how it moves through the water and all of that sort of stuff and how efficiently it moves through the water. They they had all of this gear that had this research team and they had nothing else to do after this project finished. So so Dr. Rajat Mittle rang up the US swim team. And this was when Michael Phelps was at his peak and they tested the top 50 swimmers and did exactly the same research on them. The outcome of that was that Michael Phelps was the closest person from that from those 50 swimmers to to swim in to emulate the movement of the dolphin, but particularly of particular interest.

What was happening was the propulsion that was coming from his feet. As we know, as a lot of people might know, he has rather large feet, but it was how he used those feet to propel through the water that was of particular interest.

Have you allowed the. Yeah, you’d be able to bring up this. Yeah, so people are listening to this on our iTunes or on Spotify. Sam’s showing a video. So we’ll make it as good as we can if you can’t see the video. But you can also find this on our YouTube channel, which is the effortless swimming YouTube channel, which we ought to find if you just look it up on Google.

Yeah, OK, so for me as a strength and conditioning coach for swimming, the interest for me was the extra efficiency and speed that you get from the underwater dolphin kick, which is why we’ve seen, you know, everyone exploit that 15 metres either end of the pool in competitive swimming. So and the reason for that is the reduced drag, the reduced energy expenditure and the slightly holder speed and the slightly higher speed comes from holding the speed that you get from the push off the ball or the dive that you get to start. So when you hit the top of the water, then you’ve got surface drag

and you increase in energy expenditure. So so you might swim at the same close to the same speed, but using heaps more energy. And I think for the triathletes out there and those just trying to learn how to swim faster or not be slowed down by their legs or be slowed down by their feet, this is where it starts to get important, this information. So so the basic sort of four sort of quadrants of research that we didn’t know about that was out there already was the the Von La Boke one was the the underwater the dolphin studies that was done then on the US swim team increase and increase of dorsiflexion strength and internal rotation strength both from the same study. That’s what really interested me because there was nothing like that out there and everything that I read and everything that I’d asked swim coaches ahead of doing this study was that pliability of the ankle or flexibility of the ankle was what was most important.

So what this study was suggesting, which was new to me and I think new to the swimming world, which is why I wanted to do the research was that there was a huge strength component.

And there was another Japanese study that was done that showed five degrees of extra plantar flexion in a computer model increased speed and efficiency. So I think for anyone watching out there, I think that’s probably one of the key things is that a small increase in flexibility and an increase in strength through your feet can make a big difference. Now, what I did was put that together in a study.

And I just skipped the next slide there. So what I did was put that into a study looking at the range and strength. So so I chose a couple of swim teams where I knew I could get really good coaches. MLC where where you’re currently being doing a bit of work, Brent and and none wanting some club. And I had a couple of coaches there help me out. And I had Andrew and Andy Andy Cameron do the do the actual physical dynamometer test to test the strength of the feet and the flexibility of the feet. And what I came up with out of my study was just a good protocol, which is just a twenty twenty five meter underwater swim and looked at whether strength and range was were factors. But we put everything else through, you know, we put everything else through the mill as well, everything that you would expect. So all of the upper body range, the the streamline range,

you know, and I had lots of swim coaches telling me what’s important in the underwater dolphin kick. Some say it’s the hips, some say it’s the upper body, some say it’s, you know, natural talent. You know, people have lots of different reasons for performance and what came out of this study. We put it all through a

statistical analysis and what came out was that 30 percent of the performance was explained by the range and flexibility put together, which is which is what I expected from the previous studies that have been done. But it hadn’t been done before in a in a in a practical competitive setting with with age group swimmers. Do you mean do you mean strength and flexibility or range and flexibility? Yeah, as I said, yeah, yeah, so strength and flexibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So with the statistical with the statistical modelling that we did,

every every bit of data that we gathered goes through. And then the the regression analysis spits out a couple of models that showed the biggest improvement. And so the model that came out with the biggest improvement was a right was a mixture of the range and strength,

which, again, I expected from computer modelling, but again, we hadn’t seen it in a practical setting and it showed up showing that, you know, it was responsible for 30 percent of the performance. So so it’s a really, really big factor. And I guess maybe I’m skipping ahead, but I guess a big question for a lot of a lot of people will be thinking now is, all right, that’s that sounds great. How do I now improve those two things? Yeah. And that’s what every swim coach said straight away when they saw me doing the study. As soon as they saw Andrew, you know, with the dynamometer doing that doing the testing and me sitting there with my spreadsheet and those sort of things, they were like, does that make a difference? And I said, well, that’s a hypothesis. I think it does. And and they’re like, well, what do I have to do? What exercises? And they’re like, well, do I do ballet exercises? You know, things like, you know, the all those foot movements

and foot stretching and foot strengthening. And the answer is actually yes. So those stronger feet, smarter feet are really, really important. A really there’s some other really interesting studies that I haven’t spoken about where that they did do on age group swimmers, where they they showed that skilled age group swimmers who were skilled in the underwater dolphin kick were grabbing vortices that came off their knees because because humans are clunky, we’ve got all these joints. Dolphins are smooth and they, you know, and they they move like a, you know, they’ve got a right down to the end. It’s a wave that goes through their body that generates the propulsion. But because humans have hips and knees and ankles, there’s there’s all of those places there, those segments of the body that create lots of friction in the water or vortices in the water. But what they showed was that the skilled swimmers were actually grabbing the vortices that were going in the opposite direction

coming off the knees and then then grabbing those vortices and turning them into a jet stream aimed in precisely the right direction. So so what we know is that there’s there’s a lot there’s a lot more to the story that it’s not just flexibility, it’s strength and skill and and what I believe. And and and this is, you know, a lot of research down the track. There needs to be done. But there’s there’s a huge element of proprioception here of getting that feedback to motor control loop and being able to and feeling on your skin and I know this from, you know, working with swimmers that work at a really, really high level of skill that teach me a lot about strength and conditioning is that they have such a feel and they can feel the water on their skin and they adjust to that. And that’s why they learn how to propel themselves through the water and they learn to avoid resistance. And they also can feel that through their feet.

And and what what we know now that skilled swimmers are doing is they’re actually grabbing water says they’re finding areas of water that are moving in the opposite direction, grabbing them with their feet, turning them into a jets jet stream and creating propulsion, which is amazing. It’s amazing to know that that’s happening. How do they, you know, it’s boggles the mind in terms of how much

neural power or brain power or, you know, you know, utilizing that proprioceptive feedback loop that it would take to actually understand what’s going on, let alone understand it and turn that into moving really, really fast through the water. So, yeah, so for a long story short, the key, the key, I mean, the several key to this, but around the feet, the feet are super, super important in performance. They either speed you up or they slow you down. And you need to have strong feet, smart feet and the right amount of flexibility. So if your feet are just floppy, then that doesn’t necessarily help.

And thinking from a lot of the triathletes I work with, particularly if they’ve come from running background, very stiff ankles and often quite limited. What what could those athletes do to over time improve it? And we know that we don’t want to talk about this last time is we don’t want to just sit on the feet and stretch you’re talking the ligaments because it’s not great for them. So what can I do to just gradually improve it? Yeah. OK. So the thing is what we’re talking about going back to that five percent study that was done through computer modelling and Japanese study.

A little a little bit of extra range makes makes a big difference. And it’s probably better to say things like range and mobility than flexibility, because when you say flexibility, people think, oh, well, if I just jump on my feet and rock backwards on them, then that’s going to then they’re going to be more flexible. And yes, they will be more flexible, but you might cause a lot of damage, particularly if you have stiff feet to start with. So you might just be tearing at the ligaments of your feet. And once you’ve you know, once you’ve stretched the ligaments, you’ve created instability. You’ve created probably a much worse situation than you started with. This is and this is the this is the juxtaposition of

things that you need from a human performance perspective for triathletes, because running on land, you increase performance through stiffness and then running on water after running on water swimming. Sorry, you improve your performance through through your mobility and skilled and creating a skilled wave movement through your body. So so that’s so that’s the big challenge. So it’s it’s mobility stuff. So the more the more you can do with conditioning, your tendons. So that that means rolling from so with a foam roller or a tennis ball or a myofascial ball of some description or a myofascial roller is rolling from your knees all the way down. So the connective tissue goes, you know, it goes up through your feet. You’ve got all of these like strings that go from your toes right up through your shins, connect around sheaths around your tibialis anterior or your big shin muscle and and all of your other muscles around your feet.

Or which is also an internal rotator, which also is a big part of how you internally rotate your feet, which is a big part of how you hold hold your feet to create propulsion in the water as well. So so you need to do control work where you’re controlling what your feet are doing. So really simple stuff. So with with our summers, what we do is just circles in circles out and pull up as hard as you can and push down as hard as you can. So if you do that, we are able to pull down this the share screen because I reckon I don’t know if you’re recording this. It might not get you I’m showing that motion. So OK, so just showing it with my hands. So so if you’re so doing circles out with your feet and and you and you’re creating as much dexterity as you can through to your toes. So you try right through your foot. So that’s back of your foot. You’re trying to bend your foot backwards. You’re trying to rotate right up right around push down as hard as you can

and push up now for our stiff footed friends. They’re going to start cramping probably within about 10 reps. All right. So if you’re pulling up as hard as you can, pushing to the side as hard as you can and pushing down as hard as you can. But what you’re actually doing is because because all of those tendons are running through your feet, running through the bones, you’re starting to free free them up and you’re starting to push and pull and push and pull them through a range that they might they might not have ever gone through. So so you’re starting to open them up and starting to get them moving. You’re making your feet smarter. You’re getting your feet and you’re watching them too. So you’re getting a sense of your feet becoming more aware of your feet. So you’re connecting visual neurons to motor neurons to receptors that you get when you get pain. And if you have sore muscles the next day, you have more receptors as well.

So you’re building up more and more skill, more and more

receptors and motor neurons, receptor neurons that can can develop that whole feedback loop. It’s going to make your kick a lot better and it’s really, really important because if you think about doing a long a long swim as part of as part of an overall triathlon, you don’t want your feet slowing you down and making you work harder and wasting energy that you could be using at the end of your race. So it’s really, really important. And in terms of the rolling, so you’re talking about rolling out like through through the front part of your your leg, your shin and even on the side a little bit by the sounds of it. Like through there. Yeah. And what about the the calves can as well? Is that going to help or is it more just on the front? Yep. So so yeah, there wouldn’t be in terms of plantile flexion. So so pushing your foot down.

So so this is the top of your foot. So when so when you kick on the water and this and this is just as much for freestyle kick out in the surf as it is for underwater dolphin kick, you want to create this surface here where you’re pushing back and and and projecting on the water.

There’s more to it there. There’s actually a scaling action involved as well, which is using the Bernoulli principle, which is a whole another thing to get into. But but yeah, it’s it’s really, really important that you roll everything from the knee all the way down to the end of the toes to condition the fascia and fascia takes a long time to condition a long, long time. So that’s why it’s important that you take your feet through those range. You actively take them through that range. It’s not a passive stretch again, which is why just sitting on your feet and rocking back is not such a great idea really for really for anyone. That’s not something that I’ve ever encouraged. I always see it and swimmers keep doing it all the time. And look, I’ve recommended it before as well. So it’s good to have it’s good to have a few different ways to improve it. So that’s looked at at the range of motion. And now what are you doing in terms of strength?

Yeah, so just just with a band of actually, I’ll put up a YouTube video of Ruby doing this out of the study as well.

But yeah, just just again, just pushing down, which is, you know, plan up flexion, pushing down with a with our band, you know, like a ribbon band around your feet. So pushing down as hard as you can, pulling up as hard as you can and turning in and turning out. So and have you got the band around your feet the whole time as you do that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Gotcha. So yeah, just like a fair ribbon, fair band, like a similar one that you use for your shoulder, shoulder rotation, the internal and external rotations and stuff like that as well. Yeah, same deal. You can put a link. You can put a link to the video in your in your feet down the bottom. Yeah, but yeah, it’s just pushing down, pulling up and being able to create that circle against against resistance to strengthen the muscles. Like I said, with no band, just just doing those movements, pushing down, pulling up and doing circles outwards and doing circles inwards. If you do 50 reps, each of those, that’s a couple of hundred reps right there, you’ll be conditioned and you’ll be improving your condition. And like I said, for our stiff footed friends, that’s, you know, they’re going to start the muscles will start burning after about 10 reps or so if they’re pushing.

Yeah, I look so many clinics on the weekend and yeah, quite a few people said they cramp all the time. They cramp in their in their feet. They cramp in their calves and and so that stuff’s obviously going to help. Is there anything else that would help them avoid cramping there? And like I think a lot of times that it seems like it’s just stiffness through the feet and through the through the calves and just through the entire leg from all the running and riding and stuff. But what other things would you suggest that they do there? Yeah, it’s not just yeah, look, it’s it’s it’s like a conditioning through those muscles, too. So right as as as you would know, and you would have experienced as well.

If, you know, when you get back in the pool after a long time and and you’re getting cramps, it’s it’s in those muscles the least condition that’s where you start cramping. So yeah, look, the huge issue with feet and I don’t want to get controversial here. Do it get controversial. Yeah, look, if but I think it makes sense. If you think of strapping your foot down in a in a moon boot in in one of those boots, if you’ve ever had a broken foot or an ankle or whatever it is, you strap your feet down and what happens to your feet? I’m not sure I’ve never. Well, they just don’t get used. So I guess they some of the muscles waste away and probably lose or you lose conditioning. Yeah, so you lose conditioning, you lose control, you lose strength and you lose muscle. Now, unless you do something to gain that muscle back,

you’re you know, you’re permanently

a little bit less able to do something right because you have less muscle and less and less strength. Your physiology has changed. Now, if you strap your foot down into a shoe and this this goes for bike shoes. So ski boots, snowboard boots,

any type of shoe that you strap your foot down really, really hard into, you’ve basically strapped your foot down into a moon boot. So then what you’re relying on is everything above above that part of the chain to do all the work. And then all of a sudden you’re doing something that requires a lot of work from muscles that are used to being, you know, fixed, fixed down and laced down or, you know, if you crank your shoes up in your on your bike as well. So and there’s no movement allowed in all of those situations. So we’ve got it. We’ve got a pretty strong culture of strapping down our feet and and and really anesthetizing them and not and not not appreciating them, I think. So but there’s, you know, the whole barefoot movement in the class action against the vibrant five fingers as well. But the answer to that is that

you can’t get inspired by a book like Born to Run and then just go out and start barefoot running marathons if you’re a marathon runner, doesn’t work like that. It takes years and years and years and different motor patterns to condition your tendons over a long period of time to adapt to a new movement pattern, particularly things that you do repetitively for long periods of time, like running or swimming or anything like that. So changes aren’t fast. They’re slow and conditioning is something that you do over a long period of time, which is not a it’s not a sexy thing to say. If you want to if you want to sell products and you want to sell something, you say, you know, fast, easy results.

But the reality is a little bit different. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And look when that I listened to that book on as an audio book and got my vibrams, went for a few runs, got super tight calves and machines were in pain for a while and and didn’t use them since. That’s right. Yeah. Guilty. Yeah, and a huge on-site suit went in a class action against five. And so. Yeah, so the you know, it’s so the there’s the there’s the inspiration and then there’s a real story. I mean, if you’re a Tamarind Indian that grew up from a child, you know, running like that in that sort of way on bare feet, that would be fine. But if you’ve grown up all of your, you know, all of your life in a moon boot and then all of a sudden you want to you want to do this, you know, different, completely different style, which puts completely different stresses on your body. It’s it’s not going to work overnight. It’s going to take a long time to adapt.

And the audio are, you know, the longer it takes those adaptations to to kick in. So that’s why it’s great to do this stuff with with little kids. And you see, you know, countries like New Zealand with with their small sided barefoot games in getting little kids to play small side games of rugby and bare feet. And it’s a big part of their culture, you know, and look at what the All Blacks did over the last couple of decades. So, yeah, there’s there’s different ways to go about it. Have you I mean, I guess, yeah, you’re what have you seen with the kids that you’ve worked with in terms of doing these strengthening exercises, like how long does it take to see results? Is it noticeable for you or for the coaches over the course of a couple of months to to see their kick improving? Like what’s what have you seen? Yeah, we can say anecdotally

that we’ve done it and, you know, they’re kicking is getting better. So it’s it doesn’t it doesn’t automatically and necessarily transfer straight over the pool. And I haven’t done a study on it with our own swimmers. I’ve only done a study to say that well to look at whether if you’re stronger and more flexible through there does that improve your underwater work. And, you know, and it did. So that’s what and that’s what I was expecting. And the outcome of that for me was to always include the foot exercises that we do in our in our warm ups and exercise routines

and just be just be very aware of it and make sure that we’re always doing that part of the training and generally as a as you know, Trent, as a swimming club, we do we do pretty well for for a country swimming club. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Well, and that’s a drug and swimming club as didn’t mention that before. But that’s where yeah, where I still compete for them. And that’s where I grew up swimming. And that’s where dad coaches as well. So Sam, that’s great. I think we’ll leave it there for this part two episode on feet and ankles. And that’s for me, you know, working with a lot of adults, swimmers and triathletes that give that’s given me a lot of hope that there is ways to improve their range of motion through their feet because it’s often a limiting factor in a big, big way. And like for me personally, I focus a lot on the front end of the stroke the catch in the pool, because if you’re wearing a wetsuit,

look, that’s mostly what’s going to make the biggest difference is that stuff. But certainly your feet can slow you down and we say that all the time. So, Sam, thanks very much. And we’ll be back for part three where we’re going to talk about deep core work and how you can develop your deep core strength and how that translates to swimming and better coordination through the rest of the body.

So thank you, Sam. 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 Transforming Your Feet Into Propellers (Even If Your Ankles Are STIFF!) with Sam Fenton – Part 2 appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Sam Fenton is the High-Performance Manager of Control High Performance, he has been involved with sports for close to 20 years now and is in charge of Strength and Conditioning/ Performance programs.

Sam will be joining us for a three-part podcast, for the next episodes, Sam and I will be talking about:

Part 2:Transforming Your Feet Into Propellors (Even If Your Ankles Are STIFF!)

Part 3:Deep Core vs 6-Pack Abs – Developing What Really Matters In Swimming

Watch out for the next episodes!!

05:42 Looking Into High-Performance Approach
06:12 High-Performance Approach and Physical Literacy Approach Together
07:12 High-Performance Approach – Wholesome Approach
12:21 Does Elite Swimmers Suffer As A Result Of Taking Softer Approach?
15:53 Being Smart About Your Rest
16:52 Incremental Improvements
19:01 For Coaches Transitioning to High-Performance Approach
22:55 Thinking Brain v.s Feeling Brain
24:15 Going Into The Zone
26::34 What Happens If You Are Training Tired?
27:02 Pre-Training Routine
28:36 Load Management
32:25 Follow The 10% Rule
33:47 Strength and Conditioning – Balance Your Body Out

Um, high performance is a different way of looking at it. So it’s continual, uh, less, less, um, extreme periodization and more incremental, consistent improvement, obviously a lot more recovery. 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 the one and only Sam Fenton and Sam, we’ve known each other for many years now, I think it’s been, um, oh, I can’t even think back probably almost 20 years, close to. Yeah. 2002, we’re probably 2003. We were into each other for the first time. Yeah. It’s about 18 years in the way that, that we kind of got introduced to each other was that my dad, who was Muslim coach at the time, he was running some strength and conditioning, some pretty basic stuff. But for that time it was, you know, it was quite advanced for country swimming.

And then I remember he always tells the story that you came along and you said, I think I can do a better job than what you’re doing. And, uh, that kind of got your foot in the door. And since then you’ve been working not only with the truck and swim club, which, which I grew up with and I still compete for now and then, but, um, you’ve gone on and done a huge range of things. Some is swimming related. Some is related to high performance and a whole bunch of other things. So I think it’d be useful for the people on the call, just a bit of a quick, I guess, background on some of the things that you’ve done over the past couple of years in terms of what you’ve studied, what you, who you’ve worked with and who you’ve learned from. And just a bit of a rundown on those things. Cause I think it’s, uh, it’s pretty impressive. Um, look, I guess, uh, one of the key things that, um, I’ve always believed, I guess, about having a career in a regional area in Tralgan is that

you can have excellence right where you are. And I think this COVID things really proved it that we don’t actually need to, you don’t need to be in the city. You don’t need to be in an institute of sport as such that you can do all of those things locally. And your dad, Brian was, um, was probably a big reason for me sticking around in Tralgan because there was someone, because I certainly wasn’t getting that in other places where I was working and through other people around the area, but, um, I certainly got that through Brian. So, so Brian’s certainly the key figure, um, in terms of, uh, my learning around working with athletes and working with, uh, that whole system, I guess, but, uh, from the, I guess, the strength and conditioning and sports science perspective, my big, uh, my big thing has to been to find out, you know, what the best are doing and then bring that home to our home program. So, um, I guess it started in 2004, 2005.

In that perspective, I did an internship at the Victorian Institute of Sport during that time. That’s when Michael Klim was doing his rehab program, uh, rehabbing his shoulder and, um, having his last, last crack at getting back in the pool and I got to, and I just, I just ferociously took notes and diagrams of all of his exercises and, and took note of what he did back then. So that was, uh, and I got to spend that time with, uh, sitting across from Bernard Savage, who was a, um, who’s one of the early versions of a high-performance manager, uh, back in the day, back in those days, um, high-performance managers are all over the place now, but back then it was a pretty, uh, it was a new concept, I guess. Um, so, yeah, from there, I did, uh, you know, I, I learned lots of stuff off as many people as I could, um, all over the place, uh, one of the, one of the big turning points in changing, changing the program too was, um, I went to a

homebush, I was doing my strength conditioning level two up there in Sydney and, uh, I, I went to see the, um, David, David Wilkins, and I think it was, who was a previous head coach, um, the Australian swim team and, um, and had a look at the program there and he was coaching the juniors, uh, or the under 15s or whatever it was. And, uh, there wasn’t much going on there and, and, uh, he was sort of on the back end of his career, having a coffee, sitting in a plastic chair and, and, uh, not really doing a whole lot, just, um, addressing a few complaints here and there about the cold water and that sort of thing in, in homebush, you know, which is this amazing facility. And then up on the deck, I could see the, uh, the Australian dive team doing their strength and conditioning warm-up. So I, um, I went, I went up there and again, just ferociously took notes and came up with all of these, uh, things that I could take home and apply.

And, and you were, you were the recipient of that. You would have been doing a lot of those exercises that I learned poolside from the Australian dive team. Um, so from there, I guess I just kept learning, just kept, um, benchmarking, going and looking at different programs around the place. Uh, and then in 2015, um, or recently I served my master of high performance sport through University of Canberra. So that was awesome because I had access to all of the sports scientists, um, and, uh, everything that was around the Australian Institute of Sport, um, and, and learning from those guys who are also lecturers at, at the University of Canberra. Um, and that was, that was just a real turning point. And that’s where I actually did some real research in terms of, uh, the underwater dolphin kick. And I learned about, um, I guess everything I could about the, about the underwater dolphin kick in particular and performance in that space.

Um, and then more recently, um, through PhD studies, I’ve been doing some work with, uh, Dick Telford and the, and, uh, his son, Rowan Telford around physical literacy, uh, and those sort of things. And, um, I finished working with those guys and now I’m doing physical literacy, uh, research with local schools in, in my local area. So, um, yeah, I guess it’s been a long, that’s a long answer, but, uh, yeah, that’s, uh, that’s what I’m into now is, is taking that high performance approach and, uh, building that into a physical literacy approach. So the high performance approach is, is away from the peak performance. So peak performance, uh, by definition has a trough. So if you’re going to peak, you’ve got a trough. Um, high performance is a different way of looking at it. So it’s continual, uh, less, less, um, extreme, um, periodization and more incremental, consistent improvement, obviously a lot more recovery.

That’s one of the big things in high performance is you’ll see a lot more recovery focus now. Um, and the high performance approach and the physical literacy approach together means that, you know, before there was a, it was a peak, it was just a triangle and you’d cut, cut, cut, cut to get to the top of the triangle. Um, and, and that’s, you know, and that’s your elite athletes is this tiny little less than 1% of the population up there. But, uh, the approach now is, is now there’s, yes, there’s, there’s still that peak there, but it looks, it’s off on this angle. And then everyone here as they, as they fall out of high performance sport. So like yourself Brent, you’re in a national program. And as you decide to move on with your career or do other things in, uh, in life, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve filled up this other area here, which is lifelong, um, physical activity. So enjoying lifelong physical activity. So it’s a different approach, a much more

holistic approach, uh, and a much healthier approach, unless, um, getting rid of everyone that doesn’t meet your standards. There’s always things for them to do. And hopefully loving the sport, you know, loving swimming, riding, running and that sort of thing. I think that’s a, um, that’s a good segue into what we’ll talk about here. And this is going to be a three-part, um, podcast cause I think there’s, there’s three really good topics that we’ll, that we’ll chat about. And, uh, I think people who sort of see, see that or go, yeah, I probably want to listen to all of them. But if it’s a really long podcast, they probably, you know, they may not get the chance. So the three topics that we’ll talk about are that sort of ankle flexibility and strength. And I’m really curious to ask you, you know, some questions about it, because I work a lot with adults and triathletes and look at, um, you’ve sort of seen it on the more high performance

or elite end with, with that and what makes a difference with that. But I’m curious just to see what we can, um, derive from that for people with maybe poor ankle flexibility and, um, yeah, and who find themselves going backwards when they’re kicking with the board. The other topic we’ll talk about is, um, deep core work. So, um, curious as to some exercise with that and, um, you said it, a lot of people just, just miss it. So curious about that. And then the third one, which we’ll talk about, um, right now is what you just mentioned there with the physical literacy and you talked about high performance where it’s, it’s almost like the kind of Chinese model where you’ve got all these people, you know, doing the sport, you don’t make that level. You’re out. You keep, you know, going and it’s just, um, you retain the only the very best, but now they’re moving more towards that physical fitness and health for, for life.

So with, with, with that in mind, what are some of the things that you’ve, you’ve found and what the, what is different between the clubs and I guess the sporting bodies that do that well compared to those that don’t and how’s that changing?

Okay. So from the high performance perspective you’re talking about. Yeah, like that, that shift from just the, like, you know, the pyramid, just where people get cut to the other one. Absolutely. So well, as, as we know from a lot of

ex-ex-swimmers, not just from, from our swimming club, but we’ve, we’ve seen a lot of swimmers that we’ve dealt with over the years go to swimming clubs where it’s, it’s very, it’s very cutthroat.

And, you know, being in a, in a situation where you’ve got only the best of the best swimmers get to, you know, swim in this lane and if you’re not so good you swing that lane and if there’s anything else you get quarantined and sort of put out in the outer lane and just treated like a number.

That’s, you know, and we’ve seen, we’ve seen the, the downfall of that and the downfall of that is for some people, this is a lifelong issues that they’ll have from, I wouldn’t say abuse is, is a really strong word but, but if you’ve been belittled and made to feel small and that’s happened over and over and over to you again, there’s, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of people that have been through that system where they’ve been cut, cut, cut and ostracised that they, you know, their mental health is, is the, is the victim of that. So, yeah, I think, I think this approach that we’ve got now, which is a much more, the high performance approach is about incremental improvement in all areas. So, it’s not just, it’s not just the physicality, it’s not just treating the body and the, and the athlete as a machine, it’s treating them as a whole person and focusing on their wellness, focusing on their load management, making sure that

they’re not getting overuse injuries but making sure that they’re recovering and a lot more focus on wellness and mental health. So, a lot of training, breathwork meditation and also a lot of time in the foam roller, a lot of recovery and, you know, as you know, the ice baths and making sure you’ve got appropriate nutrition and hydration and all of those sort of things. But certainly a move away from things like, you know, from the nutrition point of view, diet plans, where you’re calorie accounting and all of that sort of stuff, there’s been a big move away from that and just holistic approach and we’ve got a lot more science out now in nutrition. So, we know that looking after our athletes isn’t about giving them the best diet, it’s about making sure they’re eating really healthy and making sure they’re eating in a way that serves them as an individual because everyone is really individual in how they respond to exercise and everyone is

really individual in how they respond to food. So, having an open approach and a consultative approach with athletes is the big difference. Yeah, I love that and that’s certainly the approach that I like to take with people and I mean, I work primarily with adults and a lot of them have only just got back in the pool after like 20, 25 years out of the water from say school and that’s not necessarily from overtraining and just being beat down or anything, but you do see it particularly after their kids are a bit older and that sort of thing, like they get back in the water or they start triathlon and they’re just starting to get that physical fitness back and so it’s great to see that but particularly for the age groupers, the younger kids and going on from there, you look at that approach and I guess the question in the back of my mind there is does the high end of the performance, you know, your elites are major professionals,

does that suffer as a result of taking this, I’d call it a softer approach in a way, you know, it’s not the hard line approach, does that suffer as a result of taking this softer approach?

Yeah, quite the opposite. So that’s the whole thing about it. So as you know, like I’ve done some benchmarking around the place and including around the world.

One of those coaches that I went and spent some time with was a middle distance coach at Stanford University because running is something I’ve been really interested in in the last couple of years in particular. Certainly really keen on watching swimming programs and swim strength and conditioning but I think good running is really, really fundamental to enjoying movement and enjoying your life and having a healthy life. So he’s approach and this is one of and this and he took Stanford from they had a 56 year drought of winning middle distance running. So so for the first time they got for the I think it was a 400 yard dash or whatever they call it, but they broke a 56 year drought with his coach that came along and and gave that approach high performance approach, which is small incremental improvements, lots of recovery but I found the same thing going through their swim strength and conditioning and their swim coach program as

well as well as their track stuff was that they’re really if you turn up and you’re not feeling well, generally you don’t train. So and they weren’t too scientific about it. They weren’t doing high rate variability or anything like that. They were just they they did measure weight. So if you came in dehydrated or underweight or anything like that, they would they would say first have a chat with you and say well what’s wrong and what’s changed in the last couple of days. You know and if exams are on and those sort of things the athletes under high stress, understanding that stress builds upon stress. So nutritional stress, stress, environmental stress,

you know, workout stress and then on top of that exam stress and study stress and work stress and social stress. So if those things all compound, we know that we’re going to get worse performance but you’re going to train worse as well and that’s not going to improve your performance. So a lot more rest

is what’s led to these, you know, big changes in performance. So our performance

across the world hasn’t gone backwards with a high performance profile approach. So our athletes are experiencing much high levels of mental health, mental awareness,

but they’re also they’re also a lot happier and performing better going faster and all of those sort of things. I had a chat to Dick Telford who trained Robert Dickistella and those guys back in the days and he’s a multi-multi, you know Olympic gold medal winning coach with his athletes

and he’s got a 40-year-old that he’s been training recently and, you know, and getting PBs in her mid-40s and I said, Dick, what are you doing differently?

That’s, you know, she’s getting all of these PBs at this really late stage in her career and it just smiled and he’s like, oh, yeah, a bit more rest. That’s that’s it. So the approach is really different and for those, you know, hardcore coaches that are go hard or go home it’s really challenging for them to start resting their athletes a little bit more but the returns are bigger.

Yeah, and it’s it’s good that that is a result of a smarter approach. Now, you don’t want it to go backwards and like it makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean, I think of two weeks ago, right, we sold our house and we bought a house and the stress of like of that period just like and like we were I could feel I was really stressed and so last week I trained normally and I was pushing pretty hard and I could feel myself getting a bit sick but I knew that I was getting sick and it was the stress of that

of buying something the house and then compounded with starting back with from going zero from zero coaching to full time again. All those things added up and then it’s just kind of put me out for about a week and so if you can just keep steady and you can rest when it’s smart to rest it’s you can just keep continuing on that path instead of just going down and going back up and you’re just fighting a it’s a hard battle it’s an uphill battle if you keep you know keep getting sick and you’re not smart about your your rest so it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah it does and if you think about I think the trajectory is the most the easiest way to think about it so so you know you might you might be training down in a hole and this is the super compensation or you know specific adaptation to impose demands theory and all that sort of stuff but so you know you drop them in a hole they super compensate drop in a hole again super compensate you keep doing that and you get here but but

if you if you do incremental improvements which a lot of coaches have just done naturally and a lot of athletes have just done naturally if you do incremental improvements and then it’s a lot smoother that the improvements aren’t as fast the adaptations aren’t as extreme but they’re more consistent and one of the key things I think a lot of people miss in periodized in heavily periodized programs and heavy weight training for athletes is that tendons and soft tissue does not regenerate the same way muscles do so you can get as a strengthening addition coach I can get you super strong super quick no worries with that but I can’t get your tendons strong it’s going to take years and years to get your tendons to adapt because they have a much lower blood supply so and they grow differently bones and and tendons grow differently so you can’t get all of those things to adapt together but you can make it appear that way through heavy periodized training

but we know it doesn’t work so the lesson there is just longer slower approach to building that up

yeah the body adapts slowly so you can lose weight really fast you can lose body fat real fast you can put on muscle real fast you can do all of those things but they’re all superficial

your tendons your your neural improvement so the way that your neurons are firing and wiring those things adapt incrementally and slowly so and and just on that too you know the way your neurons fire and wire if you’re training tired and sloppy or stressed that’s what you’re training your body to do you’re training yourself to move like that so which makes no sense from it from your point of view so

so with if a coach came to you and they said all right I like this approach I’ve been a hard ass in the past but now I now want to change it up and I want to take this approach where I’m looking after my athletes more and it’s a much more long-term approach for them and hopefully a happier approach what are three or three to five things that you would say to them to maybe change in their program and the way they go about things yep so first first is always warm ups so that’s where within you know your first 10 to 15 minutes of how you approach training that’s where you can make the biggest bang for your buck so and that’s that’s always an ongoing conversation we just had that we just had that conversation in our last coaches meeting because I’m not as involved with all of the you know the warm ups and the strength and conditioning as I used to be and I’ve got Trent there

doing a lot of the sessions now for the strength and conditioning so so the the warm ups have started going different directions and talking prior to getting in the water yet prior to getting in the water so we just want to make sure that they’re going in the right direction so within within the

just that first yeah it doesn’t take much that first 10 to 15 minutes if you’re if you’re doing the right activities there it makes a huge difference and there’s some recent research being done through University of Canberra as well around you know what’s the ultimate warm-up for swimming and it’s really it’s it’s basic stuff and there’s and and different parts of the warm-up have different effects but yeah there’s a 12 hour effect of doing a little bit of heavy strength

and you know and the the mobility work and those sort of things have a lasting effect throughout the day if you do some full activation so you activate your whole body as hard as you can and you can do that through skipping as hard as you can for 30 seconds just just little things like that make a huge difference on on your performance on the day but but if you do that you know training session in training session out the the effect you know the trajectory changes and you start improving faster and just on that too so we’re talking about you want to you want to actually warm up so talking skipping talking maybe some activation with like TheraBands and that kind of thing as well is that yep that’s that’s included and with the mobility stuff what sort of mobility stuff are you doing because obviously static stretching yeah it’s kind of that’s not what you’re meant to do before before swimming these days what kind of mobility you’re doing pre-training

yeah so people like static stretching because it feels good but it feels good because it has an anesthetic effect so

but an anesthetic effect you know the last thing you would do if you wanted to improve your speaking performance is put some anesthetic in your mouth yeah it doesn’t make sense to do that right so

so it’s important that your mobility work is is dynamic it’s waking your muscles up but it’s it’s waking you up it’s waking up here in your your neurons and your nervous system as well so breath work how you’re breathing can be effective really super effective but also

that’s why I like foam rolling as well because because it makes you aware so that bit that you’re rolling that’s really tender you’re actually connecting your brain to those muscles and when you when you’re

yeah rolling on a on a consistent basis you’re you’re improving your connection to your skin to your senses which improves your

your proprioception and your coordination so and how you go from a receptor to a motor unit and how you control your movement is really really important that’s you know and we call it our business control because that’s what it’s all about it’s about being having a feeling of control but also being able to control your body it’s yeah that’s interesting I was listening to this is somewhat related Mark Matthews his big wave surfer he’s retired now but I was just listening to him on a podcast and he was saying that every morning he’ll go out and surf and on the way down to the surf for what do you say for it was like 30 seconds I think that he’ll close his eyes and he’ll just walk down and the other stuff around you know it’s not just a clear path but it’s that 30 seconds where he’s switched off the visual component of

you know you can’t see anything and so he’s walking down and he’s and then you can’t he becomes really grounded and aware of everything else like you hear the birds you hear the waves you feel the sound on your feet and it just really enhances those other things and it brings him into the moment and that’s particularly what you need when you’re swimming but I think also so for surfing but you also need that for swimming so I went for a run this morning closed my eyes for probably 40-50 meters now and then and it was really interesting you know I could I heard things that I wouldn’t necessarily hear I was much more conscious of the ground under my feet so yeah that sort of stuff just coming into your senses is very useful especially yeah I know a lot of the some as I work with are up in their thinking brain a lot and so at the clinic I try and get them to go into their feeling brain a lot more especially when they move from drills into the actual swimming

because if you’re overthinking your swimming you’re so mechanical it’s all robotic and there’s no fluency to it no there’s you actually cannot process that much information you actually need to go into that zone so when and when you do go into the and you know and it’s called the zone you’re actually going into Alfred and Theta waves in your brain so which is allowing you to access your entire subconscious and the and that’s why that’s why that’s why all the best athletes in the world put more fundamentals over and over and over again you know and you see all these things on YouTube you know Kobe Bryant keeps getting asked why he keeps doing the fundamentals but you know from basketball as you see you know Steph Curry and all the other basketballers doing exactly the same thing doing the fundamentals over and over and over again

it’s because you need to you need those things to be on automatic pilot so that you can worry about what’s actually going on in the game and so you can be reacting to what’s going on but all of the skills are on automatic pilot there there in the rest of your brain so

there’s a really a couple of really good books on specifically sort of this concept one is the Rise of Superman I don’t know if you’ve come across that book it’s a really really good book about extreme athletes and extreme human performance and how far we’ve come in that space and another one is the talent code by Dan Coyle

in and which is all about the the growth and the wrapping of of Mylan around in terms of the building of skill so it goes through all of the 10,000 our theories and all of those sort of things but

a couple of great books that really break it down for you in getting into the zone and like you said you know getting out of that prefrontal cortex getting out of that that thinking brain where you think you can control everything that you’re aware of you can’t that’s a very little bit of tiny little bit of brain power to access your entire body you know and the neurons in your hands are the same as the neurons in your brain there’s just a bit more of it in your gray matter your entire body is thinking and moving and sensing and creating and some of that a lot of that is going to your spine back out through your

unit so you you have motor units in your spine so they don’t even reach your brain so so you can’t possibly think that you can think your way into

more skilled movement you can’t yeah that’s interesting you have to repeat it let your body repeat those processes which again is why we’re you know what we’re talking about before if you’re training tired if you’re training stressed if you’re training at a low level you’re training to move like that you’re you’re actually teaching your body to move in a painful way or a tired way and even when you’re feeling great that’s how you’re going to move unfortunately and I and I think if you’ve got a set you’ve got a set routine is stick to pre-training like and routines and habits are are so key I reckon like makes me think of so I’ve had a guy a coach Nam Baldwin on the podcast and he was McFanning’s coach and there were he was there at the the pipeline masters and he had to I think make the semifinals at the pipeline masters and to win his second world title and the night before his brother passed away and so he heard about that it was dealing with that and then in the morning

he’s up and he’s he’s surfing in the it was I think it was like the quarters and so the what he had to do is go into his ritual which is sitting on the beach closing his eyes picks up some sand rubs his hands together like this and this is the ritual that he trained himself with for the last 12 months and he was able to get into the zone and actually go on and win the world title and clinched in like the last 30 seconds and it was just an amazing thing to watch and I didn’t know about all that stuff in the background until I heard Nam talk about it but it’s just that particularly at a high performance or elite level it’s um being so good at being able to go on to that zone in the moments where it really counts yeah yeah and it’s it’s something that you practice and you can practice

yeah like that you can practice sitting on the beach you can but the but the those steps the one step that leads into another leads into another those routines

absolutely crucial to that and so we’ve talked to um so we talked about pre-training all right that’s um it’s good to have a a warm up routine that flies you up gets you activated and gets you in the moment and feeling what would be the some other things that you’d recommend to a coach that is looking to to go this way look at load so

so this is look this is one of the toughest thing for coaches I think is to manage the load of their athletes so

and less unless you’ve got a whole physical preparation team and a high performance manager looking after this for you it’s it’s really difficult to manage the levels of activity that that someone’s doing and manage it properly so so if you’ve been out of the water for six weeks or out of or out of the gym for that matter so you’re out of the water out of the gym whatever your activity is

a lot of people come back from that break or that holiday or you know they might have just had the flu or something like that but they come back expecting to

take you know pick up where they left off and it makes from our high performance point of view it makes no sense whatsoever to do that you’ve got to come back at you know where scientifically like you can measure it but you know maybe somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of what you’re doing quick for and then build that back up incrementally so so high performance is easy like it is super easy but from a human behavior point of view it’s really really hard because no one drop their weights down no one wants to come back and do a shorter ride then then the ride that they were doing or a shorter run and the run that they were doing you know their long run week whatever it might be so

so to encourage people to do that it’s it feels deflating or whatever it is

but you know I’m sure you know from triathletes and people that do a lot of long distance work is that people gradually over time get better at it and get better at managing themselves which is part of the reason it’s not just physical adaptation part of the reason people get better in their late 20s early 30s is because they start to mature and their ego starts to they can put their ego aside and train sensibly whereas up you know as you know like ego is a lot bigger in the early 20s especially and you just want to push yourself and push yourself to the limits and going backwards is not an option but you know often that might be forced upon you through an injury I feel like I’ve I feel like I’ve lost some of my edge because look I’ve still got I’ve certainly still got some ego but I think it’s a lot less than what it was

particularly when I was 19 20 and even like late teenage years as well it’s like it’s just reduced a lot from there like you just don’t care as much about what other people think and you don’t have as much of you tied up in the results that you you get I find so or it probably shifts to other things I reckon so yeah it’s which is a good thing especially when it comes to training smarter and I think I’m I’m definitely doing that I’m training a lot less than what I was but can still get pretty similar results I reckon and yeah that’s definitely from I’ve done the hard work in the early years but it’s it’s also from you just you know what what counts and what’s going to actually make a difference and and count to that fitness rather than just over training and I think like with Brian with my dad it like was a I was in a way kind of I didn’t want to not go to training just because I didn’t feel like it like it always go to training

had exams or something I said oh yeah to mind if I just not go and it would really happen but I think I hope he says you know that I don’t need to train but like whenever I asked I said of course you know it doesn’t that’s fine but back then it was like it seemed like a really big deal to to miss training but I’m glad he wasn’t a coach or a parent it’s like no you got to go like it’s going to it means life or death whether you go to this training session or not

yeah yeah and I think that’s you know it’s it’s one of those things

um but back to back to the you know what’s what’s the key bit of advice I’d give in this area is is to manage load is follow the 10% rule so um or maybe or maybe I’d call it a 60 percent 10 percent so if you’ve been away for more than a month come back at somewhere between 60 and 80 percent

don’t be scared to do that because you’ll adapt a lot quicker otherwise you’ll be sore and not want to train and have all of these emotional issues as well

and and you get back into a lightning fast if you come back at a load so and and you feel a lot better doing that too so it actually increases your motivation but the 10% rule is don’t don’t do more than 10% this week to what you did last week because again back to your tendons and your soft tissue your soft tissue can’t adapt that fast so don’t don’t do more than 10% this week than what you did last week the only reason you would ever do that is because you’re trying to get fit in a hurry you’re trying to get strong in a hurry and like I said yes you can do that you can lose weight fast you can get strong fast

can’t keep up

yeah that makes a lot of sense and uh so we’ve talked about load we’ve talked about warm-up before training what other things

wow if

if there was one more thing to say

do strength and conditioning I guess understand that there’s there’s more to an athlete’s body than

just the repetitions of that particular sport so as you know if it was only freestyle if you only did freestyle your body would become very imbalanced which is and and a simple approach to that is do freestyle and backstroke so mix it up with some backstroke to balance your body out a bit but

even then you’re still going to get your body twisted because you’re just not balancing it out so you need to balance your body out from your sport so I think and that’s one of the misconceptions around strengthening and dishing that and especially young strengthening and dishing coaches are all about strength and power and I certainly was like that too I’m like I can get you powerful I can get you strong and you know and and I remember thinking this I’m talking about ego

I you know I think I said it to Brian in the early 2000s too he goes I said the only limiting factor is is their ability to do exactly what I tell them to do

I look back at that and go I can’t believe I said that I know

but but you need you need to balance your body out so you need to whatever you do repetitively over and over again your body is going to

you know go out of balance because you’re doing a lot of it you know probably and so you need strengthening and dishing to balance out the shape of your body and to balance out your joints so that your joints don’t become you know one sided strong on one side weak on the other and like a tent you know if you put gyrobs up on one side of the tent but not the other tense going to fall over at some stage awesome well I think that’s a pretty good place to leave it for that for that topic and for this this episode so coming away from that you know the things that that I’m sort of taking away from that is got a rest listen to your body stress whether it’s work whether it’s family whether it’s sport whether it’s physical activity that all of that stuff compounds and yeah and you’ve got to you’ve got to take the rest when it’s when it’s calling as I should have done two weeks ago and then also yeah pre-training routine is really important and things like therabands

and skipping and and rolling out using a foam roll and that sort of stuff is very important and then

so it’s just cut out what was that and mobility work and mobility work yeah and then and load looking at load as well and just making sure that you increasing in the the right amounts and not going from 0 to 100 which I’ve probably done twice during these two lockdowns I think so yeah I I’m great at receiving advice not great at actually applying at some time so that’s fantastic thanks to that Sam and we’ll be back with another episode where we’re going to look at ankle mobility and strength to help with freestyle and butterfly kick and how that relates to to the elite swimmers awesome thank you thank you thanks for your time 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

The post The Smarter Way To Progress Your Swimming with Sam Fenton – Part 1 appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, I want to give you my take about Total Body Force swimming by Brett Sutton. He is a coach of multiple Olympians and Kona Champions, he has a huge history of success in having and developing good swimmers as triathlete. He wrote this three-part article on Total Bodu Force Swimming which is basically the way he teaches his athletes to swim.

1:15 WHY? Total Body Force Swimming
3:50 do not focus on trying to feel the water
5:14 use whole body to create force
7:40 Bilateral breathing > Is bilateral breathing necessary?
9:21 TBF swimming gives both rhythm and balance >
12:08 straight arms recovery stroke
12:45 hand entry
13:15 head position
14:55 find the stroke that best suits you

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. In this podcast episode, I want to talk about total body force swimming. There’s a triathlon coach, probably the best triathlon coach out there called Brett Sutton. And I’m sure if you are a triathlete, you’ve heard of him before. He’s the coach of multiple Olympians and Kona champions. Just got a huge history of success in triathlon coaching and huge history of success in having developing good swimmers as triathletes. And he wrote this three part article on total body force swimming, which is basically the way that he teaches his athletes to swim and keeping in mind that he typically works with very high level triathletes and they’re very fit and not all of them have got a swimming background. But I wanted to go through this these articles here and just give you my take on it

and you’ve probably heard a lot of these concepts talked about before because we teach a fairly similar method if we’re working with triathletes. But I think it’s a very useful article to go through. And I just want to give you my take on it. And but really big fan of a lot of this stuff here. So in this article he says, so why total body force swimming? So here he says, the first point to reiterate is that we do not try and teach our swimmers the theory used by the best swimmers in the world. We find that most age group athletes and coaches have tried to follow the line of theory of modeling off what the very best swimmers do, and then applying it to triathlon. We do not believe this is effective. And as you’ve probably seen, in a way, yeah, I sort of follow that path as well. I mean, if you’re trying to replicate someone who’s been swimming since they were three years old, and is built like a swimmer, you know, as in like really

long limbs, six foot four, then it’s going to be very difficult to to try and replicate that if you’re not of the same background and body type. He says here replicating the mechanics of a Michael Fultz swimstroke, for example, simply will not work. Instead of trying to copy the stroke of a person who’s been swimming 80k a week for 10 plus years, and who is a completely different physique to us, and whose event is a completely different distance in a different sport, we instead aim to find the swim stroke that is optimal to each individual. Yep, absolutely. Agree with that. There’s no one size fits all you’ve got to do. You’ve got to find a stroke that suits you. We trained for triathlon, not swimming. These are two separate sports and we therefore train the swim component as such. If our sport was speed swimming or pool swimming, we would likely practice an entirely different stroke. Our sport, however, involves open water swimming with a bike and run

after it. We train accordingly. And I completely agree with that as well. So if you’re if you’re doing triathlon and you’re racing in a wetsuit, it’s all open water, you’ve got dozens or hundreds of other people around you, then it’s going to be a different stroke than if you were doing a 50 free style, for example. He says here, total body force goals implement a stroke that we can replicate over and over without breaking down approximately 1500 times for our Olympic distance athletes and 3800 times for our Ironman athletes. When working on a swim stroke, our priority consideration is how do I tie a least a stroke where we can attain the necessary volume in training without causing injury. Also a stroke allowing the volume without causing excessive fatigue levels. We have two other disciplines, bike and run to train for also rhythm and balance now stroke. Our swim stroke is dictated by our breathing pattern, whether it be one side only or by the

actual breathing. The breathing pattern is critical to helping us find both balance and rhythm in the water. And then talks about a video there. And then he goes on to the stroke itself. So let’s have a look at the next one, which is part two. So here he goes into a little bit more of the mechanics and the technique of it. So in this one here, he says the specifics of total body force swimming. He says, we do not aim to feel the water. We do not focus on trying to feel the water. Sorry, folks, but finding a feel for the water is not going to happen in 30 years of coaching I’ve yet to see one triathlete who can feel the water of the 24 Olympic swimmers I have trained for were able to feel the water. Very, very few of the top swimmers in the world will ever feel the water. And in a way, yeah, I somewhat agree with that is that you’ve got to be in the water a lot to have and train a lot to really get what we

classify as a feel for the water. But that said, you know, in a way, you know, with the swimmers that I’ve worked with, when we do improve their catch in the their pool, in whichever ways we do it using different drills or different concepts, they have a better they have a better hold of the water and they can they know they can feel that they have a better hold of the water and they know when they’re doing the right thing and the wrong thing might be kind of different to what he’s talking about there. But I do I do definitely know that when people make changes to their catch in their pool and they improve it, that they can feel that difference. And you wouldn’t necessarily classify that as the same as a feel for the water. But I think you tend to you tend to know, once you’ve made an improvement with what’s happening under the water. And he says here, we teach our athletes to use their whole body to create force. The

power comes from the body, not the arms. The force we generate initiates from the hips transfers through our body with our arms simply being the levers, just like throwing or hitting a ball or throwing a punch in boxing. In total body force swimming, the force also starts from the rotation of the hips. And that’s yeah, completely agree with with that because if you are just using your legs or just using your arms to swim and you’re not getting that use of the entire body, you’re going to become tired very quickly. So we really want to get that get the hips to connect up with the rest of the stroke. And we’ve seen, I mean, we’ve done this with a lot of swimmers by improving their timing of the stroke. So for example, sometimes I’ve had swimmers who have joined our membership, for example, and they’ve sent me some videos, and we see that their timing is way out there. Starting to catch much too early. And they’re not reaching, extending

enough. And so there’s nothing connected. And it’s like their hips are rotating out of sync with the rest of their body. So nothing’s connected. And then when we get the right timing happening, then we see that alright, they started to connect up their catch with the rotation of the hips and all that sort of stuff. And it makes a huge difference to the effort that they’ve got to put in for the return on their times. To generate the force, the hips roll to the breathing side and then back to center. We think of it as a pole through the top of the head or like a chicken on a skewer at a rotisserie. We turn the pole to breathe, and then we bring it back to the center. And again, you’ve probably heard me talk about that similar sort of concept. Where, yes, imagine you’ve got this pole through your spine, and we want to keep everything nice and long. And then, obviously, when we want to re-rotate, we still sort of keep it on that pole

or that skewer and bring it back to center. And if you saw our Greg Peltunary analysis, so this is an analysis we did on YouTube of Greg Peltunary. He got the second fastest time in the 1500 quite recently. If you look at his stroke, he’s kind of got and it’s pretty common with distance swimmers. On his breathing side, he’ll turn to the side with his shoulders, and he’ll sort of load up on that side, and then he’ll really bring it back with quite a bit of force. And you see this great connection from that hand coming back over the return of the head to the center, as well as the rotation of the hips. And you see this great connection happen, and he really kind of loads up on that side. And again, you see that a lot with really good swimmers. And I think that’s probably what he’s talking about here. On the breathing pattern, many age group athletes attending our training camps have the preset notion that they must bilateral breathe.

Whilst we have some great swimmers who do bilateral breathe, not everyone needs to do this. Bilateral breathing suits the needs of some individuals, however the majority of age group athletes tend to be more suited to a one-sided breathing pattern. Once a breathing pattern has been established, always keep it the same. We use the term pick and stick. Whether it be fast, easy, short speed, long endurance training or races, athletes should concentrate on ways, on always maintaining the same breathing pattern. And I agree with that as well. If I’m teaching age group swimmers, you know, like teenagers or young kids, totally I’ll teach them to breathe bilaterally. It’s a great skill to have. But if I’m teaching an adult who doesn’t have a swimming background and they are best suited to breathing on one side, I’m not going to, sometimes I will, but very rarely will I focus on you’ve got a bilateral breathe. I think often it can be a waste of time

because when you’re racing, when you’re training, a lot of people prefer the one side and some people will say, well, that can lead to injuries, that can lead to an unbalanced stroke. But as we know, an unbalanced stroke or a stroke that’s not symmetrical isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yeah, maybe it can lead to shoulder problems if you’ve got some issues with your technique. But there is no, there is no problem breathing to the one side. And we’re talking about triathletes here, so if you are teaching young kids, then I think it’s good to breathe bilaterally, at least know the skill. But otherwise, yeah, it’s sometimes it can be a waste of time to focus on that. Rhythm and balance. Total body force swimming gives both rhythm and balance. This is the X factor to improving the overall speed through the water. How we do this is specific to the individual. As mentioned above, our swim stroke is dictated by our breathing pattern, whether

it be one side only or bilateral breathing, or as a two, two, four pattern. The breathing pattern is critical to helping us find both balance and rhythm in the water. To find balance in the water, we do not need to be doing the identical action on both sides of the body, letting go of the false conception that we need to be symmetrical in the water has paved the way for many swinging breakthroughs. Both of our arms do not have to go under our body. We often have one arm tracking a lot wider than the other. And that is okay. We do not have to swim with two bent elbows above the water. For many age group athletes, we find the best fluid dynamics come when breathing every second stroke with one straight arm recovery. The straight arm can be either the breathing arm or the non-breathing arm depending on the athlete’s natural side. How the arm moves through the recovery, a high bowling action or a low grass cutting or a helicopter action is

determined by both the breathing pattern, the natural efficiency of the movement, and the flexibility of the athlete. And he says here that to be crystal clear, the flexibility is not important in swimming. We advise a stroke technique to suit the flexibility of the individual athlete. We do not try and make the athlete more flexible to try and swim a predetermined textbook stroke. What I’d say on that is often sometimes people are very stiff with the way they’re with just in general. And I think my ability is one of those things that look at it will take you a number of weeks, often a number of months to improve it depending on what it is. But that said sometimes it’s important to improve mobility from what I’ve seen. What comes to mind is I’ve been working with a couple of guys in our membership who appear to have very tight hip flexors and they struggle to get their legs above their torso. So like their legs are just dropping well down

below the line of their body. And I think it’s probably a combination of tight hip flexors and weak glutes. And so I’m giving them a couple of minutes a day of hip stretches and some single leg glute bridges just to help improve it. Because once they get that up it’s going to make a big difference. But I do agree with the concept of like we don’t want to, I’m not going to have someone focus on just stretching out their ankles for 30 minutes a day just to necessarily improve their kick depending on the person. So I think that’s true. Like again you just want to work with what the swimmer’s got and try not go too far from what their natural tendencies are. So I do sort of somewhat agree with that. The two straight arms recovery stroke is also effective and can often work especially when combined with a butterfly kick instead of a freestyle kick for certain athletes. I sort of know what he’s talking about there. I haven’t seen

many elite athletes kind of do like a dolphin kick but I kind of I know the motion that he’s talking about. And if you look at someone like Janet Evans, she doesn’t have a dolphin kick so to speak like both her legs aren’t together but she’s got very like the kick is like it’s a very minimal kick and it’s almost like a butterfly or a dolphin kick with her hips there. And I’m wondering if that’s what he’s talking about. With the hand entry we enter our hand into the water in line with our shoulder not our nose. So that’s our train track sort of philosophy that we talk about. This way we avoid the fishtail we see in so many age group athletes. If we enter our hand in line with our nose given the momentum of the entry the hand will cross the midline. There is no way around it. It will not stop at the nose. Newton’s third law tells us if we make an action at the front of the stroke, i.e. cross the midline, it will have a reaction at the

back of the stroke fishtail. That’s a good way to think of it. And then head position. Last but not least we do not point our nose down at the bottom of the pool. We break the water in line with our forehead and look forward to watch our hand enter the water before turning to breathe. I agree with most of that. So

I don’t often swimmers have been told put your head down, look down, but that caused them to bury their head. If your head is completely submerged in the water, you’re probably going to feel like it’s you kind of feel like you don’t know where you’re going because you’re looking so far down. And if you look at most top swimmers, and particularly most top triathlon swimmers is the top of their head is above the water. So I like to say, you know, break the water with kind of above your forehead, not necessarily a forehead. But if you are swimming in a wetsuit or saltwater, yeah, look, you’ll be sitting a bit higher and that’s roughly where it might be. So yeah, I agree with that. I like to think about looking forwards one or two meters in front, as opposed to straight down. And it’s much better than just yeah, looking looking too deep there. And in terms of he says look forward to watch our hand enter the water before turning to

breathe. I don’t some swimmers will do that. And I don’t mind it, but I wouldn’t actively try and look at my hands going into the water. I would say that’s the heads are going to come up a little too high for most people. But as I mean, everyone’s different. Again, Janet Evans, she really looked up a lot before turning her head to breathe. So it is a it is a valid way to swim. But I wouldn’t necessarily encourage everyone to sort of look up too high before turning the head to breathe.

And then he says he determining the stroke and breathing pattern that is most efficient for an individual is not commonly achieved in one single swim workout is a process of experimentation and trial and error. Timing a single hundred interval is not a method we would recommend to decide upon a stroke. A stroke an athlete can maintain for 1500 to 3800 meters is preferable to one that is great for 100 meters, but then falls apart, especially under pressure of race day for us technique under fatigue is is the key. A coach on deck with an eye for fluid dynamics is ideally the best way forward here. Once the stroke is decided upon the athlete can then go away and confidently swim, ideally without the need to overthink incorporating tools such as pullboys and paddles will further assist us in developing the stroke. The tools can be used to develop swim specific strength, but the choice of shape and size for each individual swimmer is

critical to TBF swimming. The correct choice of paddles can help correct swim technique without the athlete thinking and hence avoiding analysis paralysis. One of the main killers of age group swim performance. So yeah, some really good points there. When I’m working with some as I like to keep it simple, no more than three things to think about, but ideally it’s going to be one or two. And if those one or two things can be a cue, like, you know, it might be like length out in front or or it might be like something to do with the catch or the pool. Then that’s a good way to do it because we don’t want to be overthinking it. And when we see some as overthinking it, the timing gets thrown off. So the way I kind of had this taught to me is that there’s a guy, a performance coach Nam Baldwin, and he tries to teach his elite athletes and a lot of them are surfers and snowboarders and sort of that like the X Games kind of sports. And what he

what he says, what he has them do like a really simple exercise for them to be in the moment and be present is he’ll have two tennis balls and he will face them about two meters apart. He’ll throw them a ball, they’ll catch it. And then just as they catch it, he’ll he’ll throw the other ball. So they’re sort of constantly throwing balls between each other. And if you take your attention off the ball that’s coming to you and you’re getting ready for that one after it, then you’re not going to catch that ball. And so by doing that exercise, he teaches them to focus on only the thing that’s happening in the now. And it’s the same thing when you’re swimming, if you’re thinking about if you’re sort of in your head too much, your timing will get thrown out. And if your timing is out by point one or point two of a second, then you’re not going to get that connection through the body. You might sort of lose hold of the water. So we just

want to really keep things simple and be able to dial in and focus in on how it feels. And when we’re present in that, particularly in a race, of course, but in like in a set, if we just dialed into that rhythm and that timing and like that breathing pattern like he talks about, it is it is a fantastic way to be able to to maintain good, good speed and good times across an entire set or in cross across an entire race. But if we focus too much on our technique, then we sort of we lose it and the times will suffer as a result of it. So some really good points there. Now he’s got a third part here, which I won’t go into but I might even just link to this in our notes here, sort of talking about difference between men and women and so on. But I think those first two are probably better articles for all the most relevant ones for most people. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I’ll link to these articles in our show notes, which you

can find at effortless swimming dot com. And you can read those there. And if you’re not a member already, then to become a member, just go to the website and you’ll find the membership button there. And that’s where we’ve got all of our stroke courses, our technique courses. And you can see all of the drills that we recommend, whether you are a triathlete or an open water swimmer, or even a competitive pool swimmer. So thanks again for listening. And we’ll be back soon with another episode. I’ve got quite a few podcast episodes coming up. And I hope you enjoy them. If you haven’t left a review in the iTunes store for the podcast, I’d love it if you left an honest review there, because that helps us get in front of more people. So please do that. And I’ll see you next week with another podcast episode.

The post Brett Sutton’s “TBF” Style Of Swimming appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest in this episode is Ryan Twist, a Podiatrist from Bayswater Foot and Ankle Clinic. Anyone who is listening who wants to get into running or they have been running and they have found themselves injured, this episode is for you.

01:13 People Are Starting to Pick Up Running And Walking

02:49 What Are The Most Common Running Injuries?

04:56 Recommendations For Beginners (Walk Run Cycle)

06:33 The Best Strengthening Exercises For Runners

10:21 The Wrong Shoes Can Cause Injury

15:10 Injuries And Niggles: When To Run And When To Stop

18:27 How Much Should We Run?

20:37 Running Slow To Running Fast Makes A Massive Difference

24:36 Nasal Breathing

26:18 Be Patient

26:59 Role Of Mobility I Avoiding Injury

Ryan Twist:
Bayswater Foot and Ankle Clinic
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We tend to find swimmers do pick up a lot of lower limb injuries. So I’m talking sort of below the knee. So foot, ankle, shins, calves, you know, things like that. 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 Ryan Twist from Basewater Ankle and Foot Clinic. Ryan, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, mate. It’s been too long since we’ve caught up. Yeah, so we’ve done a bit of work together in terms of swimming coaching and your background in sport is triathlon and in particular Ironman, as you can see with a lot of stuff behind you as well with all of those races. And we, you’re a podiatrist and I thought it’d be great to get you on the podcast today because with all the lockdowns and all of that and I’m a prime example of it

is you’ve seen a lot of foot or foot, ankle, leg injuries as a result of it. So if anyone is listening who wants to get into running or they’ve been running and they have found themselves injured like I have, this podcast is for you. So what have you seen the last couple of months since pools are closed and all that sort of thing? Well, it’s been a really interesting trend and something that has definitely started to come through is people starting to pick up more walking and running because if we think about it, all the pools are shut. Well, for most people around the place, pools are shut. There’s no organized sport. There’s no gyms and there’s no other real way of exercising. A lot of places have a radius limit like in Melbourne, we can’t go more than five k’s from our home. So that rules out cycling and a lot of other things as well. So people are taking out walking and running and generally people who are fit and active

and got a pretty good level of fitness and competitiveness are going in at all guns blazing and getting injured as a result of that. Guilty as charged. The first lockdown in the first week I went for a run and I was going to do, it was gonna be 15 seconds sprint, 15 seconds walk and I was gonna do it for 10 minutes and I thought I’m feeling pretty good. I might just do that for 30 minutes and what do you know? In two days I couldn’t run anymore and that took me out for six weeks and then the second one I was just because I couldn’t swim and I couldn’t travel down to the bay. I did 97 and a half k’s in a week so nearly 100 k week which is more than what I did when I was training for Ironman. Just because I was bored and I needed something to do and then I was out for two weeks because my ankle fled up again and I wasn’t surprised, I knew it was gonna happen but it was one of those things where I had to just exercise.

So what sort of injuries are you seeing in what’s most common at the moment for people? Well right now the two most common things either soft tissue tendon injury so Achilles tendinopathy, a couple of other tendons in the foot which commonly get injured or like the classic plantar fascia which is sort of bottom of the heel pain and then the other sort of injury we’re seeing at the moment is a lot of bone stress injuries where bones are getting stressed too much too soon and they develop some swelling and inflammation within the actual bones and that can be a real problem and we’re seeing a lot of that at the moment. Swimmers are especially guilty of this and in non-pandemic world we certainly see this a lot as well in swimmers as a subset. So it’s interesting now. So generally swimmers, swimmers if they’re looking to transition to triathlon or they wanna pick up some running, train for an Ironman or a marathon or they wanna change or introduce more cross training

to their training or whatever, we tend to find swimmers do pick up a lot of lower limb injuries so I’m talking sort of below the knee so foot, ankle, shins, calves, you know, things like that and the reason why I think it is is because first of all, as we touched on swimmers are very competitive. They’re generally sort of quite high achieving in an endurance sport. They’re fit, they’re strong and they’ve got good aerobic base because we know how good swimming is at building that aerobic base. So they could, you know, aerobically and psychologically they can sort of run, they can run for many k’s but the years of that non-weight bearing conditioning you get from running, so you know, the lack of that through swimming is certainly a problem that we see a lot in swimmers because of all those reasons why, you know, they’re fit and strong and healthy and they go out and run. They’re not conditioned to run so they develop overuse injuries very, very quickly

and it’s very common to see. And what do you, let’s say someone hasn’t started running yet or they’re just, they’re looking to start. What do you recommend to those people? Obviously don’t do 60 k’s your first week. What sort of thing? What sort of thing help avoid those sort of injuries? Okay, so the best thing that especially I swimmers or anyone can do is get a strength and rehab sort of program started where they’re focusing in on specific areas of the lower limb and foot to improve the strength of the muscles of the joints of the collagen of the ligaments, you know, soft tissue, everything. At the same time, start running very, very, you know, lightly, we wanna start at a very small base and progressively build. And so generally what we recommend for swimmers to start running would be a few weeks of a walk, run training program where they go out for a run where it’s say 30 minutes, but you’re walking for three minutes, jogging for two minutes,

walk for three minutes, jog for two minutes. So it’s a walk, run cycle. And if you do that consistently a few times a week for a few weeks, at the same time, you’re doing a lot of strength and conditioning to build up that strength in your lower legs. That’s the best way rather than going in and diving in head first, pardon the pun, to just running. That’s gonna help protect against these bone stress injuries and this plan of heel pain and tendinopathy so that we see a lot of, yeah. What are some of the most common strengthening exercises that you’ll give that sort of cover most of your bases? Look, I am a huge fan of developing calf strength. We know through lots of studies and anecdotal evidence that when runners have strong calf muscles, the chance of an overuse injury significantly decreases. And so the calf muscle is made up of four muscles and if we focus on strengthening the soleus, which is the biggest one in that calf muscle complex,

that can go a long way to helping to protect against a lot of overuse injuries. So strengthening the calves is super important. And then I’m also a big fan of strengthening a couple of muscles located within the arch of our feet. They help to control a lot of motion as your foot strikes are ground and responsible for a lot of propulsion. So a muscle like tibialis posterior and another complex muscle located within the actual foot, that they’re really good things to try and focus on. Yeah, right. A friend of mine, he had an issue with his calf for like three years or something and he just couldn’t run for a very long time. He went into see like one of the top three experts in Australia and you basically have to have been injured for at least three years or something to be able to go and see this lady. And I remember him telling me that he went in and it was her and like her trainee apprentice person as well. And they turned him around and they had looked at his calves

and they basically paid his calves out for a few minutes at least picking it up. And then she gave him this really heavy your sort of calf strengthening program. And he’s good to go like he’s ready to run now. But yeah, essentially it came down to calf strength and obviously just easy back into it.

Yeah, apart from being the bruised ego, I’m sure he’s super grateful now. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s the reason why is because the calf muscles, they absorb so much load as we strike the ground and they are responsible for a lot of propulsion forwards. Early in my career, I was very fortunate enough to work alongside a podiatrist that was involved at the Australian Institute of Sport. And at the AIS, they’ve got a lot of benchmarks that athletes have to meet, you know, certain strength in certain muscle groups and certain range of motion and certain joints for the calves, it was all weight-bearing athletes had to clear 25 single leg calf raises on each side with the right technique. That’s the gold standard. It might have changed, this was 10 years ago now, but it might have changed since then, but that’s sort of a good benchmark to aim for. If you can achieve 25 single leg calf raises on each side, again, with the right technique,

it makes a massive difference. What do you see? Because listening to that, you think, oh, it doesn’t sound that hard, but I guess I think I’ve sort of done a little bit of it before and 12, 13, 14 reps in, start to feel it. And I’m guessing the form probably breaks down then. Big time, yeah. And then you start compensating. A lot of people will start to say bend their knee, which engages the hamstrings and the glutes, which can assist in it. And then the pelvis anteriorly rotates. And so you’re sort of rotating outwards through your hips. And so you’re engaging all these different muscles and joints rather than actually using the calf muscles to engage the movement. So very few, even high level and even elite level athletes struggled to do 25 single leg calf raises each side. So it’s a good thing to aim towards. And if you’re commencing running, it’s even more important. What about shoes? What kind of impact do they have

having the right kind of shoes? Yeah, everything. As a podiatrist, I’ve been practicing nearly 13 years. I would say the number one risk factor for injury. There are lots. The number one risk factor for injury is footwear. And the wrong shoes can cause injuries so quickly. And so it’s really important to get the right kind of shoe. And it’s probably the number one question we get asked is what shoe do you recommend? And my answer is there isn’t one. It depends on your foot type. It depends on your level of ability. It depends on your injury history. It depends on what surface you’re running on most of the time. There’s so many factors at play. The best advice I can give, there’s two bits of advice. One is that you have multiple pairs of shoes. Studies have shown that if you have more than one pair of shoe, it will decrease your chance of an overuse injury. And then the second thing is that you invest in some time

and some money and going to a proper footwear shop where they do a full fitting service where they’ll take a look at everything, take it all into consideration and then find the right type of shoe for you. So, yeah, they’re the two best bits of advice I can give for going footwear. A couple of questions there. The first one is a couple of different pairs of shoes, like of the same kind, or if you’re running on, say, the road or trails, like what do you mean by a few different pairs? Oh yeah, sorry, yeah. So that’s a mix of that. So it’s good to have, say, a pair of trail shoes. Then let’s say the Sunday long run built up more sort of cushion shoe. And then maybe a faster, flatter pair for your track sessions or speed sessions. And then maybe another shoe for your 20 minute easy run. Having all those kinds of different types of shoes for the different type of running you’re doing is the best way to go about that, yeah.

Yeah, interesting. Because the reason I asked about the shoes is I’ve got, so I had a pair of new balance shoes, no idea what they were, but I bought three of the same kind. There was one pair that I wore through, they were great. And then the second lot of that same style, the left shoe, just for whatever reason, the didn’t sit the same. And so I developed a bit of an injury from using those. And so I went on to the third pair, and then the right one had, I sort of had a similar issue with the fit, like they weren’t exactly the same. Just because they’re like the, I think not the sole of the shoe, but the little insert in it felt just a little bit off and that just impacted how I was landing. And it was all down to the shoes. So I’ve got rid of those and got some new pair, some new trial shoes, and they are great for on the trials, but on the road they just, yeah, they’re not that great. So I need to get another pair of shoes

for the road basically. Yeah, and if you stick to the same basic principle of how that trial shoe feels for your trial, if you sort of, you know, because trial shoes and running shoes have got pretty similar technology. If you stick to that basic principle, what works in the trail to the road, it’ll help a lot, yeah. Yeah, yeah, gotcha. And then in terms of seeing someone, so they’ve got, I know they’ve got the athlete’s foot, but you know, they have their sort of basic fit and that kind of thing. And then do you see podiatrists about that stuff as well? Do you guys do that? Or it’s more, you’re going to like a shop like that because I’ve heard reviews on those, just, you know, the foot shop and you probably, yeah, that smile sort of says it all, but that’s something that you guys do. Yeah, definitely. And look, like the athlete’s foot is, you know, it does largely a good job, but you know, the commercial reality is

they’ve got budgets to fit and a lot of the time they’re kids serving them. So there can be holes in that system. So yeah, as podiatrists, we can certainly guide people down the right sort of path, but until someone actually tries that shoe on their foot, they’re not going to know exactly. So yeah, in these days, there are good sort of specialty running shoe shops that are opening up. People recognize gaps in the market. So the running company is a super good footwear shop if you’re in Australia. But there are certainly lots of others popping up around the place and they’re really good. It’s worth the time and money to go to places like that if you’re, you know, pretty serious about your running. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think even just in my last six months, I looked at it and let’s say a pair of shoes cost you $200. Well, I think if it’s going to sit me out for six weeks for not because I can’t run, because I’ve injured myself,

it’s like I’d much rather spend $500 on a pair of shoes and still be able to train for six months. 100%. And I’m sure you’d rather spend it on the shoes than coming to see podiatrists. Well, true. Yeah, you’re going to spend it one way or the other. Exactly. Yeah. And if someone is, they’re feeling a few niggles here and there, how do you know when’s the right time to when to stop? Should you just stop completely? Obviously going to see someone about the injury is a great idea. But do you need to stop for a number of weeks or can you continue to train a bit lighter? Now, what’s the sort of standard that you see there? Look, it’s a really, really good question. And it depends on the type of injury that you’ve got. So if we look at a bone stress injury, so bone stress injuries when there’s swelling and inflammation within a bone, and that can be a little, little bit all the way to a stress fracture. So anything along that sort of paradigm,

if it’s a bone stress injury, then ideally no weight bearing, no running at all. Because if you continue to stress the bone, it’s going to get worse and worse and eventually crack. So that’s why swimmers are all right to deal with in that sort of injury because they’ll go and swim. If you tell a pure runner to swim, they can’t swim and they hate it. So that’s all right for swimmers. But for a soft tissue injury, say we’re talking like a tendon or a muscle or a ligament,

they like to have a certain amount of load put through them in order for them to recover and repair. Complete rest for a tendon, for example, is quite bad. But knowing where and how much load to put through that damaged structure is really hard to determine. And that’s where I guess a physio or a podiatrist or an osteo whoever can help guide people on that. Because if you do too much on an injured tendon, then it will flare up and it’ll get worse. If you do too little to an injured tendon, it may not repair and regenerate, it might drag on. So finding where that load level is and then staying around that load is super important. In terms of when to pull back or get advice on and you have a bit of a niggle, it’s a really difficult thing to try and explain to people. But as a general rule, what I like to say is that if your pain level, and this is very subjective, I’ll start by saying this is subjective. So it has a lot of flaws.

But if your pain level is about a seven out of 10 or less, generally it’s okay. When it gets to about an eight out of 10 or more, then generally you need to see someone. So if we go out and train and we’re going for a run,

yeah, we’ve got a little bit of a niggle, that little bit of a niggle, for you and me might be a bit different. It’s hard to know exactly, but if you think of that number seven out of 10 or less, then it’s generally gonna be okay. But a bit more than that, you need to see someone. Yeah. Yeah. But again, I understand, I appreciate how subjective that is and everyone’s seven is gonna be different. So it’s really, really difficult. But the best advice is if you’re unsure, it’s best to be seen earlier than later. And what about in terms of volume of running or how many times a week? I mean, I’ve seen, I’m just thinking of one friend in particular who was, hates running.

Don’t we all? Yeah. I’d say in the last, probably 10 years since I’ve known him, he would just always refused. Like he would never run. He’d always sort of talk about how much he hated running because he’s a swimmer and now he’s been running three times a week between three and five Ks really. So pretty light. He’s not injured or anything. What sort of volume would you look for people to sort of limit it to if they’re coming purely from a swimming background and they’ve started running in the last six months. And I know everyone’s different obviously, but what sort of things are you seeing causing those injuries? Like what sort of volume are those people doing? Yeah, the injury, if someone gets injured, generally they’ve done too much too soon. So they’ve made too much of a jump and too much of a short period of time. In terms of the type of volume, it depends on the base that that athlete or that person’s got. And some people can deal with a huge jump in their training

and generally they’ll be okay. But as a general rule, like many years ago, we heard this 10% rule where you should increase your volume by 10% each week. For someone who’s pretty fit and pretty strong and towards sort of a pretty good level of ability, you can generally increase by about 20%. Again, that will decrease if your volume’s massive. So say you’re running 120K a week, it’s not a good idea to increase that by 20%. But for those pretty good level athletes, if you stay somewhere between 10 and 20% increase each week or each month, that’s a pretty safe sort of window. If you’re coming back from an injury or you’re starting from the bottom, if you’re a swimmer who wants to just get into running, then it’s best to keep it under 10% increased per week or month. So I hope that makes sense. Yeah, that was kind of gonna be the next question. How much each week should you generally increase by? And one of the things that I found quite helpful

as I’ve been running the last few months is

I’ve been doing lots of sort of slow, easy case. I’ve sort of been out in the forest and near the mountain that sort of near my house and just exploring around there. And so it’s some really steep grating. So I’ve just been walking the uphill and just kind of cruising for the most part. And I haven’t done many efforts. And I’ve found that that’s made a big difference with just being able to do a bit more distance than I would normally do is like, I’m running some pretty slow case there compared to what I’d normally do. Like a slow case would be like, if I’m running just easy, it might be to say five minute case or five 15. But some of these have been much slower and I’ve been able to hold keep pretty good distance throughout since then. And what do you, do you ever sort of talk about pace and speed and that kind of thing? Cause the first time that we went to lockdown it was cause I was doing too, I did too much sprinting off the bat

and that’s that caused me to get injured. So now I’ve just gone too far in the other direction. I think just all easy case. Yeah, I’m a huge advocate of this from an aerobic benefit scheme, but also if we look at injury prevention scheme as well. So what we do know is that if you’re running easy and running slow like what you just mentioned there, generally your heart rate’s gonna be a bit lower than you’ll be in that sort of zone one, zone two area. And we know that when you’re training in that zone, your body’s producing certain hormones and certain enzymes and chemicals which aid in aerobic fitness, but also decrease the overall toll on the body so you recover a little bit quicker. Once we get into those zone four and five heart rates, we’re producing different hormones, different enzymes, different chemicals. It’s a bigger toll on the body. It takes longer to recover and it’s much more demanding on the system as a whole.

And so if we’re constantly in that zone four and five heart rate, our body’s gonna fatigue much more easily and it’s gonna more likely develop an injury as a result of that. Whereas most of our training is done in that zone one, zone two area with that top up in that zone four and five area, then that’s the best way to first of all get fitter, but second of all, prevent injuries from the caring because those hormones and enzymes and chemicals that are being produced in those lower zones, I’m talking the physiological reactions but also a cellular reaction in the muscles and the tendons and the bones. They’re getting much fitter and stronger, much quicker in those zones and recovering much quicker as well. Yeah, so I’m a huge advocate of running slow to run fast. Yeah, it really makes a big difference. And I speak a lot with my athletes, my patients who come in who, I’ll often look at their training program and I’ll never write a training program for them

because generally they’ll have a coach but I’ll have a word to their coach and make slight adjustments and tweaks and recommendations based around that sort of theory because it’s so important that it makes a massive difference. Yeah, and as you were saying before, I mean, well, swimmers are a competitive bunch, triathletes are a competitive bunch and I know personally, like most of the time I just want to get in there and go for it and it’s hard to hold yourself back. Definitely, definitely. As a male, a young male as well, that can also be a thing I’m guilty of that myself but swimmers especially, especially if they’re a good swimmer, they’re used to being in that fast lane and they’re leading out their hundreds and they’re smashing out those sets and they swim faster than most others and they swim better than most others and swim more often than most others. So when they start running, they’re right at the bottom.

When they’re used to being at that top end of their sport, now all of a sudden in a sport that’s relatively similar, they’re so far down, they try to work extra hard, extra hard to get to that level that they’re used to being. So dealing with swimmers can be tricky because of that. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed is the last, I guess six months ago, for those easy runs, I’ve just been practising nose breathing, nasal breathing, so I only breathe in and out through the nose, close your mouth and if I do get to that point where I’m going too fast where I’ve got to breathe through my mouth, I’ll just back off the pace and I’ve been doing all of my easy runs with that and at the start, the first two weeks, it was really challenging even to go at an easy pace but after that it’s just, it made a difference and when we got back in the pool in that middle section when I was able to swim again, I was pulling out some really good times in the water

because aerobically I was really fit and I think that nasal breathing made a big difference or it helped me at least maintain that when I wasn’t swimming, I was only running. Have you sort of experimented with that much or have you looked into that much at all? Yeah, yeah, I’m a big fan of that breathing pattern, it makes a big difference and especially for swimmers, I find it helps. From a personal perspective, I’ve done the same and I’ve found the same as well when we could swim there for, what was it, a month or so. I felt like when I hopped back in the water, I was actually breathing much more efficiently, much more easier because of exactly what you just said, yeah. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you think’s important to bring up for those that are starting to run a bit more? Just be wary that, yeah. If you are a swimmer and you’re a high-level swimmer, just be wary that your bones and your muscles

just aren’t quite conditioned for the running. Yes, aerobically, you’re right up there and you’re probably better than some of the good runners but from a cellular level with what occurs when your foot and leg impacts on the ground, the damage that occurs to those bone cells and those muscle fibres, it’s gonna take a harder toll on your body than that well-conditioned runner. So you just need to be patient. You need to grow into it slowly, do that strength and conditioning at the same time, you’re doing that walk-run program for a few weeks before progressively building and you’ll get there so much quicker than someone who goes in too hard too soon or has no background in swimming or running. You’ll really accelerate if you follow that general advice. I hope that makes sense. Does that sound clear? Yeah, and one other thing that just came to mind there is I haven’t asked about mobility. What sort of importance does that play

for avoiding those injuries as well and what kind of tightness wear and what sort of stretches you’re giving to people? Yeah, look, that’s really, really important.

There’s 26 bones and 31 joints in each foot. So there’s a lot of moving parts, there’s a lot of bones, a lot of joints and so they can seize up and become very tight and if one becomes tight, the rest sort of go out in unison with it. So stretching the calves, and ankle range of motion, even toe range of motion movements and regular massage is really, really important. It can help a lot, but as podiatrist, well, myself trained in mobilization and manipulation of joints of the feet and that can make a massive difference as well. So if anyone’s listening out there and they’ve got really tight calves, a really tight ankle or really tight arch, there’s no necessary injury or pain, but they’re super tight in any of those areas. C. podiatrist is qualified in that mobilization and manipulation and some soft tissue work and it can make a massive difference in your comfort levels, but also preventing an injury. Awesome.

And for those that are listening, you’re obviously based in Melbourne, where can people find out more about where you guys are and how you can help? Sure. So people can look up my personal pages, Facebook and Instagram or on work. Work pages are also Facebook and Instagram, which is a Bayswater foot and ankle clinic. And I love my swimming, I love my water, but Bayswater is not located anywhere near the bay or any water, unfortunately. So I don’t know how I got that name, but yeah, Bayswater foot and ankle clinic. And if anyone wants to shoot me a message or we can even do online appointments to anyone around the world at the moment. So yeah. Awesome. Thanks for jumping on and probably partly selfish of me because I’ve been dealing with some injuries in the last six months. But yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yeah. No, I’m back running. So it’s all good now. Good. And yeah, thanks for jumping on the podcast. Thanks for having me.

It’s been great. Thanks, Mike. 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 Fish Out Of Water: Making Yourself Bulletproof From Running Injuries with Ryan Twist. appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Shawn is an Ironman triathlete based in Nova Scotia, Canada. A year ago, he started some changes in his stroke, and in the course over the last year, he has effectively gone from a 2:25 per hundred paces down to 1:31 per hundred. Shawn will share how he has done that, what changes he’s made to his stroke and how might incorporate these changes to your own stroke.

00:56 Impressive Improvements
03:49 Everything Was Wrong With What I Was Trying To Do
04:56 Increasing Your Stroke Rate
06:44 Finding The Sweet Spot For Stroke Rate
11:33 Timing Your Kick With The Rest Of The Stroke
12:32 What Are You Thinking About When You’re Swimming In Terms Of Technique
14:08 Swimming From The Inside Out
16:42 Keeping The Videos Simple

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Welcome to episode number 159 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Sean Muse and Sean is an Ironman triathlete based out of Nova Scotia in Canada and Sean and I have been in contact over Instagram over the last couple of months because Sean, a year ago, he started to make some changes to his stroke and in the course of the last year he’s effectively gone from a 220 to 225 per 100 pace down to a 131 per 100. In this episode we’re going to talk about how he’s done that, what changes he’s made to his stroke and how you might be able to incorporate some of these changes to your own stroke to swim faster. So let’s get into the episode with Sean Muse. 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.

So Sean, welcome to the podcast. We’ve been in touch just over Instagram because you tell me about some pretty impressive changes and improvements that you’ve made to your swimming over the course of the last few months. Do you want to give everyone listening just a quick

breakdown on where you were in terms of your pace and where you’re currently at now?

Sure. So again, thanks for having me here. At the start of last summer getting ready for Ironman and Montran Blanc, I was generally like in the 220, 230 on some of the longer swims per 100 and sometimes I felt absolutely gas when I hit the shore. I’ve worked on that all summer that, you know, the endurance part of it came, but the pace never really never come around at all and the harder I tried, I guess the slower I go. It’s not like running, you put more energy in and you see speed, but swimming was just totally the opposite and it was so frustrating for me. But that one video that you had shared on Instagram when I saw it was the turning point. I mean, it’s changed everything just and it was few simple things like the entry of the hand, the fingers pointing down, the high elbow catch and maybe not reaching out as far. So the stroke cadence increased a lot and it did a whole bunch of things. It allowed me to exhale all the air out, which was key because I needed all the air back in

and it’s really made like it’s changed everything. So I focused on that. I didn’t try anything with the feet, legs, actually I was dragging them along and probably creating way more drag, but I focused on that catch and by the time I got to Tremblant, I had gone from like basically a 225 swimmer to 205 for the iron distance and it was the first year in five years there that I felt confident on the shores of that lake getting into the water with 3,000 people. And that’s, so what was, was it advice that you’d heard before that you were like overreaching and stretching out too far or was it just what you thought you should do and then you obviously made that change and improve it? Where did that original technique come from? I had heard from a friend of mine who’s a very good swimmer. I mean, he’s a some one hour iron distance swimmer and he was keep telling me reach and it worked for him, but he also saw this video of yours at the same time and he tried it and he gained 2-3 seconds,

which for him was a lot at a 130 pace to gain a couple seconds. So the next morning in the lake I tried it and it just felt so comfortable and with those fingers pointing slightly down on entry, it automatically made the catch, it would start the catch for you because your hand was down and it would kind of pull back instantly. So, but yeah, it changed and then by increasing the cadence, it times my breath with when I need the air not when my stroke was telling me I needed air because often I’d be trying to take a breath of air underwater or like everything was wrong with what I was trying to do, but that started it all and then the rest of your videos during the year have I’ve tweaked a little things and now I mean I swam a 131 pace this morning.

Yeah, I saw that one of your posts, you know, I’ll ask you a few weeks, it looks like you do like a 750 meter swim and you’ve been bringing that pace down to a 131, which is, it’s not nine man distance swim, but that pace of 131, I think most people would be pretty happy with being able to get down to that and that is such a significant change from where you were. And I mean with increasing your stroke rate and not going for too much of a reach, like it’s counterintuitive, you would think that with a slower stroke rate and a longer stroke, it would be easier and in some cases, yeah, that’s true, but just by keeping your momentum going and keeping your speed with it more constant, that is why it can become so much easier because it is common to see people just reach out and glide and there’s too much of a dead spot, too much of a pause in their stroke. Do you think that’s what was happening with you? That’s exactly what

was happening besides the fact that my elbow would sometimes lead in the water first before my hand was that sloppy, but trying to that long pause, there was like a dead spot in the stroke and really just all drag or it wasn’t working. So now I’ve tried that higher cadence and I’ve got it as high as 40 at some point. Now it only got me so far. I’ve changed a few things and now it’s around 34, 35 at best, but my stroke, I was finishing like before my hip and on the recovery of the next part of the stroke when I needed air, that hand was staying in the water by my hip creating a little more drag. So I’ve lengthened the part of the stroke where I go past my hip now and that hand never stops, so I don’t have that drag dead spot and that was like 17 seconds right away when I stopped doing that. So every little thing you talk about, I see instant feedback which is fantastic because now I try to mimic everything every day, but I have so many

things to think of while I’m swimming that I struggle sometimes doing it all right, so I hope I become automatic someday. Yeah, that’s awesome. And in regards to the stroke rate, so

you’ve gotten up to 40, which would be the equivalent of 80. So we’re talking 40 in terms of that sort of two strokes and bringing it back down to 34, 35 without having seen your swim, that’s probably around the sweet spot for you being around 70 strokes per minute because if you’re going at 80, look, there’s not a lot of swimmers that I know that can sustain 80 comfortably, so you might find that a stroke rate of 70 strokes a minute or 35 and then going to work on the catch and a couple of other things along with that would be your time best spent rather than just trying to continually increase it, which sounds like you’re not doing that, but instead of just trying to go for the faster stroke rate, a lot of times, especially if you swim with a wetsuit on, it’s about, yeah, basically a better catch, better rhythm in the water and finding that sweet spot which it sounds like you’ve probably found and let’s say, how long ago, was it a year ago where you first started to make some changes?

It was maybe like two and a half weeks before Montreux Blanc, which was I think August 21st last year. I was still quite panicked for this. I mean, I’ve done this race before and I knew, okay, it is what it is, just get through the swim, get me on the bike as fast as I can and move on, but seeing that small gain last year and then I wasn’t tired was the thing, like I could swim three and a half k and I would get out of the water. I was like, I hadn’t even been in. So that was huge. I mean, I come out of the water last year with a big smile. Usually I come out of the water in hard shape. Yeah, that’s awesome. I love hearing that and it makes an Iron Man event so much better to do. I was the opposite when I did Iron Man, I was big smile through the swim and then it pretty quickly turned into a frown the entire way through. But yeah, that’s awesome to hear. Thinking back to a year ago, did you ever think that you

got to get down to a 130 pace? Did you know what that would look like or feel like in your swimming? No, it’s quite hard to believe really. And I’ve had some of my friends say, I always knew you could swim better, but I really didn’t see this coming. And that’s an understatement, like I was striving for two minutes per 100. And when I reached that last year after Travla, I focused on everything. I’ve been watching your videos and I focused on all that. And then of course our lakes get too cold to swim in with no pool. I reached that point, 155 was quite comfy for 1500 meters. This year I knew I was in decent shape when I got no water, about 10th of June for our lakes warm up enough. I was 205 right out the gate. So I said, okay, it’s still there. I haven’t lost everything. Now let’s work on endurance and keep in that two minutes. I was just focused on two minutes. It wasn’t long. I could swim 2k at two minute

pace within, you know, five or six swims. But what I’ve, by watching all your stuff here, what’s changed to get that extra was now I’m trying to kick. But not hard so I don’t blow up, but two beat kick, but timing it with the stroke that it automatically rolls into the next stroke. And it almost gave me 25 seconds per 100. If you see my Strava files, I went from like 155 to 130 one pace overnight. And I haven’t swam, well, I don’t think I’ve swam under or over 135 in the last three weeks. And what were you doing before with the kick? Nothing, just dragging them along which would keep them, you know, they were, they were probably not above the surface hardly ever. And it was just, I was basically focusing on this catch and feeling the water and, you know, proper pull. So I said, okay, I feel confident with that, we’re going to try to kick. And I’ve added that in it. And my heels are always above water. Now my kick doesn’t drive me forward,

but at least there’s no more drag. And if I can get that timing right that I roll into each stroke, because most of my friends that have watched me swim say I swim pretty flat, I don’t, I don’t rotate enough. That kick, if it’s time just right rotates me in each stroke. And I find I, of course, your head comes out of water at the right time to breathe. So that alone gave me another 20, 25 seconds per 100 instantly. How do you time your kick with the rest of your stroke? Are you just going by feel or have you got a cue in your mind? Yeah, it’s a lot of, that’s, that’s the part, one of the things I have to remember the most, like I really have to concentrate on that part of it. So that’s another reason why I kind of left that aspect alone until I got the catch to where I thought that part was automatic. And so I’m still playing with this kick this morning. I tried, I said, I’m going to sprint all I can. So, and I left

in the first 500 meters according to the file was at 122 pace. But the next 500 meters was at 140 pace. So I pulled up. And I couldn’t, and I couldn’t keep it up. But, you know, the potential is there to swim well. And I’m not looking for a 130 pace next Ironman, but if I could be comfy and 145, I would be thrilled. Yeah, that’d be a huge, huge improvement. So, and then what’s, so in terms, there’s a lot to sort of think about, Dan, you said you’ve tried a lot of different things. Once you found the things that worked for you, did you just focus on those? Or were you still experimenting? Because I’m curious as to what, yeah, what are you thinking about when you’re, when you’re swimming and how’s that changed over the last year? Well, I didn’t dare try anything too different on that catch part because that seemed to work. And, and now with the timing of the breath with the stroke and having all the air out of your lungs

and getting all new air in at the right time was, was big because before, like, I felt like I had to breathe when the stroke told me to breathe, not when I really needed the air or, or I would force that last little bit out. Now, like the stroke rate and the breath seems to work together. So I feel like I can sprint and not get tired. And before that was in the case. So swimming doesn’t tire me anymore. But I don’t want to mess around with anything I’ve learned on that part yet until someone tells me differently. Or if you saw a video of myself, I feel like the most improving I need to do is the on the back end, like proper kick and not kick so hard that I tire my my legs out. But to get that roll, the right the right rotation, which I just saw a video of yours, an hour ago on that proper rotation, which will get your head out of the water at the right time for, for the air. And I think the, with the, the kick, it’s because there’s so much nuance to everything in

swimming technique related is that same thing with like the reach, like you don’t want to be really short with it, but you don’t want to be too long with it either. There’s so much nuance to it. And I think getting the kick to coordinate with the rest of the, the stroke can be one of the harder things for people to do. And for me, I think it’s one of the harder things to teach. It really has to be just sort of, you kind of have to figure it out when you’re swimming. And I think a lot of it tends to come down to just feeling, feeling for that timing. But I think one of the reasons that you probably had such a big improvement there when you got your kick sorted was, well, number one, your legs may have not been dragging as much as, which is obviously a big change. But the other thing too is if your legs are just sort of moving along and there’s, there’s nothing happening there. There’s no kick whatsoever. Then it’s really just your upper body working independently of the rest of your,

of your body. And once you get even just like a small kick, it’s that little bit of a downwards kick that you get this transfer of energy that goes through your legs through to your hip and then your core. And then you can kind of brace yourself against your catch. You’ve kind of got something to anchor against or pull against. And that’s what is sort of called swimming from the inside out, like everything’s got to start from the hips and the core and move out to the extremities. Because if there’s no sort of tautness to that, then everything’s just kind of going, you know, or working independently. Whereas when you get that kick, that’s what gives you that stability through the rest of the body. So it’s, I’m amazed how much that did improve your, your speed. But it, you know, probably when you, if you see if you had saw a video of it from what you were doing to what you’re doing now, you’d probably see just a much more rhythmic stroke, I imagine.

You know, definitely it’s, it seems to be symmetrical. Both arms are doing equal amount of work was before it wasn’t the case. Left side was always dead. Now that, like I said, just timing that kick and I, I’m so untrained and swimming. I don’t know if I have what beat kick I really have, but I know I time it that it fits with the arm when it enters the water and it rotates me into the next stroke. And I think I watched something a while back that you drive that hip forward a little bit and that rolls you into the stroke as well. So again, with the fingers pointing down, the high elbow in the water, all that, I mean, everything’s come together. Your videos are helpful for, for all my friends and some of them are fantastic swimmers because what they’ve noticed is when we found you, you’ll stop the video, you’ll draw a line from the elbow to the wrist to the hand. And, and for a non swimmer like myself, it just made sense. It really, it really

worked. I appreciate that. And I mean, I try and keep it as simple as possible and try and avoid too much jargon when we’re explaining things because I mean, if I, even when I’m, if I hear someone explaining something about swimming, like I’ve had coaches where I’ve had to sort of stop and go, all right, what does that actually sort of mean? I’ve had to sort of break it down. I think, man, if I can’t understand it, I’ve been doing this for, I’ve been swimming since I was five, you know, then it’s probably going to be too complicated for someone who’s only been swimming for a couple of years and who doesn’t necessarily live and breathe it. So I appreciate that. And I mean, I just want to also give credit to you because this stuff doesn’t just happen on its own. You’ve obviously got to put the work in. But I also want you to just talk about your swim training and how, look, you can’t swim year round. So just a little bit of background on

what your general swimming would look like for a year. For me, like I said, by the time our lakes are warm or warm enough, it’s generally about June 10th. And unfortunately, by October 1st, I need to put the wetsuit away. Then my busy season for my work will start. I may not get a chance to get in the pool on a normal year before February. So I’d swim, you know, a little bit February and March, maybe a dozen, 15 swims in those months, April and Mays, no swimming, no training of any kind, no biking. June 1st, our lobster season is closed. So I start full on Ironman training and I have 10 weeks to get ready for an Ironman, which is not easy to do and things have to go right. So, you know, the bike in the run is not as complicated to me as swimming was. So it was always the anxious part. But like say, last year, I’ve never felt so calm standing on the shores of that lake while they’re playing the national anthem in my life.

And it was like, I’m just, I’m going for a swim. Like I’m going to have fun today. That’s awesome. And when you can finally put all of that practice into, put it, put all of that into practice at the next race, maybe it’ll be next year or it will be next year, I’m sure that would be great to see what you can get that that swim speed down to, because it’s been a huge change in the course for you. So thank you for coming on and sharing this. I thought it’d be worthwhile just having share your experience because I’m sure there’s a lot of other people who could who can learn from it. And yeah, thank you very much for your time and all the best for the next little while. Thank you. 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 2:25 to 1:31/100m In 12 Months With Shawn Muise appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Melissa Urie is the first woman to complete 895km Uberman Ultra-Triathlon. In this podcast episode, she shares her experience during the race, doing training, and getting through the race with the use of mental strategies to survive the tough times.

5:22 Training For Uberman
10:23 The Power of A Positive Mindset
12:43 Proving Yourself That You Can Do It
13:51 Building Your Confidence
17:29 Giving Up Is Not An Option!
19:15 Post Race: Mental And Physical Recovery
25:24 Moving Forward By Going Back To Basics
29:18 Finding Identity Outside Of Sports Is Important Too
31:47 Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
40:52 Training Session Management
43.24 Combat Decision Fatigue With Better Mental Habits
46:48 How To Trick Yourself Into Doing The Hard Things
55:00 What Keeps You Going?

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And so I made the decision at that time and said, well, every race that you do from now on, you’re never allowed to think about quitting because it’s just, you know, if you can get through that, you can get through anything. 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 158. My guest today is Melissa Urie and she’s the first female to complete the Uberman triathlon, which is touted as the world’s most challenging ultra triathlon and for very good reason. It’s a 556 mile course that starts on Catalina Island and it finishes at the trailhead of Mount Whitney, which is the highest pink peak in the continental US. So it’s a 34 kilometer swim from Catalina Island across to the mainland where they land at Palos Verde.

Then it’s a 640 kilometer bike ride to the Badwater Basin, which is 200 feet below sea level and competitors then run to the top of Mount Whitney, which is the highest peak in the continental US, which is 13,000 feet. So it ends up being a 217 kilometer run. And this is a task. This is an event that Melissa completed last year. She was the first female to do it. Very few people have done it ever. And we talk a bit about the race. And one of the things I found most interesting about this conversation was some of the ways that she kind of tricks herself into doing the training and getting through the race as well by using some different mental strategies that allow her to enjoy the tough times. And one of the things that I also found interesting here and one of the funny things was when she’s training in the riding into the wind and it’s wet and it’s miserable and she’s going very slow because she’s got a strong headwind.

She thinks of Lieutenant Dan from Forest Gump, where he’s on the the prawn boat and they’re going into the the wind and the rain and he’s on top and he’s yelling out to the world, is this all you’ve got? She visualizes that it makes her laugh. And that’s one of the ways that she uses or finds that she can get through tough training and get through tough races. So we also talk about imposter syndrome, which I think is everyone’s been through before and particularly before doing the urban man event. This was something that kept cropping up, even though she achieved a lot in the ultra endurance world is something that she still felt like she was an imposter. But after doing this race, it’s diminished a bit and she’s found that her body language, the way she thinks about herself, the way that she interacts in the world has changed significantly as a result of it. So it only took her five days of of a race like this to be able to do it.

And there’s a lot of interesting things and she’s not afraid to share the details and actually get into and kind of peel back the layers on on what she’s actually thinking and some of the challenges that she encountered. So let’s get into the conversation with Melissa Yuri. The podcast, the first female to complete the urban man event, which is just insane. I hadn’t heard of it until late last year when I saw your name pop up. How did you first hear about the the event? It’s really interesting. I can’t remember when I first came across it. I know that I travel in a lot of like ultra endurance circles. I’m sure I saw it somewhere on someone’s Facebook came up. Someone had done it. I know the very first guy who did it. I did. I was there when he was doing Ultraman Australia the first year round. So it must have been like something about him completing it. And I looked into it and like, wow, that looks really intense.

And then I just kind of went, OK, put that to one side, not think about that for a while. But yeah, it was definitely on my radar for a couple of years before I did it. And how did your your career start in in triathlon and endurance sport? Like, I know you did your first Ironman 10 years ago. What was it before that? What was your story with sport? So when I was a kid growing up, I would always swim. My mum is a qualified swim teacher from many moons ago. So she was, you know, through us in, you know, swimming. My brother and I for a very long time, we were kids. And then I, you know, played a bit of basketball, played a bit of netball, usual sports through school, didn’t really do much through uni. And then once I’d finished uni and started working, I’m like, OK, time to focus on your house. You know, you’ve kind of haven’t really made that a priority for a while. So I started getting into a bit more bike riding that I used to do

with my dad and my brother. And then I went and saw my friend do a triathlon, one of the corporate triathlons. And I don’t know what they’re called now. They are, they are W’s or whatever they are. And I was like, that, that looks really fun. So I decided that I needed to stop running because I hadn’t run before. And then, yeah, did my first triathlon.

I’m pretty sure it was 2005 that I started. And it was one of those mini distance tries where it was like a two, three hundred meter swim, ten K rides, two, three K run something along those lines down in Mordialli, I remember was the first one. And then I was like, that was really fun. I really want to do that again. So that’s, that’s my start from very, very baby distance races. That’s awesome. I’ve heard so many people mention that that’s how they’ve got into the sport is through the corporate tries. And I think it’s a great way like you get a taste for it. And it’s like, OK, this is actually quite fun. And then it’s a very slippery slope until you’re doing Uberman. Fifteen years later, right? So it’s, uh, and in terms of training, leading up to the event, like how, how long did you give yourself to, to train for it? Like you’re obviously doing a fair bit in the lead up to it. And you had a number of years background in it.

But what was the training block look like? Was it months? Was it years?

And that’s a really hard question to answer because I feel like my training was 10 years worth or five years worth when I started Ultras. But specifically for Uberman, we started training in July. But I train all year round. I have generally around six to eight week break after a really big race. And then after that, then I’m back into training, just doing some kind of, you know, training with my coach. So then what I am what when I spoke first to my coach about this race, I said to her, you know, like, this is what I want to do. And she went, oh, my God, I’ve no idea how to train you for that. And my answer was, it’s like, well, you’ll figure it out.

That’s why I trust you because she’d already trained me for Epic Five, she’d already trained me for Ultraman Hawaii. So I knew that, you know, she knew what kind of base I had. She knew what kind of athlete I am. And I had, you know, a lot of faith in her being able to train me. So the training for this particular race was very, very different to what I normally do. It was the way that she kind of framed it. My coach Kate Bebelakwa was that I wanted she wanted to overload me on one sport a week instead of trying to cram like really, really long of everything in one week. So what we do is we do maybe like five, six swims a week and, you know, have that as the main focus one week. And then the next week I’d have as a bike focus. And there was a lot of, you know, like doing something at night after work and then early morning the next day with the swims. I’d be in the pool maybe like eight, nine o’clock at night

and then getting up at five in the morning back in the pool again because it was about getting that overload of fatigue happenings. And then my body would get used to that and then used to still continuing on even though all you want to do is stay in bed and you can pull exhaustage. And then I did a lot of trail runs, a lot of 50 K runs. And I did 100 K run and the day before all of those runs I’d be out running for, you know, like 10, 15 K’s or something, which is something I’d never do. Like usually do like a half hour shakeout run and that’s it. But instead it was again, let’s run on tired legs and then still get through the event and see how you go. So, yeah, there was always kind of the Uberman was the focus. Everything else was training in between, even though I was still doing races and other things. And is that something that you felt during the event where it really paid off where you’re just so used to being fatigued and overloaded that you’re

just like, yep, this is I’m used to this. My body knows what it’s doing. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I mean, that’s something that I’ve learned over the years as well. I’m very, very good at managing through fatigue and about, yeah, just, you know, continue on pushing through, even though, you know, the last thing you want to do is to keep moving. So I feel like that’s something that I’ve definitely developed over the years, but that type of training really, really helped with Uberman as well. And my main thing about doing a bunch of 50 K runs as well is I wanted to make the distance not an issue when I got to it. You know, when you, you know, your runs 216 Ks long, it’s ridiculous. So it’s like, how can I break that down into actually making sure that, you know, it’s a, it’s a manageable thing. And that’s why I did a hundred K. And then I’m like, well, if I’ve got 50 Ks to go, then it’s not going to

be a big deal, which ended up not really mattering because when I was doing the run, every time I’d stopped to sleep, I would charge my garment so I had some kind of data afterwards. And then I had no idea where actually was in the run course in terms of how far I’d gone because my garment had reset every time. The only time I actually knew how far I’d been is that one of my crew, you know, did a little celebration like we had a few costumes and so he had a unicorn costume on. He jumped down and was like, congratulations. This is a hundred miles. And I was like, ah, I had no idea. And then the last part was up Mount Whitney. And that’s basically a half marathon distance from the town Lone Pine where I had a sleep during the night and then got up in the morning and ran some like, OK, no, I’ve got 21 Ks. And that was the only time I actually knew during the run portion. Except on the bike, I had an idea because I had my garment.

It was was working a bit better. But, you know, it’s a little bit crazy to be honest. It’s got to be great for just taking it one step at a time, though, like not knowing like, oh, that’s 300 kilometres on the bike. It’s like, no, you just you sort of know it’s just like one step at a time until you get to your next like feed or your next stop. Is that something that you had experienced in all the events leading up to that where you just take it, you know, one short, short moment at a time? Yeah, absolutely. I have this thing that I do where when I’m like really, really early on in a race, you know, when I was doing the hundred K, I had done maybe like three, four Ks and I’m like, oh, wow, I have 96 things to go and I’ll just laugh to myself. I’m like, that is ridiculous. Like, what the hell? But then I say to myself, I’m like, but how good is it going to feel when you have three Ks to go? Like, then I just kind of reverse it and go, OK, well, you

know, remember this feeling and remember, you know, that you’re laughing about how ridiculous it is because you will actually have covered all of that distance and then you can do a little celebration because you’ve only got two Ks or whatever to go. And I find I do that in every race, you know, at the start of the swim, I’m like, this is a 34 K swim. That’s insane.

But whatever, we’ll just get out and do it. It’s it’s nuts. And I mean, just to get to start off a race with the Catalina swim. It’s like, yeah, that’s that’s a fair bit. I mean, I think I heard you say your longest distance swum before that was 20 Ks. Is that right? Yeah. Is there any any doubt whether 34 Ks would be a stretch or you’re just comfortable. You knew that you’d done the training and on the event day, you you’d be fine. Yeah. So I I did the 20 K because I wanted to do that event. I wanted to do the Roto swim. But also it was when I was starting to think about doing Uberman and I hadn’t done any swims in open water over 10 Ks. And so I said, OK, well, if I do the 20, I get through that, then I can do 34. Like that was kind of my one plus one equals to mine frame. So when I when I finished the 20, I was like, OK, well, the 34 will be fine then because I would have a wet suit on. I’d have a boat and, you know, a kayak and I’d have a lot,

a lot of support around me. So I just went, OK, well, that’s that’s a done deal. That’s not going to be an issue to get through the distance. So I can’t I have the way of almost need to prove to myself that, yes, I can do it before I do it. And that’s the way that that I did did that part of it. I kind of I relate it to when you’re training for a marathon, you don’t run the marathon distance. You run up to a certain distance, so then you get the confidence that you’re going to do the whole thing. The only big thing that I realised with Catalina kind of retrospectively is because I had come from winter over to America and I had done maybe like half a dozen open water swims before I got out and did the Catalina swim. And the only there was a 10 mile swim over there that my friend who I was staying with is like, oh, I’m going to do this. I’m like, oh, awesome. I jumped in and did that race. And thank God I did that because otherwise, you know, I did

a half half Ironman and that, you know, I would have swam like two K’s and then that was it because I had done no open water swimming in winter through Melbourne because why if you’re going over to, you know, 20 plus degree temperature, it’s not going to be helpful. So I hadn’t had that time in the salt water, but yeah, I was like, oh, I’ll just do what you can. I mean, do you say it was a 10 mile swim? Yes. Yeah. I mean, most people look at that and go, what, you just jumped in and did that. And I look at that and think we just jumped in and did it. But I mean, you had the training behind you, but it’s exactly right. I think you just build that confidence as you as you sort of train up to events and you do them. Like I did run a couple of years ago and same thing, like 16 K’s in a training swim didn’t feel like that much at the time. And so now just sort of mentally, it’s like you’ve sort of leveled up in your mind where you can then just go, that’s

fine, but you’ve got to prove to yourself that you can do it before you can get there. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I also put a lot of faith in my coach because I say it on like, well, you’re keeping my training, you’re doing my program, you know, you know where I’m at, you know what my fitness is like. So you will get me prepared as possible to get to the event physically. I’ll do all the mental work and then we’ll be able to get through it. So that’s yeah, I also just put a lot of a lot of faith in that and it’s it’s paid off. And the thing I like about that too, I mean, she said, you I don’t know how to coach you for that because I mean, it’s such a unique event and such a distance that there’s no, you know, it’s not like a marathon where there’s a million sort of proven plans out there. It’s like, well, I’m guessing she just looked at it and thought, okay, how what are you going to encounter in the race? What are you going to come up to?

And then how can we prepare your body for it? And I think that’s for a coach, it’s probably pretty exciting where they’re looking at it and going, cool, this is uncharted territory. And if we can do this, then that’s going to be a great accomplishment for both of you. Yeah, absolutely. I remember my very first coach who’s like, I actually really like coaching you because you pushed me because, you know, I’ve coached anyone to these distances before. And that’s what my current coach Kate has said as well. She’s like, I love it because, you know, I get to coach all these different things that I’ve never even considered doing myself. Like she’s done Ultraman, which is three days. And she’s looking at, you know, other races and she’s like, no way, no, I’m like, oh, you’ll be fine. She’s like, nope, thank you. But yeah, she gets to experience, you know, what it’s what it’s like for me, which is, which is pretty fun too.

Yeah, vicariously living through, through your, through your crazy, crazy adventures. What, what was your, your swimming like over that, over the buildup, how many Ks a week were you doing at your peak? I honestly have no idea because I don’t look at that. Is it just for time? Swimming? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, sometimes it’d be for distance.

Yeah, sorry, all my sense has to be for distance, but I never would look at what my total distance is because to be honest, it doesn’t really matter. Like it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s, you know, it’s a cool number to look at and go, wow, I did this amount of swimming. But, you know, I, it’s sessions that I do. I do one session at a time, you know, whatever, whatever I’m doing. So I have no idea. I’d have to look back through my training, training plans. And I always hate that question. Yeah, that’s a question of like, what’s your TSS? And like, I don’t know, it’s a number that means nothing to me. So yeah, I, I did one 10 K swim because I went over to America months before the race. So I did it when I was over there. And then I did that 10 mile swim. But to be honest, a lot more of my training was focused on the run because, and the bike, because it was about getting to the run as best as you can, as fresh as you can, which is ridiculous

when you’re going for that long. But then so I had enough legs to be able to continue on and get through the run as well. So yeah, there’s a lot more focus elsewhere. And the swim was like, oh, we’ll just get through that. Was there any point in the race where you doubted that you were going to make it or just you knew that it was happening? No, no. I did a race in 2014. I did Ultraman Canada. And I still break that as the hardest mentally race, mentally tough race that I’ve ever done because of what happened during it. I had a lot of, you know, I had a couple of bike crashes leading up to it. I broke in bones. I like, yeah, it was, it was absolutely horrible. I ended up in hospital at the end. And I looked back to that afterwards and I said to myself, I’m like, at no point in time, did you think about quitting? And so I made the decision at that time. I said, well, every race that you do from now on, you’re never allowed to think about quitting

because it’s just, you know, if you can get through that, you can get through anything. So it’s not even something that I entertain ever. It’s the question is always about, how am I going to do it? Not, am I going to do it if I can do it? It’s how do I break this down to be able to get through the distance? Yeah, I love hearing that. And also hearing about, you know, with your training, for example, like with the swimming, you weren’t looking at your weekly Ks at all. So I just take it one session at a time. And there’s so many different ways to go about training for a race or, you know, working for a goal and everyone’s going to be so different. And that’s the one thing I’ve learned as a coach is particularly that for athletes, people are different and they need different things. But also like, you can, there’s no right and wrong. You can make it up. You can do it how you think it’s going to work best. And if you’re trying to follow someone else’s plan

because you think that’s going to be the best one, well, it might not be the best one for you. So it sounds like you’ve been able to just kind of go about it the way that you see best and keeps you mentally strong for the event, which is amazing. Yeah, thank you. And after the race, what was it like? Because I know for me, after a massive, a big event, like for me, there’s always that sort of that downtime where it’s like sort of question, all right, what am I doing? And like you have the high of the race and then you have the low afterwards. Did you have any of that? And what was your physical recovery like as well? So it’s interesting. Like, I feel like this was kind of the races and accumulation over all these years of experience and everything because I didn’t have the low after the race because two years before when I did Epic Five, I didn’t realize at the time, but I’d actually done a lot of mental preparation

for what it was going to be like after the race, not just during. And the way that I was doing that, and I’ve done it just subconsciously since then, is I think about what it’s going to be like when all the training’s done, the race is done and what I’m going to do afterwards. And then almost build it up as an exciting time to look forward to, especially when you’re really in the depths of your training, when you are so fatigued, all you want to do is just curl up in the fetal position and just not move and not talk and not do anything. And yet you’ve still got an eight hour bike ride to do and yet you know that’s just what you’re going to have to do. So then I’ll say to myself, I’m like, how good is it going to be when you can just learn the couch, play with the cats, talk to my husband, watch Netflix, that is going to be amazing. And so I built it up as this really exciting time. So then I can have this celebration

and I don’t have to, yeah, I don’t go into that down, which is interesting because I have had that before in other races. So yeah, that’s kind of a bit of an unconscious thing that I was doing, but now I purposely, I do think about that. And then physically my recovery, after a big race like this it’s generally around about six months before I start to stop feeling that heavy fatigue. And I find that I get to a point, I’ll be back training, I’ll be back doing something, but I can’t kind of push into that high, high threshold, above threshold pace. It’s just not there, my body and my heart is just like, no, you’re good, we’re cat media, we’re, this is where we’re stopping. So like immediately afterwards, I was actually in much better physical state than I thought I would be. Like I wasn’t hobbling around like I’d been riding a horse for a week. Like I was actually able to walk normally well. I didn’t have any blisters on my feet,

which is an absolute miracle. Like that’s been an ongoing thing that I’ll finally crack the code for with my feet. So that’s been amazing. But it’s more just about the fatigue. So my husband and I were like, we’re in America and I didn’t know how long the race was going to take. So our flight home ended up being about a week later and we hadn’t really planned what we’re going to do. So we just kind of threw together a bit about, okay, this is what we’re going to do now. But I had to be really, really careful with my energy because I’d be fine. And then something I’d want to sleep. Like anything, like you’re turning a light switch off and I’d just be dead and be mid conversation. And I’ll be like, I just can’t talk anymore. It’s just too much. So it’s, yeah, it was interesting. And then my sleep was really disturbed. Like I’d be waking up at two, three o’clock in the morning, I’d be wide awake as if, you know,

it was first thing in the morning, ready to go. It was, it’s bizarre. And I think it took, I mean, obviously jet lag as well, but when I got home, you know, it was a couple of weeks before my sleep actually normalized a little bit again and I managed to get back into a bit of a routine. But physically I didn’t do really any exercise for about a month afterwards. And I just chill. I let myself do that. I let myself do whatever I want. I don’t ever put pressure on myself to go and do something because, you know, I’m going to lose my fitness or, you know, I have to do something. I should be doing something. I’m like, nope, if I don’t want to do it, I won’t do it. If I get the urge to do it, then I might, you know, I might give myself a day and check back and go, do you really want to do this? Yes, no. And if I decide I want to do something and I’ve done this before, like I’ve driven to the pool to go for a swim and I got out of the car and I’m like, I don’t want to do this.

I’m like, all right, got back in the car, drove home. Like it’s, I put no pressure on myself whatsoever until I start feeling like actually I want to be active and do something again. And then I call it exercise, not training to take that pressure off of it as well. So, yeah, that’s just a few things that I’ve done for years now, which really, really help with kind of my mental recovery as well because you put so much into it. I really just need to give my brain that time to decompress and de-stress afterwards as well as physically. Well, I guess it sort of balances out there, doesn’t it? Whereas, you know, when you’re training, it’s like you’re doing all the sessions and if you’ve finished late at night and then you get up early in the morning, you’ve got, you’re going to get up early in the morning. So when you’re not training for an event like that, it’s like you got free reign, you can do what you like.

And because if you’re going hardcore 12 months of the year, mentally, it’s not sustainable, physically, it’s obviously not sustainable either. So I like how you approach it. And I mean, I sort of take that approach. It was like when I’ve trained for an event, I love having those intense times where you’re motivated to do it, you want to do it. But then it’s great to have that downtime too. And I like one of the things that you’re looking forward to is just sitting on the couch and watching Netflix. It’s one of the best feelings though. When you’ve earned it, you know, you don’t feel guilty about it and it’s just, you enjoy it a lot more than if that’s your normal day. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, no, it’s exactly what, you know, you’ve earned being there, you know, can kind of bathe in a bit of glory about the whole thing, you know, can reflect on it and just, yeah, it’s a really fun time. I really enjoy that time.

As much as the training, I reckon, I think I do enjoy that just, you know, complete, relax, you know, whatever, not doing anything. It’s really fun. Yeah, absolutely. And what about now? Like, where’s your, where are you at mentally in terms of looking at another event? I read that you were, the event that you were training for was canceled. So where are you at in terms of what you’d like to do next? Yeah, so this year anyway, it was planned as a down year. Like, I wasn’t planning any massive events because I’ve been doing them for, like I’ve done five events, I think, or yeah, basically every year I took one year off because I had injuries and yeah, didn’t do anything massive, but I’ve done like five events pretty close together. So I was getting to the point where eventually I was starting to really crack when I was doing the training. And I’m like, all right, I needed long break after this because if I try and build up for another big event,

then it’s just, it’s gonna end really badly and I don’t want that. So yeah, I was gonna do an event in Samoa which was gonna be a bunch of races over a week and that was gonna be really, really fun. I was really looking forward to that, which is a lot less crazy and intense that I always have been doing. But yeah, obviously with, you know, flight restrictions and everything, I was like, all right, you know, that’s not gonna happen. And then at the moment, I’m in a bit of a holding pattern because there is no races that have been announced that interest me or that I really wanna do. And I don’t really know kind of what’s gonna be happening. So yeah, it’s an interesting time. But I found a little while ago, like when everything was starting to close down and all the races were canceled and everything, you know, I was starting to kind of have a bit of a moment of just like, well, who am I? What am I? Like I trying to race, like this is crazy.

Like I don’t understand what’s actually the purpose in continuing on doing anything at the moment. And so I did have this one particular run that I went on and I was thinking about, okay, so why did you get into sport in the first place? Like what was the initial attraction to it? And I thought back and I’m like, well, it was nothing about races. Like I didn’t even know about races when I first started getting into fitness and things. It was about trying to be fit, trying to be healthy, trying to be strong. And I went, okay, that’s still relevant. Like that’s still the purpose of why you’re doing this now. The races are a fun thing that get on top of that. So go back to basics. That is now, you know, why you’re still going. And my training at the moment has been a lot more focused on getting a lot more strength and, you know, a bit of speed because I haven’t done a lot of really targeted speed work for a very long time because, you know,

you do a little bit here and there. You’re not going to know that. No, no, no. When you’re racing for five days, you know, it’s not really funny. Just that statement alone, hey, racing for five days, yeah. Yeah, pretty much. So, yeah, like it’s been really different, but it’s been fun in a different way and really challenging in a different way. So I’ve actually been quite okay, like, you know, I had kind of a bit of a moment and I’m like, all right, how can I reframe this? And then, yeah, now I’m actually, you know, just waiting, really, waiting to see what happens. And because to me, I think the kind of races that I’ll be interested in that are actually going to be feasible are going to be like trail races and mountain bike races and things where people are spread out anyway. So I’m kind of waiting, maybe, if something like that comes up that interests me, then I’m like, okay, well, you know, I’ll see, see what I can do.

But for now, I’m just happy training and actually not having a race to have some kind of pressure to train for. It’s actually been really nice. It’s worthwhile enjoying those moments, isn’t it, when there’s no pressure and just enjoying the training for the training sake. It’s, and one of the good things that’s come out of this, and I think I was probably similar at the start. It’s like, when I had to stop coaching, stop swimming, it’s like, I had to sort of, you’ve got to check yourself. It’s like, you can’t have your ego tied up in something like that, where you could easily have it shut down. So if a lot of your identity and self-worth comes from that thing, you’re going to be in a bit of trouble. And it’s like, I’ve sort of been battling that a little bit. It’s like, well, I can’t do the stuff that I love and it’s really hard to manage that. So what are some strategies to sort of stay, stay on top of it and keep enjoying the things.

And so I’ve been going down to the Bay once a week and swimming there and surfing a lot more and still doing a little bit of online coaching. But still it’s, yeah, it’s hard when you sort of get that reality check. It’s like, all right, you got to come back to the real foundations of why you do things. And similar thing, it’s like, it is fun to just train, to be fit and to do new things as well. I’ve been doing a lot more strength training where I was doing number four. And so you mentioned you’ve been doing a lot of speed training some, like, yeah, why not? Because yeah, because normally that’s not going to be part of your training at all. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, my coach and her husband, like I’ve got to join business together. And that was set up. We’ve done three 5K time trial runs and we did them all four weeks apart and then just see if you can improve on your time each time. And like time trials are the worst.

Like I really, really, really struggle with them because I’m just, I’m not used to running flat out. I’m not used to that kind of level of pacing or whatever. So I’m like, well, you know, it’s something different which just kind of invigorating in some ways as well. But yeah, I absolutely take your point about identity. I’ve really made sure throughout my whole, like athletic career so far that I’m not a triathlete alone and that is itch. Like I am a lot of different things that all are made up in together. And I’ve had people over time, you know, ask me would I ever work in triathlon? Would I have a coach? Would I ever do anything? And I’m like, for me, I don’t want that to be my all in everything. Like I really like having different parts of my life being in very, very different focuses. So yeah, you know, for someone who like that’s it. It’s like, okay, so that is not who you are though. That is what you do.

And yeah, finding that identity outside of sports very, very important too. Yeah, absolutely. And I read one of your posts on your blog as well about imposter syndrome. Is that something that you felt had reduced after doing the Uberman event or it’s still something that comes, that crops up from time to time. And I think it’s, I mean, I don’t think it matters what you do, whether it’s coaching or competing. It’s like, it’s always there. And even you hear about the top athletes in the world, they still have that sort of feeling. It’s just, it’s such a funny thing. But yeah, if you, has that diminished at all or it still crops up?

It hasn’t gone completely. I don’t think it ever will. But no, it’s definitely, definitely dissipated a lot. So I remember when, because we had a little meet and greet because there was two other guys doing Uberman as well. And, you know, with their crews and things. Like I knew quite a few people on their crew for one particular athlete. So that was amazing to catch up with all of them. But I remember walking in and I said to myself, and I had the feeling of, wow, I actually belong here. And I’ve never had that feeling before. Like that was, that was really incredible to have that feeling. Because all like constantly as like, you know, there’s always really fit people. And then there’s me, like, what am I even doing here? Like I don’t belong here. Like this is, this is crazy. And like I’ve battled that so hard when I did Epic Five as well. And, you know, being the only female, I kind of felt probably extra pressure to prove myself

that, you know, I was tough and as strong and that everybody else is all the guys and everything. Like, you know, usually I don’t have a big gender focus on what I’m doing. Cause, you know, whatever, I just do what I do. Cause I love it and I want to do it. It doesn’t matter if there’s other females there or not. But yeah, I really, really battled with that. But I’ve found since Uberman, I’ve really learnt to claim my space in the world a lot more. And so I’ve even noticed like just physically moving through spaces and things. Like, I will, you know, if you’re walking in a straight line and there’s someone else walking directly towards you, you make eye contact. And, you know, the other person makes it very clear that they’re not going to move. I’m like, well, you know, we can actually give each other a little bit of space here. I’m not the one who’s going to shrink to the side just because you don’t want to move, because whatever.

Like, I find even those little things I’ve got a lot more confidence with. And I’m like, no, this is me, you know, this is me in the world and this is where I am. And I’m not going to be, you know, just kind of shrinking to just to accommodate other people around me. So yeah, it’s been a really interesting shift and something that I’ve kind of noticed over time that’s overhappened since Uberman. It’s given me a lot more confidence in ways that I didn’t expect to happen. That’s so interesting, because it is absolutely a thing. The way that you feel, the way how you think about yourself comes out in your body language. And then it projects out into the world. And one of our coach up in Sydney, Mitch Patterson, he, ex Australian swimmer, quite tall, quite broad. And he’s posture, ever since I first met him a couple of years back, his posture is always chest forward, shoulders back, just very, comes across very calm

and confident and with that sort of demeanour. And it really carries on with the things that you do in life. And so it’s awesome to hear that that’s, you know, something like that. All it took was a five day race to get you there, right? Yeah, nothing, nothing, it wasn’t a thing. Totally worth it.

And I mean, I saw you on the Rich Roll podcast as well, which is unreal. And what was that like for you being on that podcast, which is, you know, for most people in endurance sports, like that’s probably one of the very top podcasts and goes out to tens of thousands of people. Like how was that for you being on there? Yeah, that was amazing. So I had met him and done a podcast before with another girl, Danny Grable, because we’re the first two females to do Epic Five. I cheated the first two nights in the second. So I’d already met him. And when I took the first one, I freaked out. Like I was, it was really funny. So you sit down, you’re like, oh my God, there’s Rich. Oh my God, there’s a bunch of video cameras. Oh my God, what am I even doing? Like it was, I just, I was looking back at that and I just screamed. I’m like, oh, I can’t even listen to it. I just, I can’t, I can’t even. So I feel like the second time

I was able to be a little bit more relaxed and we were like, oh yeah, cool. I’ve done a few more podcasts now. So I get the rhythm of them a little bit more. I kind of, I feel a lot more comfortable talking to him and sitting across from him. And because it was just me as well, I kind of like, well, you just got to hold your own. Like this, there’s no two ways around it. So it was still pretty full on. And I was still like holding your fan girl, just calm down, just breathe. But yeah, I think it was much, much better the second time around, thankfully. And yeah, we had that conversation because I wrote that imposter thing after I did the ritual podcast and I was like, you don’t even belong there. Like who do you even think you are? And we brought that up during the podcast. And I sent you, I’m like, oh my God, I had the biggest meltdown. Like I do not have anxiety as a baseline, but I feel like I had a panic attack

thinking about that. And then, yeah, so this time around, thankfully. And I get so much amazing feedback, even still from people sending messages, saying they’ve listened and they got this out of it or that out of it. So yeah, it’s definitely an incredible podcast with a huge, huge audience. I can’t even get my head around how big his audience is. But yeah, it’s a really fun experience. Still intimidating. Do the people at your work sort of know, well, they obviously know what you do, but is there any sort of, do they recognize the things that you’ve achieved or is it sort of, do you keep quiet about it? Like what’s it like at work for you with all of the stuff that you did? They probably say you’re falling asleep at your desk and go, oh, you must be training again. Yeah, it’s funny. Like I don’t really talk about it at work because I mean, like I sort of love my work colleagues, but to be honest, if you’re talking to people outside of sport,

I feel like they can’t relate or they’re like, you know, oh, so would you know the weekend? I’m like, oh, you know, I just read for eight hours and ran for six and did a swim. And they probably say, oh, okay, yeah, great. Yeah, pretty much. It doesn’t trigger like, that’s a massive weekend. No, I mean, like, yeah, there’s usually, oh my God, you’re insane. And then, yeah, you can’t really conceptualize it. So I generally don’t really talk about it. Cause one thing that I also do struggle with is that reaction of people just like, oh my God, like that really full on emotion that you get back when you tell somebody. And I’m like, yeah, cool. Wait, what do I do now? What do I say now? Like I’m getting better at that. I’ve had a bit of practice now. So yeah, I generally don’t really talk about that much, but I actually had one guy say to him the other day, he’s like, so I figured out what you’ve done

because he like, you know, explain it. And he goes, yeah, I didn’t actually really, it didn’t sink in. I didn’t really comprehend what you were saying. But then he’s gone away and spoken to his sister. And his sister’s like, oh yeah, I heard that episode on the Rich Role podcast talking to her. So he was like, you are famous in my household now, which is very, very cute. That’s awesome. Yeah, so occasionally there might be a few discussions, but to be honest, I generally just keep quiet about it. And if people want to know, I’ll talk about it and everything. After Overman, I did a very brief interview with the ABC radio and then that leaked around the office and there was a little article printed out and put out. I was just like, look at, look at what Mel did. So yeah, it is very sweet. That’s awesome. It’s the way to do it though. I think when people find out on their own what you’ve done and it’s not like you’ve been really sort of out there

just telling everyone, well, you won’t believe what I did. It’s like, it’s really, it’s a nice, that’s a nice feeling. And they probably come to appreciate it more that way too. But it’s funny because it’s, a lot of my friends are swimmers or triathletes and like I enjoy talking with them about their training, what they’re doing and like it’s for whatever, it’s just fun. You know, you like sharing that stuff. And then anyone who’s not in that world, they’re just like, there’s no connection with that. And it’s just like the end of that conversation. Like they just can’t go anywhere. But with someone who’s in the world and you’ve done it, you’re used to it as well. It’s just, it’s enjoyable to talk about it. So that’s why I think it’s, you need other people to share that stuff with because they can appreciate it. And you can really just talk for hours without seeing time go by because it’s just, you’re just in that world and you love it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And how did you fit it around your work? I mean, do you know how many hours a week we’re training? Because I think like for that sort of block hat, how many sessions a week were you doing and how’d you work it?

How many sessions? I think it was maybe like 13 to 15 sessions a week. So I’d have like two gym sessions. I’d have, you know, probably minimum like three runs, three rides, three swims and then whatever on top of that, you know, sessions that I was doing. So, yeah, I think that’s probably it.

It’s one of those things like, thankfully, I used to do shift work, but I don’t anymore. And to be honest, you know, people’s like, oh, isn’t it so much better working, you know, like not shift work hours? I’m like, well, you know, you do what you can with what hours you’ve got. So, you know, either or. Like, I think night shift is the worst when you’re trying to balance a heavy training load around night shift. I think a few years ago I was doing maybe like 20-hour weeks around night shift and that taught me that I can survive on no sleep and, you know, still work and still function. So that was actually really good learning. Not really recommended to do it on a full-time basis. But this time round, my training, I think my biggest week absolutely would have been the 100K week that I did and that was getting up almost to 30 hours. I think that was maybe like 27, 28-hour week. And then I backed that up with another 20-hour week.

So that was pretty full-on. Thankfully, I have a job where I can sit down at my desk and do work and then, you know, I come and go. But if I really need to, I have the ability just to get really focused in on what I’m doing. Like, even if I’m completely exhausted, I can just kind of push that down to deal with later and still be able to actually be a functioning person at work, which is very helpful. But I mean, I’d be training twice a day every day, basically. So my work starts at 7.30 and I finish at 4. So I’d be up, you know, 4.35 every morning, you know, do maybe an hour and a half, two-hour session, whatever it is. And then I’d get home from work and do another, you know, an hour and a half, two-hour session. And then on my weekends, so that could like, I’d either work, you know, Friday, Saturday or Sunday, Monday, just depending on what my roster was doing at that time. So my weekend, I just would have massive training blocks.

So a lot of the time, my coach was getting to be right, getting me to ride in the hills. So I’d be driving out to the Dany Nong’s or driving out to King Lake and just doing hill repeats because I find that if I have to make a lot of decisions, I really struggle with decision fatigue because I work in a very stressful job sometimes. And then, you know, training on top of that, when you’re absolutely exhausted, if I’m riding the Dany Nong’s and I’ll say to myself, where do I wanna ride? Which hill do I wanna ride? I’ll end up going, I am way too tired to make this very basic decision. I’m just gonna do hill reps for eight hours and I don’t care. And that is fine because I can go to my car, I can refill, I know where the water is, I know what everything is, it’s fine, I’ll just do that. So I try and set up my life as much as possible where I don’t have to make decisions. I just have to do what I need to do. So like that’ll be to the point where I even do it now,

like it’s even such a habit. I’ll even like pull my work clothes out. It’s just, yeah, it’s such a habit. But I’ll get my sports clothes out the night before every single night. So then I don’t have to think about what I’m doing. All I have to do is just grab the pile of clothes, get changed, then get out the door or whatever decision I’m doing. So then again, it’s taking that decision about where is everything, try not to wake up people in the house, having to do all these small steps. It’s like all of that’s taken out. All you have to do is get up as soon as your alarm goes off, get out the door and get moving and then deal with it later. And then at the end of my working day, I’ll get home and I’ll get changed straight away because I know that if I sit down on the couch, I have to then make a decision to get off the couch. So I cut out that, I just get changed straight away, jump on the bike, go for a run, whatever session I’m doing.

If I’m doing a swim or go straight from work to the pool, I won’t come home because again, then it’s a decision to leave the house. So I find if I stop and think to myself, do I really want to do this? The answer is going to be pretty much no because I’m really tired. So I don’t ask myself that question. I just go and do it. And it sounds like such a small and simple thing, but it’s the difference between doing the training and not half the time. Like it’s just, if there’s no negotiation in your mind and you don’t allow yourself to ask that question, then you’re going to do it. And I do a similar thing with get exercise clothes out in the morning and same thing, I don’t want to wake up my wife, don’t wake up the kids. And I want to, I need to get out of the house without causing too much of a stir. And then it’s just, it’s so much easier as well. So it’s five minutes at night can save you half an hour in the morning sometimes.

And especially as soon as you sit on the couch, like for me, I’ve found it really hard to get any work done after about sort of 5.30.

I used to be able to work through the night, but now it’s like, no, I get home and if I can’t do work after 5.30, it’s just, it’s too difficult because my mind’s just going, no, you’re done. Like once you come in and you’ve had dinner, yeah, it’s hard to do. So I think I love all those little mental tricks that you’ve sort of, that you know, that you understand, you see what they are and you can recognise them and just continue to do them to get the training done. Is there anything else like that that you use to do the training or anything else that you realised over the last couple of years that you trick yourself into doing the hard things? I’ve got so many.

Yeah, so there’s a bunch of different things, just depending on what the circumstance at the time is. One thing that I really, really cognisant of is not voicing out loud a lot of things. So I have a rule that I’m allowed to, you know, complain as much as I want in my head, but I don’t voice it because then it becomes my reality and then it’s something that I then have to deal with. So, you know, if I’m running and my legs are aching, you know, I’m feeling horrible. You know, just not loving life at that point in time. I’ll generally, what I do is I do a body scan. I’m like, okay, so physically, how am I actually going? You know, like top to bottom, you know, what’s going on? Is there anything that I need to urgently deal with? You know, is there any issues with my feet that I need to manage? Is there, you know, like something that I can just practically do at that point in time to fix? And, you know, if it’s not, then I’ll be like, okay,

so maybe I’m feeling bad because I need to eat. So then, you know, I’ll have something because that’s generally always my first point of call. If I’m not feeling great, it’s probably because I’m low in calories. So just eat something and then give it a bit of time. But one thing I really don’t do is I don’t try and force myself out of feeling bad. I remember once my coach said to me, she’s like, oh, you know, like, you know, when you’re not feeling great, you know, like just try and think of other things, you know, try and think of something positive, you know, try and work yourself out of it. And I was like, that doesn’t work for me. I am actually quite comfortable sitting with discomfort. And so what I do is I just sit in, you know, the uncomfortable for a while, try and problem solve, and then, you know, know that eventually the feeling’s gonna go away because every feeling always moves on to something else,

you know, you’ll feel good, you’ll feel bad, you’re never gonna feel good the whole time. So then how can you, you know, manage and, you know, when you’re not feeling great and try and figure out what’s going on? So that’s one thing that I absolutely do. I also, if I’m not feeling great, I’ll try and look up and around where I am because I also find, especially when, you know, you’re riding or you’re running or something, you’ll kind of go into yourself and you’ll look down and you won’t really take in your surroundings at all because you’re just not feeling that great at that point in time. I mean, obviously it’s harder when you’re swimming and in the oom, man, I was swimming in the dark. So I was like, look around at what? But yeah, I find that that also can be quite nice and destructive because a lot of the time I pick races in places I’ve never been to before because I just wanna, you know, go there and experience it.

So I’ll be like, actually appreciate where you are at this point in time because you’re not necessarily ever gonna come back here again. So, you know, look around, take in the scenery, take in, you know, the landscape, the amazingness of wherever you are and the amount of kilometers that I went across with Uberman and the amount of different landscapes that we went through is just absolutely incredible. So that was really, really important for me as well just to have that sense of appreciation of this is where you are, be here where you are, don’t, you know, kind of forward project into what’s gonna be and, you know, then start kind of get worked up about what’s gonna happen if you don’t start to feel better. But I know eventually, you know, I will. I’ve got a couple of ones that I use depending on what the weather is. So in heat, if, you know, you ever see pictures of me as, you know, you can see now I have very pale skin

and I have red hair. I’m not built for desert running at all. But what my previous coach, Craig Percival, he said to me once, he’s like, because I always used to give feedback in my training. I’m like, oh, it was really hot. I didn’t do that well because it was so hot and I don’t cope well in the heat. And he said to me, he’s like, well, you’re going to Hawaii. It’s going to be hot. Figure out how to deal with it. I’m like, ah, right. Okay, it was the best advice I’ve had. So I went, okay, how do I mentally deal with the heat? So I came up with a few different strategies about, you know, again, going back to not giving it a voice. So I never say it’s hot. And if anyone comes up to me and is like, oh, wow, it’s really hot, I automatically have built in a response and say, oh, it’s not that bad. Cause then, you know, I’m just immediately not even engaging in that. And just going, oh yeah, isn’t it? And then you suddenly, you can feel the heat

and it’s, you know, again, you’re giving it a voice. So I don’t ever, don’t ever acknowledge that. And I also do a couple of other things where I will, you know, think about the sun, especially when it’s really intensely beating down on you. And I just think and I’m like, thank you. You know, this is amazing. And I just imagined that the sun’s actually giving me energy and like, I’ve got some solar panels on me or something and it’s actually like super charging me to continue forward. And I find, yeah, just having that kind of sense of gratitude around it and just, you know, reframing it. I do a lot of reframing, I realize that recently. I was like, you do that a lot. I’m like, oh, do I, oh yeah, actually. So I find that really helps. And the other one that I really like is when it’s really windy. So if I’m on the bike and I’m riding into a really intense headwind, I think about how Forrest Cump, the movie, which is so random, I have no idea where this came from.

It was just one day I must have just come to me. So I think about that. And I think about Lieutenant Dan. And I think about when he’s on top of the shrimp boat in the middle of the storm and he’s in there yelling and he’s like, is that all you’ve got? You know, like, I can take it. And I just think about, and like, one thing it makes me laugh and then I just relax and it’s a bit of a tense in the headwind. But also then I just start challenging the wind and I’m like, well, come on, like, I’m still moving. Obviously not doing good enough job here. So yeah, there’s a bunch of things that I’ve just come up through with over the years. Like some things have come to me, some things I’ve made up on my own. But I find just, yeah, all these little things just help as I go along. I love it. I don’t know if you’ve seen, have you seen the Jordan Docko on Netflix? Yes, oh my God. It’s awesome, isn’t it? And just one of my favorite parts about that is

he’ll take anything and even make stuff up, kind of like you make things up as a way to fuel his fire. Like he’ll pretend like someone had said something about him and then that fires him up and it gets him ready. And I was listening to a swimming podcast and it was, who was it? So Grant Hackett, I think in, he had the 1500, I think at Pampax one year and his attitude normally going into that race is I am like, he’s there to win it and win it by as much as he possibly can. A real competitor and at this Pampax meet, he was tired, he’d raced a lot in the last two weeks and he said to one of his teammates, Brett Hawke, I’m just going to, I’m just going to go in there to just, just to win it. And that’s it. Like he wasn’t driven to really do that well. And so his teammate, Brett Hawke said, and he made this up. Like some of the guys from the American team were saying like, you know, this is like, we’re going to, we’re probably going to beat Grant here.

Like this is, this is our chance to beat him. He hasn’t been beating for so many years. And like he said that talking smack about him. And that pissed him off so bad that he went out there and just obliterated them. And he got out of the pool and he was still angry. And after he did like, I think the post race interview, Brett had to go over to him and tell him that he made it up. Cause he was still walking around like, like some of his friends from the other teams had said stuff about him. But it’s, yeah, it’s things, it’s tricks like that that can, can really do wonders. And I think, yeah, as a coach or as a friend, it’s like, yeah, if you can really buy someone up with the way that you know is going to get them going, why not use it? Absolutely. It’s really interesting. People always talk about what their why is. You know, why are you doing this? Like what’s, what’s their, you know, underlying reason to keep going.

And I’m like, if it’s anger, use it. Like it doesn’t have to be a positive thing. It doesn’t have to be, you know, something nice and rainbows and sunshine. If it’s like you are angry as hell, doesn’t matter. Harness it, use it. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s right. And you see it particularly with a lot of, a lot of high level athletes is that, like a lot of times they’re driven by, by maybe, you know, frustration as a kid. Like maybe they need to want to prove themselves from, because as a kid, they maybe bullied or whatever it could be. It’s like, we use that as your fire. And I think as you get older, like you start to, you maybe realise that and you can change your approach a bit. But I think it’s a good way to stake the fire if that’s what gets you going. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Mel, thanks so much for being on the podcast. And I mean, you’ve got a blog where I look back, you’ve got a, you’ve written for a very long time,

which is amazing. So do you want to give your details and where people can find out more about you? Yeah. So my blog is rangamel.wordpress.com. So, yeah, rang are for those not in Australia. It’s memorable. It’s, oh, it really is, it really is. And it was so funny, I was explaining to some Americans they’re like, I don’t get it. Like, they’re okay.

Yeah, so my Instagram is rangamel and I’ve got an athlete page on Facebook as well, which is our policy area ultra endurance athlete. So, few places. Awesome. I’ll put those links now, show notes. And I appreciate you being on the podcast. Thank you, great chatting. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post Training Your Mind To Finish An 894km Race with Melissa Urie appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Welcome back to another podcast episode! Today, I’ll be sharing my top tips for making your open water swimming enjoyable and more challenging. Listen on in!

00:27 What Are the Drills You Can Do?
1:47 How to Break Down Or Structure An Open Water Swim
3:37 Don’t Overthink It!
3:56 Overcome Open Water Swim Anxiety
5:55 Progressively Make Your Swimming More Challenging
6:39 Dynamic Breathing

Darren Stojanovic
Dynamic Breathwork Sessions
Podcast episode: Hijack Your Breathing, Control Your Emotions And Increase Your Performance With Darren Stojanovic

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Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. I got asked by one of our members earlier this week is what kind of session? How can you structure your workouts if you don’t have access to a pool but you can only swim open water? What are some drills you can do and how would you structure a workout? Well the thing about open water is there’s no reason why it can’t be similar or somewhat similar to what you do in a pool in terms of you can do specific efforts in there you can still do the same drills now obviously if it’s choppy it’s going to be a little bit harder but what I would typically do provided the water is not freezing cold and you just need to keep moving is I would do some of the primary drills that I’d normally do in the pool for a lot of the times like if I’m racing in the warm-up I’ll do some easy swimming

followed by some kick and typically some pretty hard efforts of just kicking I’ll do quite a bit of front skull as well just to warm up the shoulders and get that feel for the water and I’ll also do some drills like either the doggy scoop drill kind of like a doggy paddle drill just to work on the front end to work on the catch sometimes we’ll do that YMCA drill as well and then drills like our kickboard press down drill which is really just working on opening up the shoulders opening up the lifting the sternum and and working on the recovery because for me that’s one of the things that I need to to work on so there’s no reason why you can’t do the same or similar drills in the open water that you would do in the pool so if you do have any specific drills that are working on the things that you know are going to help make you faster you can still do those as part of your warm-up now how would you break down or structure an open water swim well what I normally do if I’m

going to swim with friends in the open water depending on the type of session look we’ll do some easy swimming it could be 500 meters a thousand meters of easy warm-up and then sometimes we’ll break it down so if we swim in a place like Alwood there’s a section there there’s two poles they’re about 200 meters apart I think it is and within that that 200 meters like we’ll often do laps as in let’s say we might do three pole to poles which would be 600 meters and we will sometimes build up one to three so we’ll start easy on the first one a little bit faster on the second and all out on the the last one you can do it that way so if you’ve got some markers out there that’s a good way to break it into different efforts and intervals and sections like that or what we will normally do is just break it into break it into stroke count stuff so if you don’t have any buoys or poles or anything to sort of indicate distance

then do it as something like 20 strokes fast 30 strokes easy that’s a real go-to that I like to use is if we’re just on a straight patch and we’re wanting to do some efforts 20 strokes fast 30 strokes easy is one that will often go to there so you can always just break it down that way and if you know right normally in a 50 meter pool okay I might take let’s say you take 40 strokes you know that’s going to be roughly equivalent to the same same thing so if you are looking to do sort of 100 meter efforts it might be like 80 strokes so you might do like four times 80 strokes where the first 80 strokes is easy second is medium third one’s solid and then the fourth one is is all out so break it down that way just keep it simple don’t overthink it I mean when we are a training look the main thing is you’re in there you’re swimming that’s the most important thing but then when you if you want to break it up and

you want to keep it interesting then that’s a good way to do it and if you’re swimming in cold water and this is something that we’re doing at the moment because the water temp is down to about 12 degrees 13 degrees starting to get pretty cold and I’ve had a few friends and a few people I know just mentioned when the water gets really cold they get quite anxious and within you know with one of the reasons for that you know the reason that we get anxious a big part of it comes down to our breathing and so when the water is cold and I and I feel like I’m starting to get cold one of the things that I always try and return to is is how am I breathing particularly how am I exhaling so when after I take a breath I’ll put my face in the water and I’ll just sort of I’ll try and hold my breath I’ll try and limit the exhale there might be a light exhale through the nose but I’ll just sort of hold my breath I’m trying to feel relaxed trying to feel

controlled and then just before I turn my head I exhale through the nose I sort of it’s a fairly assertive exhale but assertive to the point of I just want to try and mostly clear my lungs and then return to the breath what most people tend to do when they panic or they get anxious is they’ll breathe it’d be more like a gasp of air where it’s really in the upper chest try and use your your diaphragm your dome shaped muscle that’s at the base of your your lungs there so think of it like breathing low or breathing into your belly try and get a slightly deeper breath more of a controlled breath in a short shallow one when you get that then you put your face in the water and just just hold your your breath for a minute don’t exhale straight away because one of the things that will cause you to panic is a very quick exhale where you’re blowing everything out straight away then you’ll be short of air you’ll be you’ll be searching for air

immediately and it’ll just start to build upon itself so if you can follow that ideal way of breathing where you don’t exhale everything straight away just hold your breath a little bit might maybe let a little bit out of your nose and then have that more assertive exhale through the nose not the mouth then then it’s a good way to sort of keep the heart rate down and feel much more comfortable in that cold and like anything if you want to develop your you know your ability to go through things that maybe you’re that make you anxious or or that you’re afraid of it’s just progressively make it more challenging so you might just swim near the shore and that way you know okay if things get bad i can get out the shore is 10 meters away and then i can get on to dry land so just progressively work towards something that scares you or or makes you more anxious that’s the way to to overcome those those sorts of feelings

and look at i know it happens but just always returning to the breath is something that i’ve focused a lot on and doing a video on this so if you haven’t seen our youtube channel lately then have a look there there’s a video where i’m sort of talking a little bit about this and someone called Darius Dejanovic doing a little bit of work with him on it he runs breathing classes and breathing courses and that’s something i found very beneficial as well to help with that sort of thing so if you know that breathing is an issue then looking at something like some breathing classes can be a good way to approach it and i’d recommend something like dynamic breathing which is Darren’s company they run online classes and and something that i think is beneficial for for all swimmers and that’s something that we do at at clinics as well i’ve done a podcast with Darren as well which i’d recommend listening to if you haven’t heard that one already so thanks very much for listening we’ll

be back next week with another episode thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

The post How To Keep Your Open Water Swims Interesting appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Welcome Back! Here in Australia, there are a couple of pools that have started to open, you can book individual lanes for a certain amount of time. So I thought of doing a podcast talking about the best ways to get back to training once your pool has opened.

00:55 Time Frame
01:54 How Many Sessions?
02:52 What Will You Experience?
04:19 What Type Of Training Should You Be Doing?
08:39 Warm Up With Fins
09:41 Therebands
10:19 Time Trial

Effortless Swimming
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Get The First 2 Weeks Of Workouts & Speed Up Your Return To Fitness

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, welcome back. It’s Brenton here. And in this episode, it’s a solo episode that I’m recording, so no guest. But this one is about the best way to return to the pool. In Australia, there’s a couple of pools that have started to open where you can book individual lanes for a certain amount of time. So pools are starting to open back up and I thought I’d do a podcast talking about the best way to get back to training once your pool has opened. How you can do it without getting injured and how you can do it so you start to get that fitness and strength back that you had before it all stopped. How you can get that back quickly and do it in a way where you can also improve your technique as you go through it. So there’s seven things here that I’ve written down.

And the first one is for returning to the pool is what timeframe are you looking at? One of the things that I’ve found over the last sort of 10, 15 years is that the times I’ve taken time out of the water of a number of weeks or I haven’t swum much at all. If I’ve done enough swimming in that time that I have gotten back into it, I can usually get back pretty close to where I was within about six weeks. So I think for most people, for most adults, if they train well enough and intense enough for six weeks, they can get back to where they were earlier. Now, for elites, most of those guys will be looking at four to six months because obviously they are training eight to 12 times a week and it’s a different level that they are at. But for most people, I think six weeks is a good benchmark. You might be looking at eight or 10 weeks depending on how many sessions a week you can do. But that’s what I’m sort of bargaining for is about six weeks provided that I’m training enough.

The second thing is how many sessions and how much distance should you be doing per session? Well, obviously it’s individual depends what you’re doing before this. But what I’m looking at for most systems that I coach is somewhere between 3,000 to 4,000 meters or yards a session. Now, for the first week, you might look to do a little bit less than that somewhere in the sort of 2,000 to 3,000 mark is probably a good way to begin. But if you have been able to either swim open water or do some strength work, yes, somewhere in that sort of 3,000 to 4,000 meters or yards will be a good range to stick to. And if you can swim four times a week, that’s going to be ideal. I mean, my rule of thumb is typically three sessions per week is a minimum for people, but there’s a noticeable difference with four sessions a week. So that’s what I’d recommend provided that’s what you can do. I know some people have got a limit on how much they can swim

because some of the pools aren’t allowing more than, say, one session a week. But that’s what I would aim for is four times a week. Then what are you likely to experience getting back into the water? Well, for the times that I have taken a bit of time out of the water, when you do get back in, the number one thing you’ll find is that the very first lap feels great. It feels amazing. You feel like you’re fresh, you’re well rested, and then as soon as you hit the turn, you feel heavy and you feel weak and it all just turns around. That’s what I find every single time. But expect yourself to feel very sluggish and slow and heavy, particularly after like three or 400 meters. That’s going to happen. You’re going to feel weak and wobbly and disconnected and is not going to feel good. So you need to be willing to persist through those sorts of feelings for usually three or four weeks is how long it will probably take you to overcome most of those sorts of feelings.

But if you know that it’s coming and you’re prepared to persist through it, then you come out the other side of it feeling so much better and feeling like you can swim again. But don’t be disheartened. Look, that’s just all part of it. And for whatever reason, when you do spend time out of the water, there’s nothing that can substitute actual swimming. No matter how much swim specific strength you’ve been doing, there’s nothing that actually substitutes actual swimming. So just know that it’s going to not feel great for a number of weeks. Then what type of training should you be doing? Well, in terms of what type of training, I wrote a six week return of the pool training plan and that’s inside our membership for members there. And I’ve also made two weeks of that available for free. So if you go to our website at effortlesswimming.com, find this podcast and I’ll put a link there as well so you can get those two weeks for free.

But within that sort of six week program, some of the things that we’ve done, like we start out very comfortable, but one of the first things that we really want to do is start fairly slow with some of the swimming. But as we progress through those six weeks, we do have a few efforts where we’re building or we’re progressing the effort. So it’s not like for six weeks, we’re just going to do completely slow swimming, all slow swimming. That’s not the case because for you to get back to where you were, we want to start to be able to change the pace a bit. Now you’ll probably find as we do these building efforts, an example of this is 4100s, building one to four. So the first hundred is the easiest one. The fourth one is the fastest one. Now as you do something like that, your times may not change that much because you’ll probably find that you’re very limited with the different gears that you can use. Your effort might increase but your speed might not change that much.

But we want to start to get used to changing the speed a little bit. So there are certainly some building efforts within those first six weeks. We even do some sprints. Even the very first session I’ve got in there 425s all out with I think it’s 15 or 20 seconds rest in between. Because what I personally find is that when I’ve had time out of the water to get back in, something that helps me get back quicker is by doing all out short, sharp sprints like repeat 25s. And it doesn’t need to be a lot, but that real top end, that real high end work, you tend to develop your swim strength a lot quicker than you would if it was all slow swimming. So for every sort of second or third session, there’s at least some 25s in there where I find that helps you kind of get back to where you were a lot quicker. The other thing that we do is there’s a fair bit of kick in there. Now, if you’re a triathlete, you probably might be wondering,

well, I don’t need to kick much if normally we’ve got a wetsuit on. But with kick, that’s what can provide you the stability through the rest of your stroke. So even if you are doing triathlon and you feel like kick is wasting your time, it’s not, it can really help you with the rest of your stroke. So it is worth doing the kicking there and doing it on your side, on your front, on your back, mixing it up, changing direction. And that’s what’s going to help you develop an effective kick. Because we know you don’t need a hard kick, but we want an effective kick. And that means upwards and downwards pressure on the kick. We want to keep it relatively narrow within the line of the body and keeping the toes somewhat pointed. And that’s what’s going to give you the stability and control through the rest of the body, through your hips, through your core, and be able to connect that up with the catch and the rotation.

We’ve got some skull in there just to start to get that feel and that awareness on the hands and the forearm again. And with the skull that we do, quite a bit of it is with a pull buoy on and a band and ankle strap. Because that way it can also help develop that upper body strength through the deltoids, through your forearms and through your hands that’s needed for when you start to get some more distance going. And we also do a reasonable amount of, I’d call it strength work, but pull work. So you’ve got the pull buoy, you’ve got the paddles on and sometimes the ankle band as well. Just to isolate the arms and the pull to start to fast track that a little bit. So obviously taking the kick out of it and most of that strength is, or most of that work is going to go into the arms. So we really start to build that up through those six weeks there. So that’s what we look to do. And then in terms of drills, most of the technique work that we do

in that training plan is done in the warm up and we change the drills as we go. We sort of follow those five core principles that we’ve got on how to swim fast. We follow those throughout the six weeks. So as we start to get into week three, four, five and six we start to do a bit more of the doggy scoop drill, YMCA drill, some of those catch and pull drills as well as sort of rhythm drills and things like that. You start out with the basics, finding your balance, getting the kick working, getting the scale happening and then we start to progress to the later parts of the stroke. Another thing that I would recommend for most people is warm up with fins. The purpose behind that is with fins on it’s going to take a lot of the load off your upper body and your shoulders. And one of the issues that people can come across is just getting a few niggles here and there through their shoulders or getting injured through different parts of your upper body.

And sometimes that can come from either not warming up before you get in the pool or by just kind of having too much load in the beginning. So I think it’s really worthwhile doing some warm up with fins on. Even if it’s the first two to four hundred meters in the session that’s a good way to just work into it and build into it. So most of the sessions that we’ve got are with fins on for the warm up part of it. And when I used to coach the master squad that I used to coach I’d say probably four out of five sessions that we did we would warm up with fins. And I think it’s a really good thing to do particularly now when you haven’t been swimming for a number of weeks. The next thing is it might be worthwhile doing a bit of theraband work before you train. So there’s a five minute theraband warm up that I’ve got inside the membership. It’s this five minute routine that I will go through as often as I can before I train

because it’s going to help not only warm up the upper body but strengthen those smaller controlling muscles through the shoulders by using the theraband. So it’s an easier routine. Most people can find that five minutes to fit it in and it’s something that particularly anyone who’s had shoulder issues or anyone who just feels like it takes a long time to get going it’s something that can be useful for them. And the very last thing here is I’d recommend doing a time trial in your first week back something like a 400 meter time trial. Now the purpose behind this is one of the things is humans that we want to see one of the things that makes us feel good and be motivated is seeing progress. So if you do a 400 time trial in that first week that you’re back see how slow you are, realize how slow you are since you’ve been out of the pool and that’s going to give you a good benchmark to then work from over the next six weeks

whatever it might be for you a good benchmark to then look to improve upon. So let’s say that first 400 let’s say it takes you eight minutes in the next six weeks if you get it down to seven minutes 30 or quicker then you’re going to be pretty pumped up you’re going to be motivated to continue to make that improvement and in when was it November I came off the mountain bike and injured my shoulder and I couldn’t swim for a number of weeks or I could only kick basically and when I was able to swim again my hundred times or my hundred pace was 20 seconds slower than what it was before I came off the mountain bike and that was frustrating but I knew if I just kept persisting kept training that would eventually come down and it was good to see it come down and I think it took me two or three weeks to get it down to sort of 10 seconds 15 seconds slower than where I was and then it was probably about about eight weeks down the track

I was able to get it pretty close to where I was before that but obviously an injury is a little bit different than not being able to swim but it is good to see that progression so doing a time trial having some sort of benchmark to measure yourself against is a good approach now I wouldn’t normally recommend that but I think that kind of thing is good to see and that’s what might keep you motivated coming back into the water now as I mentioned earlier if you want to get the first two weeks six week plan for free then visit the website have a look at the post that this podcast is on and there will be a link there to be able to get it or if you’re a member jump inside the membership it’s under the workouts and you can download print off the six week plan it’s a PDF that you can just print off there and we’ve got links to all of the drills so we’ve got videos of them all and there’s sort of some comments under most of the sets that we do

explaining the purpose of it how to pace it how you should be feeling and what’s the reason that we’re doing it so go and check that out that’s our six week return to the pool training plan and that is what I would recommend now some of you I’ve also had the question what if we can’t get back in the pool and we can only swim open water well I’m going to answer that on another podcast that will be out in the next couple of days and I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast I’ll see you next week thanks for watching 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 7 Things To Make Your Return To The Pool 10x Better appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s episode, we sat down with the author of the book Your New Prime, and promoter of men’s health and wellness, Craig Cooper! We talked about the active approach to maintaining your physical and mental health as you age, how to get out of complacency, and how to start thriving and making steady forward progress in life.

3:40 Passion For Health
7:06 Adjusting Your Fitness As You Age
11:40 Cultivate The Friendships In Your Life
17:58 Break Free From Complacency
21:55 The Element Of Uncertainty
23:20 Live In The Moment
25:08 Good Friendships Are Key To Positive Mental Health
28:55 Life Is Challenging For Everyone
30:03 Get Together
33:45 What’s Next for Craig Cooper

Craig Cooper
Your New Prime: 30 Days to Better Sex, Eternal Strength, and a Kick-Ass Life After 40
craigcooper.net

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Freestyle Clinics Around Australia

Loneliness has been correlated equal to impact of smoking and obesity in terms of the ultimate health effects. 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 Craig Cooper. And Craig is the author of a book called Your New Prime, which Tony Robbins has called The Blueprint for Men Over 40. Craig is also a serial entrepreneur. He’s a venture capitalist and host of the American TV show Adventure Capitalists. He’s originally a New Zealander but grew up in Australia and now lives in Newport Beach in California. And on today’s episode, we talk about how you may shift your training and your diet and a number of other things as you get older, from when you go to your 20s to your 30s, 40s, 50s, and so on, and some of the shifts and some of the beliefs that

Craig has had to change in order to keep himself injury-free and keep himself healthy and fit. We also talk about how you can cultivate your friendships and your tribe, particularly through sport, as this is a really important part of keeping yourself mentally healthy. And this is something that I’ve seen with our camps and through master’s swimming, that having this tribe or this group of friends that you can develop through swimming is a really important part of life. We also talk about why it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got, how much fame, how much celebrity you’ve got. Everyone is going through the same issues. And Craig knows this from meeting very famous people and knowing very famous people through the work that he does. And he says that there’s no difference between people, no matter how much fame or how much money they’ve got. Another thing we talk about is the swim run community and why this is an

event that Craig has really been drawn to and really enjoys. Another thing we talk about is how you can get out of being complacent in your life. Now, there’s an element of some things we want to have certainty around, having some structure and some schedule. But we also need to have some level of uncertainty of things that we don’t know what’s going to happen, a level of adventure and play and having that uncertainty in our lives. And we talk about how you can have a bit more of that if you feel like it’s something that might be missing in your life. Let’s get into the episode. Here’s Craig Cooper. Craig, thanks for joining me on the podcast. We recorded this last week and as soon as I got off the call, I realized for some reason it didn’t record the sound on your end. And first of all, I was frustrated and I was embarrassed that I cannot believe that I wasted your time with it. But I appreciate you getting back on and offering to do this again.

So, mate, thank you very much for doing it. No, and someone who can admit their mistakes, Branson, is highly credible in my books. Well, I was thinking of it like in my mind, every excuse in the book was coming up like, right, how do I make it seem like it wasn’t my fault? But in the end, look, it comes down to me and just rip off that band-aid and it will all be fine. But yeah, at the time, I wasn’t too happy. I get double the amount of time with you, so, you know, it’s fun. Appreciate it. Craig, your background is primarily in business, but you’ve also written a book called Your New Prime, which is mainly for adults or men over 40. And how they can continue to be healthy, keep strong and live a good life. So, how did that come about with your background’s primarily business, but then moving into writing a book about men’s health? Yeah, well, you know, business has been my business, like it has to be, right?

But my passion has always been my health. And, you know, I say that because it’s kind of been a selfish endeavor for quite some time ever since I was, you know, going back to when I was nine, when I had encephalitis, I was in a coma for a month. When I was 11, I nearly lost my left leg through to, I think, osteomyelitis. I had viral pericarditis through sort of my 17th, through to my 19th year. So, I’ve had this history of inflammation and it’s been, you know, obviously a big deal for me. You know, I was, you know, I was a subject of, you know, a single mother sort of upbringing. So, sort of out on the street a lot, you know, in New Zealand and then subsequently in Australia. So, you know, I had to take care of myself and that was, you know, basically bringing myself up, you know, just as a person but also sort of looking after my health, you know, as a, you know, a teenager and into my sort of early adult life.

So, you know, it’s been a big focus of mine for sort of like 25, 30 years and it’s been, you know, really the book was a sort of passion project around, you know, how do I keep myself healthier because, you know, as I’ve sort of grown older and sort of, you know, the medical literature has evolved. We’ve found out that, you know, inflammation is just more and more at the core of, you know, disease. And, you know, it’s not just, you know, the, you know, stroke and heart attack and, you know, general lifestyle disorders but, you know, full metabolic disorders that, you know, we’re subject to as we age are sort of rooted more and more in inflammation. And I’ve kind of got the inflammation gene which I’ve had since, you know, I was born. So, you know, it was a passion project for me in order to keep me thriving through my, you know, 40s and 50s and I’m sort of turning 57 next Saturday. But it was also, you know, as I researched it more

it became more of a mission to sort of, how do I get sort of more and better information out there to men my age and educate them better because, you know, on the one hand, there’s, you know, so little information available to men especially around my age. You know, there’s a big focus on, you know, abs and biceps for, you know, guys and teenagers and that’s the focus of most of the media. But in terms of, you know, 40 plus in terms of the things that kind of really matter to you as your age there’s sort of very little information out there about that. And at the same time there’s a lot of disinformation, right? We get sound bites from the, you know, six o’clock news every night where, you know, we’re just inundated with sort of, you know, the influencer marketing around fitness and health and a lot of it is, you know, not rooted in science. I mean, basically anyone can come in and become an influencer. You know, if you’ve got, you know, a good body

and, you know, 500,000 followers on Instagram, whatever it might be, right? So there’s a lot of disinformation there. So I wanted to cut through all that particularly as it sort of relates to sort of guys my age and provide a platform for them to sort of thrive forward. And, you know, not just about fitness because that’s only, you know, one part of, you know, being healthy. I wanted to focus on, you know, every aspect that, you know, drives you forward and helps you thrive forward mentally, physically, emotionally, sectionally, nutritionally and fitness is only a small part of that because fitness changes as you age. You know, fitness is not just about, as I said, you know, biceps and abs. And that’s really the focus of the media. Fitness at, you know, my age, and I think you’re 32 now, Brenton, is that right? So, you know, you know, my fitness regime is a lot different to you girls, even though I, you know, through your videos

and everything, I, you know, try to keep up with you as much as I can. But, you know, for me, it’s more about, you know, flexibility, mobility, you know, strength is a huge part of it. You know, obviously as we start to lose muscle mass as we age, but it’s, you know, it’s a different platform once you hit your sort of forties and above. There’s some beliefs that you had 10, 20 years ago that have changed. What are the main beliefs that you’ve changed in that time where you realize that maybe what you thought you could do when you were 20 or 30, maybe isn’t the smartest option now, or some of those things where you were, you’ve completely switched dances. I mean, I know with my coaching, with my swimming, there’s been a few things where I’ve had my eyes open to what I originally thought when I started. Is there only anything that stands out to you there? Yeah, I think, I mean, you’ve got to, I mean, you’ve got to realize your limitations as you age, right?

Because, you know, I kept pushing as hard as I could, you know, as long as I could. And, you know, I got to the point where I was just rolling between injuries, right? So, you know, my whole sort of training and, you know, athletic, you know, platform and, you know, the competitions that I was entering that were basically structured around whether I was healthy or whether I was injured. And as you get older and older, you just got to realize that, you know, you’ve just got to step it back a bit. I mean, I competed in competitive Spartan racing up until about three years ago. And I was, you know, to that point, just really just racing between injuries because, you know, it was a, you know, it was a heavy, both endurance, you know, high intensity sort of strength-based exercise program with a lot of exercises which not necessarily sort of conducive to health as you age, you know, a lot of squats, a lot of heavy lifting and twists.

I mean, I was continuously just putting myself out of the game just through sort of the exercise regime that I was undertaking. So at some point, you’ve just got to say like, some things you just got to like stop and realize that that’s not conducive to a sort of a long-term sustainable health program. So for me, that was, you know, when you look at specifics, there was a lot of like squat work. There’s a lot of evidence around, you know, squats as you age in terms of barbell squats, in terms of, you know, in terms of the impact on that as you age, you know, I do a lot of kettlebell squats just in terms of goblet squats. And I’ve sort of sort of mixed that up a little bit. You can still continue to get the same sort of strength benefit but sort of, you know, using different machines and the like. So, you know, I’ve changed that whole strength regime. Nutritionally, you know, we all, you know, you just eat whatever you want, right?

But, you know, we’re bulletproof. You know, so, you know, now either, you know, very high proportion of fats because, you know, from the point of your brain health and sexual health and maintaining your testosterone, fats are a huge component of that. I ate a small amount of carbs, but I have to balance that in terms of the endurance work that I’m doing around, you know, specifically the triathlon training that I’m doing at the moment. And I eat a high proportion of protein now than I did in the past because, you know, once you hit like 30s of the age, but really once you hit about 40, 45, your body really starts to break down your muscle mass. So you need to eat a high proportion of protein per kilogram or pound of body weight. And then supplement that obviously with, you know, higher sort of, you know, low strength work. So less in terms of volume in terms of strength work,

but more in terms of intensity. Higher, heavier weights as you age, pretty much as heavy as you can lift as you age in terms of maintaining muscle mass, but less volume in terms of a weekly basis. So, you know, you don’t do weights every day. So I break my sort of training range came up into sort of endurance, tempo, high intensity training and strength work. And I kind of mix that up on a weekly basis. And that’s kind of where I focus. And with the other side of things as well, in terms of your, we spoke about this last time, your tribe, your friends, family, that sort of thing, has that shifted in focus as in you’ve, have you felt like that’s become a more important part of your life or you’ve come to understand it? Is that, and the reason I ask that is, for me, I think, particularly in my 20s, I probably didn’t have much of a focus on it. You know, it just sort of naturally happens. You might be at university and that sort of thing

happens a lot easier, but as soon as you have kids, sometimes that can fall by the wayside because you become so busy with that. So what I’ve tried to do with that is put a little bit more time and effort into cultivating that and being able to keep in touch or spend time with friends and keep that going because I’ve seen it be a really important part of mental health and also just the side of things where you’re having fun, you’re able to play, you’re able to really just take a step back from all of the other stuff that you do. Yeah, I mean, you’re lucky when you’re young. And so when you’re younger, it’s easy to cultivate friendships. You’ve still got the sort of hangover from college and your sort of early sort of state friendships. And also you’re in a social environment just in terms of your business. You’re continuously networking, whether it’s to your social networks and everything. So you’re lucky to have that as part of your platform,

but that’s not the case for upwards of 60% of men, if I can just speak about men in the United States in particular. The latest figures show that birds of 60% don’t have a single person that they can actually talk to, which is a massive social health problem, as well as, as you pointed out, a significant mental health problem globally. And that is basically being accelerated by the fact that not only are we lonely as a population, but when you layer on top of that sort of the level of social isolation that we’re in at the moment, it basically doubles the health and both physical health and mental health impact of that. And I say physical health because loneliness has been correlated equal to the impact of smoking

and obesity in terms of the ultimate health effects. So it’s a significant public health disorder. So the challenge to your point as you get older is cultivating those friendships and putting in place in effects, systems in order to make that happen because as you get older, it just doesn’t come as natural as it does when you’re younger because your friends fall by the wayside, everyone’s locked into their own little world with their kids and they’re sort of immediate network around school and the like. So it’s important to both cultivate those friendships

as well as column as you move forward as well because you obviously wanna maintain healthy friendships around yourself in terms of people who promote you and people who advance you because the old saying is the average of the five people that you mix with and it’s absolutely true. So you don’t wanna make sure, you have to make sure that those people who you are cultivating in your inner network are those that you can both contribute to as a person

and that also you can pull from.

So that’s why groups like YPO and religious groups

are important in a lot of cultures because they bring together the community, they bring together those true sort of social networks and it’s those countries, if you look at Sardinia and Okinawa and Loma Linda, California with the seventh state benefits, it’s those groups which show the longest lifespans if you look at the blue zones, for example, they’re grounded in community. It’s not so much about the diet or there’s no equinox health centers in Sardinia

with 50 people deep on a treadmill every day, right? Those people live long and healthy lives because it’s all about moderation, it’s about social connections, it’s about eating less and higher plant-based diets, it’s about walking to the shops every day. There are fundamental similarities amongst those countries in the blue zones that actually lead to those positive health effects. It’s something that I noticed, particularly on our camps, our how-weak camps in Thailand, got 20-odd swimmers there, a couple of coaches and pretty much every meal you’re there with at least a bunch of other swimmers from the group. We’re having breakfast, lunch, dinner, you’re training, you’re staying in the same resort, like it’s in seven days or eight days, you feel like you’ve gotten to know these people so well and you really feel that sense of community and that sense of, for me, I go there and it feels very much like a holiday, even though we’re coaching,

we’re getting up early and that sort of thing, but it is a really enjoyable time because you do not get that sort of social interaction and make those sort of friends just in day-to-day life in that short space of time and when you’re in an environment like that, we’ve got people who have met at a camp, say five years ago, and they’re still friends today, they catch up if they are ever in each other’s city and all that sort of stuff, and that’s what I really love to say and I think back to when I was at college at university, like it was pretty great to live with, you’ve got about 150, 200 other people there in this environment, you get to know a couple of them really well and that place where you can just, you’re basically living with your friends, it is really enjoyable, like it’s those, yeah. Come naturally, I mean, you’ve got to actively cultivate it, joining a swim squad, which I did a couple of years ago

when I got back into sort of adult swimming, right, was a step towards that and that environment. Joining clubs, actively promoting social engagements with both your sort of core in a network as well as the sort of outer rings of that network as well. And some people just sit back and go, oh, why isn’t Jack called me? I haven’t heard from him forever. Well, pick up the phone yourself and call him, right? Actively promote something. I am known amongst sort of my network as kind of like the glue that sort of brings everyone together because I’m the guy who’s actively on text during the week, where are we gonna ride? Just go do the swim, let’s sit down the beach tomorrow. I put out 500% more than I get back from that group, but the bits that I get back are super important to me, but I would never stop doing that just because I don’t think I’m getting the same back. I get a lot back from my networks and I have a bunch of different networks,

like business, like training,

that’s probably a sport business, but I have sort of compartmentalized networks,

but I’m actively promoting them and sort of driving them consistently because if you just sit there, the whole thrust of my book really is about getting out of complacency, right? It’s about striving forward in your middle age, getting out of complacency in terms of your friendships, because you carry over a lot of friendships from a lot of years and you don’t really realize, you don’t really do a sort of a friend audit as you go through life because people just stick with you. It’s like the same old guys you play golf with in the weekend or catch up with it and you don’t realize necessarily whether that’s a healthy platform to continue to carry forward, right? Because you’re complacent in it, just like your nutrition, just like your health network in terms of your doctors and everyone who sort of feeds into that network, you’ve had the same doctor for 15 years, maybe it’s time to do a health audit with that team.

So it’s about basically doing an audit on your life and I draw 40 at the line, but it certainly is not the benchmark for when you start. I laugh because I get guys when I talk to them about my book, they go, oh, that sounds fantastic, I’ll buy your book when I’m 40, I’m 39 now, right? I say, dude, it’s like, there’s no time to wait.

But it’s really about how you get out complacency from a relationship perspective is extremely important, right? Because you look at the divorce rate, particularly around where I live in Orange County, it’s pretty much 80% of people in my street have been divorced. Now, Orange County is a very, I think it’s the highest divorce rate in California down here, right?

So when you look at midlife crisis, both from the point of view of your health audit, from the point of view of your friends, from the point of view of your relationship, it’s a very important benchmark because you don’t have that long to go, right? So you wanna make sure that you’ve got optimal health, you wanna make sure that you’re in a relationship that you’re thriving with,

that your friend’s group is feeding you and not taking from you. So in terms of putting in place the core components of that going forward in order that you can thrive going forward in your 50s, 60s and beyond, that’s really sort of where my focus has been. I like even just bringing up the conversation of having that audit and just seeing where you’re at with different parts of your life, having that come to mind is a good way to start that and start to make some changes. And I know Tony Robbins and one of the things he talks about is certainty and uncertainty. And we spoke a little bit about this last time, like it’s great that you wanna have habits, you wanna have rituals in place, that’s what’s gonna help you grow and develop in certain areas. But we also want that element of uncertainty where a bit of adventure, a bit of play and getting out of that complacency. And for me, number of ways I like to do it, there’s surfing where there’s always that element

of uncertainty, especially on the bigger days, mountain biking and just not having a destination in mind and just exploring. Same thing with running as well, I really like that where you don’t really have a place in mind, you’re just running around and that’s seeing where it takes you. As well as open water swimming, there’s certainly that element of uncertainty. And for me, if I can have that a couple of times a week in my schedule, then that’s what I find when I am in those structured environments or that schedule where I know I’ve got things on, then I can do that happily, but without that element of uncertainty, I find it very hard to sit down and actually do the work and I could do the thing that I do have set in diary. Well, it’s funny you raise it because my favorite runs are in the canyon up behind my home where we actually sit out, we don’t actually have a destination or a loop. We just say, well, wherever we end up,

we’ll just get an Uber back, right? You know, at the times when you could get a Nuba, can’t get one now. But I mean, those are the best times, right? You know, whether it’s hiking and the national parks here or whatever it is. I mean, you know, what we’ve learned, I think more and more, you know, the last couple of months is that there is no certainty, right? And I’ve been through, you know, a number of black swans in my life, you know, financial crisis and stock market booms and, you know, in the life, probably four or five. And this is obviously, you know, ranks up there at the top, but, you know, in terms of, you know, certainty in life, I mean, there is no certainty, right? So, you know, you can’t live your life as if there is certainty, you know, as to, you know, what’s gonna happen tomorrow? What’s gonna happen the next day? You know, because there are these massive black swans that they come inevitably out of the blue.

We never know what they’re gonna look like. So, you know, it’s tried to say in its cliche, but, you know, in terms of, you know, living in the moment, you know, that’s, you know, it’s just a, you know, a key takeaway, I think, for, you know, the global population in terms of, you know, what we’re suffering, you know, through at the moment. Because, you know, we realize there may not be a tomorrow, right? Tomorrow is massively, you know, impacted by an event such as, you know, what we’re going through at the moment. So I find that, you know, there’s a lot of good coming out of the situation at, you know, at the moment because, you know, one of the big takeaways is that, you know, we’re all sort of like, you know, realizing that, you know, firstly, there is no tomorrow. Secondly, it’s, you know, we can live very, you know, much simpler than what we’re living before. You know, certainly our friendships are key and I think we can identify that core group

that we talked about before more and more through this process because they’re the ones that are reaching out to you on Zoom and saying, hey, you want to catch up? I just want to see how you are. Which, you know, I’ve had, you know, maybe, you know, four or five friends who I haven’t talked to for quite some time, you know, reach out to me and do, which has been, you know, fantastic. I’ve had a friend in Melbourne, a very close friend who reached out two weeks ago and just said, hey, I just want to reach out and just make sure we’re all okay. You know, for that to happen amongst men’s groups is very, very rare because, you know, we’re at, you know, we’re a lone wolf culture and the older you get, the more isolated you become and if you’re sort of operating at a certain level in, you know, business, it’s very, very hard to curate close friendships because, you know, by the nature of what you’re doing, you know, you’re nervous about your position,

you’re nervous about exposing yourself emotionally

to other people in terms of, you know, discussing, you know, your problems and things that are going on in your life. So the older you get, the more successful you get, the more isolated you actually become and then if you take Silicon Valley for an example, about what they’re saying in the latest studies, about 30% of Silicon Valley startup executives are chronically depressed and there’s about 15, 18% of them, which are, you know, suicidal. We’re seeing a massive suicide epidemic amongst startup founders in Silicon Valley for that very reason because, you know, not only do they have a massive amount of pressure on them given the sort of nature environment that they’re working, you know, there, but to succeed, but they also have no one to talk to. So, you know, it’s incredibly important that we start to foster these groups and the United States, we’ve never had it.

If you look at the institutionalized health system here, we’ve had an office of women’s health for about nearly 30 years in the White House.

There’s been a lobby group for about 20 years to get an office of men’s health and it gets nowhere every year. Every year the White House, well, before Trump, every year the White House was lit up in blue, sorry, in pink for, you know, breast cancer awareness week. It took nearly 25 years to get it lit up in blue just for, you know, men’s health week for prostate cancer. There’s no focus institutionally on men’s health here in the United States, which is a big issue, which means no money goes into it. Conversations about women’s health consistently, which is a great thing, but, you know, more men die of prostate cancer every year than breast cancer. And there’s, you know, very little discussion or, you know, to talk about the issues that men have to go through. And for me, one of my closest friendships has come from when, well, for me, this friend, we’ve had two mutual friends pass away, so one just happened and one was from suicide

and those two things brought us really close together. Whereas before that, yes, we were great friends, but it was a different level of friendship. And so now, having gone through those, having those two friends pass away and being mutual friends, it’s a very different relationship, but one where we’re much more open, we’re willing to share how we’re feeling and the actual things that we’re going through and it’s that sort of relationship that, yeah, I probably hadn’t really had that before because I hadn’t been through something like that and it’s a completely different thing, but when you’re comfortable sharing exactly what’s going on, it makes a massive difference. Yeah, I feel like you mentioned Tony Robbins, I’ve known Tony for, I don’t know, well, in my early 30s, I went to, my first unleash to power within, when I moved to the United States, and when I became good friends and did a bunch of business together,

traveled a whole bunch, and I spent a whole bunch of time with him on a plane. And you realize even at sort of that level, everyone’s got a problem, right? Everyone’s got a story, everyone needs help in some sense, so I think there’s a movement in Australia and New Zealand about sort of reaching out and just asking, I’ve forgotten what it was called, but I’ve seen some references to it about

just basically reaching out if you need help, because everyone thinks everyone else is all right, right? Everyone’s got a problem, Tony’s got problems, everyone’s got problems, right? You think everyone’s got the perfect life financially, emotionally with their partners and their kids, it’s just all BS, right? Once you get, they say never meet your heroes because you’ll be disappointed. Once you get behind the screen, no matter who it is,

I talk about in my book where I spent a lot of summers

up until probably last year, I travel up to Malibu every weekend because I’ve got the Lead Hamilton’s house up there because he’s got a 25 meter pool, which is about 20 feet deep, and it’s about probably 30 feet wide, it’s a massive big pool in his backyard, and throughout the week and particularly on Saturdays, there’d be about maybe 15 to 20 guys and girls came together at Lead’s house,

and this was movie directors, famous NBA players, everyone from John McEnroe to Barbara Streisand, and all these people would turn up, right? Just like if you’re sitting in the pool and suddenly Orlando Bloom would come in, right? It was awesome. It was just like a repository of all these people that would be pooled and it didn’t matter what you did, what you had done, because half the people there, you don’t know who they are until you find out who they are, but the rest, obviously, you know who you are. But everyone who came there were only invited and only got to stay and had longevity in that training environment if they had something to contribute to the group, right? Because it wasn’t just matter of just turning up, hanging out, doing some pool training, because that was the foundation of what became XBT training. You’ve probably seen that more now, which is the underwater training system which led and his wife Gabby started

with Brian McKenzie and Darren Allian. That was the sort of foundations of that training, but to my point, everyone who came there had something to contribute. So if you came and you sucked from the group and you’re a celebrity horde, then you wouldn’t get back, right? But if you came and actually contributed into the process, not about just being physically fit and involving yourself in, but there was a huge sort of sweetest sauna that sort of led as next to his pool. So we’d do swim training, then we’d do ice rotations in the ice bucket. We’d go into the sauna at any one time there’d be maybe 10 or 12 people in the sauna. And once you’ve got in the sauna, it was like one of those Indian tribes sort of like truth barrels, right? Everyone’s there in their bodies or in their speedos and all guards come down, right? So you got to the point where you’re talking with significant celebrities and public figures about their divorces and the problem they’re having

with this and that and the children. And it became to me, it was the first sort of like therapeutic sort of men and women’s group that I had been involved in. And I say in my book was the reason why I drove nearly two hours on a Saturday morning from Newport Beach, California up to Malibu every weekend because from the point of view of my personal therapy and what I was getting sort of out of that group and the friendships that I grew and cultivated out of it, they were priceless. So it takes effort, right? It takes effort to maintain friendships. And the hardest thing to do just given the nature of our lives and how busy we think we all are is to just pick up the phone or have a real communication with someone outside of just texting or commenting on their Instagram page or whatever it is. And I think when you look at this sort of interaction and how that’s becoming more and more pervasive and it’s going to be more and more,

I think that’s one of the key sort of benefits we’re seeing out of this crisis at the moment. And going forwards for you, what are you most looking forwards to in the next six, 12, 24 months? And what are some of the challenges that you’re looking forward to taking on, whether it be business, personal, triathlon, what have you got coming up? So let me think, well, I’d love to get back on a plane and go to the Maldives next week. That would be ideal. Even just go down to Mexico for the weekend. I mean, just those small things that you miss, right? Yeah. Because I really am getting cabin fever at the moment. So I’m missing that. Luckily, unlike you, it’s four degrees in Melbourne. We’re coming into summer here. So California is getting the weather back again. But athletically, I’m really looking forward to everything opening up again. I’m sort of just holding my breath every week to see what those schedules are looking like.

Participating in the swim run sort of world, which I love, I did Breca last year and I did the Australian champs and I just did the Attila World Champ Series in Catalina, which kind of slipped on under the radar before COVID. So I love the swim run movement to our point because it’s very, very conducive to community. Unlike triathlon, which I’ve sort of like dived back into, swim run, it’s an older demographic, much more sort of collegiate and friendly. I find the community basis of sort of the swim run movement is like, you know, super inspiring. I think triathlon loses a lot of that because there’s so much of the bike, right? Maybe you’ve just got to head down on the bike for so long, not talking to anyone, like you just become, you know, a bit of a loner. But it’s complete, the swim run environment is completely different to triathlon. So I’m looking forward to that opening up. I’ve signed up to some 70.3 Ironman events.

So I hope that starts to open up slowly and they get systems in place, which allow us to actually compete outside of, you know, Zwift and virtual Ironman races and all that sort of stuff, which is, I don’t know how sustainable that’s gonna be.

Professionally, I run a public company in Australia. We make cardiovascular health devices for measuring sensual aortic pressure, which is kind of a big deal at the moment, given that about 80% of the deaths in the United States have hypertension as their co-morbidity. So it’s a great, we have a great platform to sort of add into that environment, which was sort of actively building and sort of developing more and more. So yeah, we’re listed on the public exchange in Australia, the Australian Stock Exchange. So that’s really the focus of my business activity, pretty much everything that I have been doing over the last four or five years. You know, I had a TV show, as you know, called The Venture Capitalists. We were kind of like the shark tank for the outdoors. So, you know, that was a lot of fun. I wrote my book, which was awesome. And I’ve had a lot of venture investments, but pretty much everything that I’ve been doing

is sort of like put on the side as I focus on the public company, which is kind of a big deal. We think it’s gonna be a significant sort of multi-hundred million dollar opportunity. So that’s kind of 80% of my day.

You know, my family’s in Australia, my girls are in, you know, Sydney. They went back there to go to UNSW, and they’re now sort of based there because they grew up here since they were six. They went back to Australia. They basically decided they loved it too much. They loved the boys, they loved the music. They loved, you know, being able to drink at 20. So yeah, so they decided not to come back. So, you know, I want to get back there because I’ve been spending probably, you know, every quarter I have been back in Australia for, you know, either fundraising or, you know, other sort of corporate responsibility. So I’m looking forward to getting back into that. But, you know, my challenge is, I think from a health perspective, Brenton, I think my biggest challenge is sleep. And, you know, it’s funny, I was watching a triathlon video last night with Triathlon Taren, who I think you’ve interviewed and, you know, helped in the past with his swim stroke

and he was interviewing the top triathletes around their sleep regimes. And they’re all going, you know, I get like, you know, nine or 10 hours. I get like eight or nine. I’m just like shaking my head. I was like, how do you do that? It’s like, it’s a great sound bite, but it’s just like in my world, it’s just impossible. I’ve read an article on sleep therapy. I’ve, you know, blogged about it. I’ve been on Huffington Post. But, you know, it’s one thing to talk about it and know what to do, but, you know, executing against it. So, you know, when you look at, from a health perspective in terms of, you know, natural testosterone production, you know, obviously recovery, you know, it’s the number one free recovery tool, you know, is sleep. You know, across the board, sleep is just such a key component. So I’m lucky to get like 6,000, you know, consistently, which is just not enough. So, you know, we focus a lot on our sleep.

You know, my wife and I wake up in the morning. First thing we say is like, how many hours did you get? How many times did you get up? You know, it’s like, it’s a big deal. You know, we avoid drugs. We use, you know, as much natural therapies as we can around it in terms of, you know, processes before we get asleep. But sleep’s a big part of it. Staying injury-free is the most important thing for me outside of sleep, right? Because I put myself into the game and it takes a long time to get back in and get to the level where, you know, I’m at, you know, age group competitiveness. But then I’m always like operating on the threshold of sort of injuring myself again. And my consistent problem has been, you know, my lumbar spine and I’m going in next week to get some epidural cortisol, you know, injections in my back again. I’ve got access to, you know, a lot of good people who can help me, but it’s just the thing that, you know,

I’ve got, you know, I’ve just got to accept it. So managing that and, you know, pushing myself to the limit as much as I can without hurting myself and competing as, you know, best I can.

Because, you know, I want to keep thriving. I want to, you know, keep, you know, competitive in my age group. And, you know, I’m in a fairly competitive age group. You may think 57 may not be that competitive, but, you know, that’s sort of like, if you’re sort of 55, 56, and we’re sort of the bottom threshold is that’s a competitive age group. So, you know, I want to sort of push myself into that. And I’ve enjoyed, as you said, getting back into triathlon. I hadn’t done it for 25 years. So I’ve just started doing that the last sort of six months. So, yeah, that’s, and just, you know, just continuing to, you know, practising what I preach as best I can.

It sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate, but I, you know, it’s those, it’s having those things to do where you can progress. You can work towards something. That’s really where that enjoyment in life comes from. I mean, for me, I love just being able to try to continue improving my swimming or surfing or running, whatever it might be. And also just growing the business, growing effortless swimming and seeing how much better we can make things. And that’s really what, where I get a lot of enjoyment from. So, Craig, thanks very much for being on the podcast and for doing it a second time through. And when you do get to Melbourne or back to Australia, it’d be good to catch up. Yeah, well, look, you talk about my, you know, life goals for the next two or months. You know, I would rather meet you in New South for the new system. And, you know, do some laps out to, you know, granite or tea tree, that would be, you know,

I think that’s something I wanna, you know, go to bed thinking about tonight. Yeah, sounds good. I mean, thinking about that now, it’s, it was already a good thing to do, but now when I can’t travel to Queensland to do anything at the moment, it seems even more, more enjoyable. So, yeah, that would be, that would be awesome. Thanks again, Craig. 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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