Effortless Swimming

In today’s episode, we are joined by a lifelong trainer and athlete Andrew Read as he talks about his program 28-day Challenge. Andrew talks through how important going back to the basics is and some of the necessary skills to influence your success at living a healthy lifestyle.

4:19 Creating A Mindset Component
5:32 Going Back To The Basics Matters
12:40 Understand How You Learn Best.
15:32 Cut To The Chase
17:35 Your Body Is Built For Walking.
20:59 Consistency Makes The Biggest Difference.
23:53 Starting From Scratch
25:02 Give It Time
28:10 Carrot And Stick Approach
31:46 Identify What Triggers Your Bad Habits And Make A Plan
35:35: Change Starts With You
37:22 Asking the Right Questions

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Transcription:

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

Brenton Ford:
Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Andrew Reid. Andrew has been on the podcast before. He’s a personal trainer, and one of the things I really like about Andrew is he cuts to the chase. And on this episode today we talk about why it’s useful to have someone in your life, a coach, a friend, a partner, who can cut to the chase and be critical of some of the things that you are doing to help you improve and help you become a better person.

Brenton Ford:
We also talk about some of the triggers that can lead you to resort to old habits that you want to avoid, whether that’s eating poorly, missing workouts or conducting yourself in a way that you don’t want to conduct yourself. We also talk about a way that you can increase the amount of time that you spend active during the week, and there’s one simple exercise that anyone can do to stay healthier, not increase the load or the intensity of their training, but one way that he recommends to most of his clients to stay healthier in general, but a very, very simple way.

Brenton Ford:
So let’s get into the episode. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while and you haven’t left us a review on the iTunes store, then I would love it if you left us an honest review. That’s all I ask of you. Please leave an honest review on the iTunes store. Let’s get straight into the episode.

Brenton Ford:
Andrew, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. You were on the podcast probably four or five years ago, I think it was. I came across you through a couple of friends who said, “This guy is a great strength and conditioning coach who knows his stuff and you should speak to him.” That’s how we got in contact. At the moment you’re writing a book. Do want to talk a little bit about that and what you’re looking at at the moment with the situation of the world and where you think people are going wrong and some things that you think people are doing right? I think that’d be a good place to start.

Andrew Read:
Yeah, and weirdly that’s actually kind of exactly what the book is. I run a program called the 28 Day Challenge. It’s 28 days and I called it the 28 Day Challenge. But I came up that because I didn’t want to have to talk to clients about food and when they should go to bed, like all the basic stuff that from a professional viewpoint you just kind of think, “Well, of course, everyone knows to do this.” But as it turns out, not everyone knows that they need seven or eight hours of sleep every night. Most people, when you’re talking about aggressive people with a lot of ambition and they’re hardworking corporate types, CFO kind of people, the guys who’ve done Ironman and stuff like that, they don’t normally want to rest. They will actually overwork themselves, and so they think it’s normal to sleep five hours a night and they wonder why they can’t get anywhere.

Andrew Read:
I developed this 28 day challenge to teach them what the basics really were and the results were really good. There is a manual that goes with it which is including the workout plan and there’s a score sheet for it and stuff. It’s like 40 pages as a PDF, which is really about 20 to 25 pages of material. I started thinking, “Well, actually this is something that I should expand on. Originally it was 40 plus, but I think looking at massive age groups, it’s 35 for men and 30 for women in most sports, and so really that’s kind of the age group it’s aimed at. It is more targeted towards men than women because women have, there are some specifics about a diet that coincide with their menstrual cycle, but beyond that, the rest of it is actually the same.

Andrew Read:
As I’ve been writing it, it’s funny that I’ve said to all my clients, and I’ve got about 60 clients right now. So even during this corona thing, nothing’s really changed for me. The only thing that’s changed is obviously some people working out at home with either very limited equipment or no equipment, compared to having access to a gym. But obviously I told all my clients, “I think this is the best opportunity that many of you are ever going to have to get a six pack.”

Andrew Read:
This is one of the things we work on quite a lot and I’m developing this as well. I’m working with a Ph.D. level therapist on creating a mindset component. It’ll be a 12-month training plan that comes with a monthly mindset component, just to help people be as successful as possible. But we work very much on reframing things. So instead of saying things like, “Oh, I can’t go to my favorite restaurant,” fantastic. I can’t go out to eat. I have to prepare all my food for myself now. “Takeaway is limited, all these things are limited.” Well, what a great opportunity to get as lean as possible right now because you can absolutely control everything you eat.

Andrew Read:
There’s no more saying, “Because of this work meeting I couldn’t eat well,” or, “I had to travel for it.” Well, there’s none of that, either. So everyone right now has this unprecedented opportunity and because of the lack of commuting time for a lot of people, they’re saving anywhere up to two hours a day for some people. A lot of my guys are actually training twice a day now, so I’ve got 40 to 50-year-old guys training twice a day, which most people would tell you is impossible, but it’s not. The difference is that because we’re really controlling sleep, food, stress levels and we’re saying that ambition before.

Andrew Read:
I have a guy who works at Microsoft. He works in data security in the iCloud department, right? He started this job literally the week before everyone got sent home to work from home. So he’s got a brand new job, he’s got new customers, he’s got homeschooling, he’s got all this other stuff going on, and he’s fairly senior. The guy is working 16 hours a day. Well, how do you think he was coping with that? Probably not very well.

Andrew Read:
Again, we came back to what the basics of the book were, and the basics of the book are, hey, I need you to get this much sleep every night. Not even from an athletic perspective, but just if you want to make the process of sleep restore memory properly when we sleep, we repair cellular damage, when we sleep. There are links that show that Alzheimer’s risk is increased when sleep goes down and obesity risk doubles under six hours a night. Motor control under six hours of sleep a night goes down to the same level as if you were .05 blood alcohol content, which is quite scary when you think, if you’re driving around, the majority of people driving around near you have probably had six hours or less of sleep. They’re basically as impaired as if they were too drunk to drive in our country. It’s pretty scary, right?

Brenton Ford:
Yeah.

Andrew Read:
And then there are other people doing that who’ve got their kids in the car which you hope they would never drink drive with their kids in the car, but they’re basically doing the same thing. So sleep is really important and being able to say to this guy, and again, reframing, going, “Okay, so let’s look at it from another perspective. I get that you’re ambitious. I get you’ve got a new job. I get there’s a lot of stress going on right now and you want to keep your job because, let’s be honest, a lot of people are out of work right now. But if you keep going at 16 hour days, how long is that going to last? You’re going to blow to pieces in a couple of weeks. If you have staff on your team doing that, what would you say to them?” He’d go, “Well, I’d tell them to go sleep.” Well, why is that good enough for the staff and not for you?

Andrew Read:
Being able to talk to people and show them what’s important, the book is really helpful for that, or the manual for the 28-day challenge gives that framework because all these guys have done that. But the book will actually be available more widely. It’ll go just straight through my website. People will be able to download it for free so they’ve got that information always.

Brenton Ford:
It’s so true about the stuff that you think most people know, they don’t know. What I’m thinking about that is with swimming, it’s something I’ve been doing since I was a real young kid. You think that it’s just common knowledge. But when I look at, say, the videos or the podcasts that I’ve done, the ones where I’m talking about the most basic things, they’re the ones that people have found most helpful. Like, I did a video about breathing and that one just went. It was really, really popular. And I thought, “But it’s just so simple.”

Brenton Ford:
But that’s it. It’s these real fundamentals, these real basics that a lot of people don’t actually know, especially if they have never had a coach or they’ve never had someone talk to them about sleep or diet. They just don’t know that stuff, and if you can get those fundamentals right and get the basics right, then you are on such a good platform to then be able to improve all the other aspects of your life. It’s so much easier. Whereas if you don’t get those fundamentals right, I mean, you’re not building a house on rock at all. It’s not going to last.

Andrew Read:
I remember training with John Van Wisse and I swam at school. Not at a super high level, but reasonably, and we were always taught to breathe three strokes. That was what I had always done and I went and did some sessions with John and he said, “Breathe every two.” I said, “But I’m only going to breathe one side then and blah, blah, blah.” He goes, “Look, it’s an aerobic sport. You need oxygen. Get the oxygen in. Full stop.” It totally transformed my swimming. Such a small tip.

Andrew Read:
It’s the same with, I come in, I had this guy. He was a world champion powerlifter and I had written in his program that I wanted him to do SLDL which in my head stands for single leg deadlift. In his world, it stands for stiff-legged deadlift. He’s a really strong guy, but I would look at the weight that he had lifted and for how many reps and I’d be like, “Wow, that’s crazy kind of numbers for that exercise.” And he said to me, “Really? Because I feel like it’s actually down a bit and blah, blah, blah.”

Andrew Read:
It wasn’t until we went back and forth a few times I realized, wait, you’re talking about something completely different. So even little things like that. I’ll say, “This exercise.” A burpee is another great example. A burpee in my head always has a push up in it. If it doesn’t have a pushup, it’s called a squat thrust. But you get people now who say, “Do you want me to do burpees with or without the push-ups?” There’s only one way, but most people don’t even know that. There’s another exercise called something completely different.

Andrew Read:
For me, always remembering that hey, I have to make sure that I’m looking at things from their eyes. When you speak to someone about something for the first time, something as simple as keeping your wrist straight, can you see me on the video? If I grip something, I’ll grab my water bottle. If I grip something, so this is straight. It looks straight, right? But look at the angle of my knuckles. My hand’s actually pointing back this way. Straight is here, like the hand that I would punch someone with. Which, if you’re swimming with paddles, it’s the same hand, right? Because I wouldn’t swim like that. Straight is straight. But when you tell someone you want them to hold their wrist straight when they’re doing something, they’ll immediately revert to this wrong position. But this creates problems either at the elbow or the shoulder later on.

Andrew Read:
It actually takes time to take pitches and point hours of things and circle things and all this kind of stuff so people actually understand, but the little basic things, for a lot of people, like you say, who come to things as an adult without any coaching, it’s very difficult for them because they’re things that they’ve always assumed. I get this from customers all the time, even now online remotely with video and stuff like that, saying, “I’ve never had someone coach me as strictly as you.” Well, what the hell were you paying for?

Andrew Read:
Imagine someone came to swim coaching and you just let them flop up and down the lane however they wanted to every single time they came. It’s not really going to be very effective, right? One of the big disconnects I see with people is people would very clearly understand the technique and form involved in swimming. They are starting to understand there’s form involved with running. It’s a little bit slow, but people are starting to go, “Okay, there’s probably some shapes that we need to be making when we do this.” If we’re talking martial arts, it’s a very defined form of what it should look like. Then we get to weightlifting or something and people think “Oh, just do it however you want.”

Andrew Read:
Everything physical should have a fairly strict form and body shapes will change, but a neutral spine’s a neutral spine, regardless of how long your spine is. Getting people to understand this or even getting coaches to explain it is sometimes a bit of a slow process.

Brenton Ford:
It’s funny you mention about the wrist. In freestyle in swimming, the same thing. You need that to be flat. So many people actually have it that way, as well. They’re trying to pull through the water at a slight angle. It’s a very slight difference, but it makes a world of difference just getting that part right. When I do the analysis with people in our membership, I’ll send videos sort of every two or three weeks. I’m being quite particular about some of the things that they’re doing, but there’s a reason for it. It’s like, well, if you get this part right, it’s this one percentage that overtime is going to add up, might stop you from getting injured.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah, it’s being particular, and certainly, you’ve got to develop that eye for it, which we do when you’re working that much and that closely with people. But yeah, there’s so much to it that if you’ve got someone like yourself looking at all those finer details, that’s what’s going to stop you from not being able to do those exercises three months down the track when you injure yourself, and just learning it right.

Brenton Ford:
I did like a lifting class in New South Wales when I was there with a friend and the guy, I think he was a powerlifter. He was a very good coach. There were maybe five of us in there and I wasn’t using any weights. I was just using the bar, the most basic stuff. I started to get them right, maybe 80% right just without any weights, but had I have gone for any sort of weight, with these sort of movements it would not have helped at all, just even putting-

Andrew Read:
Certainly.

Brenton Ford:
That’s where the technique makes a big difference.

Andrew Read:
You must see with swimming as well. Intensity, obviously, in swimming is speed, right? Or maybe volume kind of adds that extra complexity. But I coach motorcycle riding as well and to me, actually, because the group that I work for, they call the California Superbike School, they’ve probably got the most detailed coaching process out of any group I’ve ever seen. To get in as a coach is super difficult. There’s constant education that has to happen. It’s almost like having, when I say another job, I don’t mean every now and then. I mean you need to spend a couple of hours every single week working on this stuff to even stay good enough to stay in.

Andrew Read:
But someone could do something slowly and the moment they start adding speed, which is what the intensity is on the racetrack, it all just falls to pieces. People go, “Oh, well, it’s because I’m going slower I can’t do it right.” Mate, if you can’t do it at 60 km an hour, you’re not going to do it at 160.

Brenton Ford:
No.

Andrew Read:
I guarantee when your eyes are as big as dinner plates and you’re worried about crashing, you’re definitely not going to do the right thing at that point. If you can’t do it light, you’re not going to do it heavy. Full stop.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah, exactly right. One of the things I like about the things that you post is you do cut the crap. You’re happy to say what you think and speak your mind, which I think is great. One of the things that I do enjoy you talking about is you’re a big proponent of just getting out and going for a walk. Just walk and get some movement going. Where does that stem from for you? Why is that such a big proponent of what people should be doing? And we always, at that point where you just sort of cut to the chase and am happy to speak your mind, or is it something that you got sick of dancing around the topic?

Andrew Read:
No, it’s pretty much always gotten me in trouble. Look, in fairness to the way these… If you come to a training session, a group training environment, most classes are an hour in most gym setups. Let’s say we’ve got a dozen people. Well, that means realistically I’m only going to get five minutes with each person, right?

Andrew Read:
Now, someone who’s really good and doesn’t need much help, maybe actually they’re just going to get one or two minutes so I can spend a couple of bonus minutes with someone else. But on average, five minutes per person. I don’t have time to ask you how you feel and are you enjoying it. I need to actually get you to do the right thing as quickly as possible so you actually get the result you’re paying for, which is to get fitter, stronger, leaner, faster, whatever it happens to be.

Andrew Read:
So I can’t afford to waste the time just beating around the bush. I have to come to the point. That’s kind of how it developed and now probably is very developed to the point where it’s difficult. Why do I say difficult? As in difficult for new people to deal with it because most people will be used to a little bit of softening, kind of social norms sort of stuff beforehand. They might send me an email like this and then get back a one-sentence reply which will be me going, “This is the biggest problem and this is what I want to address.” That makes them a little while to get used to it.

Andrew Read:
In terms of the walking stuff, I think over time I’ve started just thinking, well, we’ve been here for about a million years, roughly, in this shape. There hasn’t been any huge change in our body shape for about 650,000 years. What are the things that made the human body the human body? A bipedal stance is one of them, and the ability to sweat. We’ve got a whole bunch of things that kind of set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But because some of those adaptations, like the shape of the heel, is meant to be quite efficient so you can rock and save energy. We have glutes. You can’t actually stand fully upright without glutes. You cannot run without glutes. Even though a monkey can stand upright, don’t have glutes as we do, so they cannot run.

Andrew Read:
The shape of the toes, the length of the Achilles tendon. There’s even a ligament in the base of your head called the nuchal, N-U-C-H-A-L, which might be nuchal depending on the school of biology. But it stops your head doing this when you run. No other primate has that because they cannot run. So that’s a specific adaptation.

Andrew Read:
When I started looking at, okay, the human body is designed for this, I need to get people, instead of trying to take their square peg body and trying to bash it into a round hole, we need to at least honor the things that make us human. The things that made us human and really set us apart from an evolutionary perspective were being able to forage for food for long periods of time in hot temperatures. So when a lion or something might have to rest under a tree, because of our bipedal stance, we don’t cop as much heat because we’re upright. The air, higher up off the ground, is cooler. So it means actually we’re not overheating as much, plus we sweat. We’ve got a really powerful aerobic system. We’re designed to move for five to eight hours a day. It’s estimated that foraging for food for our ancestors was 15 to 18 km of movement a day.

Andrew Read:
You start to put into perspective when people go, “I’m really active.” Mate, you do one hour of exercise seven days a week. That’s less than 4% of your week. I don’t really think we can count that as active. If we can add an hour of walking on a day, it’s still not a terrible amount, but now we’re up to 8% at least. So we stand to actually have a little bit more on our side to work with.

Andrew Read:
So that was the first thing. I started to go, well okay, what’s the body designed for? And if you look at some of the things we can do like, while we’re very efficient cycling, for instance, we’re not designed to cycle. Our spines don’t actually like being bent over for long periods of time and we actually spend a lot of time sitting down without spine being bent over anyway. You see this a lot with guys in my age group. We start to get a bit older and then gravitate away from something like running because they’ve hurt themselves too many times because they haven’t done all this kind of resiliency work, and they gravitate toward cycling and wonder why their back hurts. Because it’s not designed to do that, mate. You sit down all day long. You should have chosen a leisure activity that wasn’t sitting down. You probably actually need something that involves standing up.

Andrew Read:
Once you start to add it all together and you start going, “Okay.” Swimming, for instance? Awesome. And I think backstroke might actually be the most effective thing you could do to reverse all of the sitting down that people do. It gets you in a straight line and gets you working all the muscles that go that way, which is not something we do very often. And lastly, if you get a lot of reps in, which is not something you can do with anything else.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah, very true.

Andrew Read:
Yeah, and then when we look at what is most important, so the one fitness industry wants to sell you a neatly packaged plan because it has to be something new because that’s a really powerful sales tool. New and improved always beats, in people’s minds, old and trustworthy, for some reason. Never mind that walking’s been around for a million years. I’m going to give you a 20 minute Tabata class or something that’s going to be more effective.

Andrew Read:
Well, for a single class you might burn more calories, but I can tell you now that if you train that hard, like a pump class or a high-intensity speeding class or any of the normal group exercise kind of things, you can’t do that seven days a week and you can’t do it seven days a week for the rest of your life. When we look at what makes the biggest difference for people, it’s not intensity. It’s consistency that makes the biggest difference.

Andrew Read:
If you and I are picking, and this is a good time to talk about this, if we’re picking a zombie apocalypse team, at the end of the year we have to pick out a team. I have a guy who trains seven days a week at 60 to 70% year-round. He gets, we’ll call it six days a week because that gives us 300 sessions, roughly, for the year. If your guy trains flat out three days a week, he only has 150 sessions for the year, right?

Andrew Read:
Now, he might work harder during his session, but when you’re coming to pick your guy who’s going to be durable, long-lasting, able to just keep doing, like diesel-powered, chugging along, I’m picking the 300 session guy every single time. When you start adding that up over 20, 30, 40 years, you start to realize the real power of getting in 250 to 300 workouts a year for 10 years is pretty powerful.

Andrew Read:
In the same period of time, the three days a week guy, if it’s three days a week for five years, he gets 150 sessions times five years. What’s that, 7,500? 750, sorry. No, 7,500, yeah. My guy, in the same period of time, essentially has 10 years of training in a five year period compared to the same guy. The only way you’re going to get there is with lower intensity stuff.

Andrew Read:
Even when you look at elite athletes like people would look at like a Kipchoge at the moment and go, “This many four-minute K’s or something.” Yeah, but the four-minute K thing is like 60% of his max heart rate. He could have had a sleep at that heart rate, that’s how to fit he is. But people see it and they think, “Well, that’s how fast I need to be running.” For most people, you need to be running more like six to seven-minute kilometers for a similar effort.

Andrew Read:
And you see it in swimming. How do you work on technique in swimming if they’re working 100% all the time? It’s impossible. You actually have to dial them back so they can work on the technique, right? It’s all about learning that intensity and getting the consistency.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I’m speaking with a guy, Dan Smith, who was on the Olympic team a couple of years back. He looked at his stroke and thought, “I’ve just got to fix this. There’s so much wrong with it that I can do a lot better.” And for him, at that Olympic level, he was something like six to nine months where he did very little fast swimming and it was just all slow. A lot of drills, a lot of technique work, and he just had to start from scratch then. I just went completely back to basics. Then was building up to eventually doing that at higher intensities and at a faster speed, but even for him, he couldn’t sustain it at those higher speeds straight away. It took him a while to build it up, and that’s someone who’s at that top level. So to think you’re not going to have to do that if you’re just an average Joe, you’re kidding yourself. You’ve got to just really come back to basics and know that it’s that more long-term approach that is going to help you going forward.

Brenton Ford:
As a coach, when I first started, I thought someone should be able to pick the things that I’m telling them or teaching them, pick it up straight away, and be able to do that. But you get a little bit smarter, get a little bit older, and you start to figure out, okay, this stuff takes time. It takes you at least 66 days to change a habit and it’s not always going to feel good and you’re going through this cycle of emotions and how your body adapts to it. You get a little bit smarter that way and that, I think, really helps as a coach approaching these things, and if you can share that with the people that you are coaching it makes a big difference for them, knowing what they’re going to go through. And maybe the frustrations of, “I want to push hard. I’m feeling good.” But you’ve got to bring them back a little bit sometimes.

Andrew Read:
Yeah, have it building, that’s a really interesting thing for me. I’ve got guys and we’re obviously working on food and basic stuff like that all the time, and the food’s really tricky. Because if you think about when you were little, so my background is in my household I got a dollar for pocket money every week when I was little. That’s how old I am. That was probably worth about 20 bucks today. But I got a dollar. If I got a dollar I could have a candy bar, like a Snickers or a Mars bar or something. If I didn’t have the chocolate, I got $2, right? But you see the perceived value of it. It’s worth double, right? So there was never really junk in our house. We had a very limited amount of junk food. It would come out for Easter or Christmas or a birthday or something like that, but again, in fairly limited quantities.

Andrew Read:
Then when I did Ironman, and for people who have done Ironman, you know you can eat whatever you want. I remember there was a point in the peak weeks where I was eating a family-sized chocolate bar a day and still losing half a kilo a week. I’m not carrying a huge amount of extra fat, but I was still losing weight every week.

Andrew Read:
So I have this feast or famine kind of thing with junk food. But when I was little it was really valuable. It was coveted by me and my brother. My partner is in the exact same boat. But if I did something really successful, maybe you did get a treat. Like if you had a really big win at a sporting event or something, maybe you got taken to McDonald’s or something afterward. But also, if you had a really bad day. I remember one day I was getting off the tram in Melbourne. It was school time, so the train isn’t packed, and I was little. I was only in grade five or something, and the tram started moving before I’d fully gotten off, and I actually had to jump off a moving tram. I was a bit banged up. I didn’t break anything but I was a bit banged up. I got taken to McDonald’s for that, too.

Andrew Read:
So good and bad in my house, there was this food reward. Now, I’m lucky in that because my job actually revolves somewhat around how I look, I am conscious of what I eat all the time. So I’ve broken most of that stuff, but it’s still there to look at. But if you have, like some of my clients, they’re in their 40s, they’re overweight, they’ve basically always been overweight, you’re not going to break habits revolving around food in a week, a month, two months, three months. It’s going to take a while.

Andrew Read:
One of the things we work on at the moment, and this is a mindset thing as well, is I feel like I’ve had this conversation with half a dozen guys already this week, is that you need to be both carrot and the stick at all times, which is a very difficult balancing act. Because while I need to be tough on myself and try to always go to a higher level, try to make myself better, that’s one of the things we work on all the time is we’re not just making ourselves physically better. We’re actually using this to create leverage for the rest of our lives. To create more discipline, better relationships, to be more clear-headed at work and earn more money. We’re actually using this as the springboard for everything because the reality is, the only thing you can really control in life is what goes in your mouth and how you treat your body.

Andrew Read:
You can’t control it, and this thing has shown us that. Coronavirus has shown us you can have zero control over anything else other than how you treat your body. So I need to be tough on myself, but at the same time I’ve got to be realistic and say, “I’m not breaking 40 years of habits in the first week of lockdown.” That’s just not going to happen. There are going to be slip-ups, but then the slip-ups should be, and it’s Wednesday for us today, very typical in an early diet setting someone would get to Wednesday or Thursday, having done the early part of the week great, and then fall off the wagon for whatever reason.

Andrew Read:
We also work on identifying the triggers that set off that change in habit, and then making plans around them. So they fall off the wagon and instead of waiting until Monday, because that’s a really common thing is to go, “I’ll start again Monday.” Then it’s next Monday, the Monday after, the Monday after. Next thing you know it’s a year later and actually you’re more out of shape than you are now. But we go straight back to the plan at the very next meal.

Andrew Read:
It doesn’t matter if you wake up and you had chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. Okay, I can get it. You saw the news, the news was upsetting. In Australia today, we woke up to hear four police officers were killed overnight on a freeway. My partner’s a firefighter. She was on the night shift last night. She didn’t go to that but at her station, one of the other trucks did. So she saw the guys coming back from that job. They had to fill in at other stations to cover all the other people that went. It’s affected the whole community in emergency services.

Andrew Read:
I woke up this morning and actually the first thing I saw was that on the news and I messaged her straight away to make sure she was okay. But it would be really normal under those sort of circumstances, or when you’re reading some of this stuff about coronavirus or what’s going on in the U.S., it’s very easy to get upset and get pulled out of your winner’s mindset where you’re focused and disciplined and head towards that emotional side.

Andrew Read:
Yeah, I get it. This is going to happen. That’s okay. Go straight back to the plan next time and let’s start making a strategy around it because once you identify what it is. For me, watching the news, I’m down to about 10 minutes at night now. I watch it first thing in the morning while I’m having breakfast, which is a couple of minutes, and then I watch it for 10 minutes at night. I get all the information I need and then it gets turned off. Because otherwise, it’s too easy to get distracted by the whole thing and get pulled into the stuff you see on social media with all of a sudden, everyone’s a virus expert and they’re a political pundit, and you know what I mean?

Brenton Ford:
Yeah.

Andrew Read:
It’s not worth it. It’s very important with habit-building that people are both tough on themselves and easy at the same time because, in a lot of cases, when you look at the psychology of it it’s not as simple as, “I wanted the chocolate bar.” It might be, “I wanted the chocolate bar because every time I got bullied at high school, and I got bullied non-stop for three years or something, but that was what I got when I came home crying because of my mom. So now when I feel bad my instant reaction is I want that chocolate bar because that’s what I associate with being made to feel better as a kid.”

Brenton Ford:
Do you find identifying those triggers for people and showing them this is why you’re resorting to that, does that give them a little bit more power to be able to go, “Okay, yeah, I can see what’s happening here,” and then they can stop it?

Andrew Read:
Yeah, so as I say, we do a thing called a risk, obstacle, and trigger document. Christmas is a really good example. People will say, “I’ve got seven office Christmas parties coming up.” Okay, so we know the temptation in groups. And this is not individual, this is everybody. They tend to overeat and they tend to over-drink. So let’s create some strategies around that.

Andrew Read:
The first one always with the alcohol is just to say to people, “No, I drove.” Because no one will tempt you to drink if they know you’re driving. Well, no one sane and mature, anyway. The next one actually is, and we’ve had people have to call out some of their friends were like, “No, I had a drink. What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you want to have a drink?” You’re, hang on. Are you my friend, like the person who’s supposed to be on my side, telling me to do something that’s actually going to make me endanger other people when I go drive home later on? Are you genuinely my friend or not? Because no friend would ever say that to someone. Having people realize things like that, that’s really important.

Andrew Read:
But once you identify it, you can make a plan. Otherwise, you’re just reactive to everything. Sitting down and actually writing out the risks and triggers, there’s always food ones. We have alcohol. There can be social situations that drive some of that stuff as well. They can be work. Some people avoid going to sleep. Some people avoid workouts. Once we start to figure out where people are falling down, then we have a base scoring system in the 28-day challenge.

Andrew Read:
For workout for the week, you should get one point a day. You should get six points for the week. If you come to me and you say, “Well, I got two points,” and you’re getting two points consistently week after week, well, there’s a problem with the workouts. We get four meals a day, so you get 28 points for food. If you come along and you say, “Well, I got an 11 for food,” well, we’ve got some problems. But if you’re telling me you’re getting 24 for food and 2 for workouts, it’s pretty easy to figure out where the problem is.

Andrew Read:
Once we can identify the problems, which is really what the point system does, it shows us where the biggest problems for things are, then we can start to create some strategies around them. Once you’re aware of them and you’ve made some plans, and this is again, with habit building, you’re not going to be successful every time. You go in your social situation, you might slip up the first three, four, five, 10, whatever times. But each time you do, it’s important not to just tuck your hands in the air and say, “Oh well, I was at a party, ha, ha, ha, had a drink.”

Andrew Read:
Well, if you really want to make the change, we need a new plan. The thing you did, you didn’t quite do well enough. It needs to be tweaked somewhere. You might end up with, if we’re talking drinking in a social situation, maybe it’s actually version eight, version nine, version 13, 14, 15, whatever. But always remembering to always go back to the plan. You don’t just tuck your hands in the air and say, “Oh, sorry, I had two packs of tin cans and 16 beers.” Well, okay, let’s get back to the plan and figure it out because otherwise, you’re just reacting to stuff the whole time.

Andrew Read:
It’s not until people are aware of the problem, so that’s always the biggest issue is getting them for themselves to be aware that it’s a problem, but then getting them to start thinking about how they can fix the problem. Because it’s all good if I tell you, “You need to stop drinking when you go out on a Friday night,” right? It’s only good if you say to me, “I want to stop drinking on Friday night,” and I go, “Okay, well, what are you going to do about that?” I can’t actually tell you what to do. You have to figure out how to do it.

Andrew Read:
This is like in the 28-day challenge. I give you how to eat, what a meal should look like, but I never tell you on day one, week one you should eat three eggs and 100 grams of smoked salmon or something. Because on day 29, when the program finishes and I’m not there to tell you what to eat, how do you know why you were eating what you had to eat for breakfast every day? It only works if you actually know how to fit it all into your life.

Andrew Read:
When you look at, like, Biggest Loser is a good example. The people who do well on Biggest Loser, they come out and they basically fail straight away, because they don’t have to control anything in the house. There’s no kids, no work, no distractions. They’ve got time to exercise, they’ve got time to cook their food. They’ve got all the available stuff in front of them with no distractions. And then we put them back into their life. They never got taught how to make it fit into their regular life. Well, of course, they’re going to fail.

Andrew Read:
When your building stuff with people, you’ve got to make them aware of it, and then they have to answer the question as to how they’re going to make it work. Because I can tell you what works for me, but my life isn’t your life. We’ve got different lives. I can help you because I can say, “I’ve got 40 guys and 13 of them have exact same problem and here’s what they did. Maybe you should try this, too.” But I will never say, “You need to do this.” That’s not my job.

Andrew Read:
We’ve had it building stuff. It’s very different, too, like if you were lifting weights I would just flat out say, “I need you to do this.” That’s different. But when we’re talking about lifestyle, habit stuff, it’s no good for me to tell you what to do. You have to come to that realization yourself. Again, the only way to make that happen is to learn to become aware of it in the first place.

Brenton Ford:
I was talking about this before, but one of the best articles I ever read about coaching was written about a guy called Bill [Sweetnam 00:37:30] and how he’s changed his approach to coaching. What he does now, and I sort of tell this to anyone who is a swim coach, what he does now is instead of telling people, “Do another 200. You were too slow. You should have gone 222, you were too slow,” he asks them questions now. He’s diving into making them realize where they went wrong or what they did right and then getting them to come up with those solutions. So all right, you missed your times here. Where do you think you could have found those three seconds? And do you think if you do another two of these that are going to help you make the Olympic team?

Brenton Ford:
He’s getting them to come up with the solutions and getting them to think about it, and that’s what I try to do, even with the younger kids that I sometimes coach. You sort of need to tell them, probably more so than the adults, but if you’re asking the right questions, they are going to become so much more knowledgeable and take ownership of those things and for anything that comes down to lifestyle, when there’s not a coach there, they’ve got the tools there to be able to ask themselves the right questions and pick up where they are making the right decisions or not.

Andrew Read:
This is when I mentioned the motorbike school before, the California Superbike School, that’s our coaching process. When I say it’s the best in the world, I mean we’re following, and the guy who came up with it is not an Olympic-level swim coach. He’s just a motorbike junkie in the U.S. He’s a California surfer dude. But we’ll do exactly that. So you’ll follow a student around and you’ll see them maybe offline in a corner.

Andrew Read:
When you come in and say, “How was that session?” And they’ll say, “Oh, it was great. Wow, that drill was amazing.” And I might say, because I want to draw their attention to something, “Was that the line you wanted to return for?” “Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s totally where I wanted to be.” “Well, were you able to get on the throttle pad coming out of that corner and actually accelerate down towards the next corner effectively?” “Oh. No, now that you mention it, yeah, I was probably out a little bit wide and I would have run off if I’d come on the throttle.”

Andrew Read:
But it’s only when you make them aware of it, when you draw their attention to something, that they can actually create an answer for themselves. I’ve had people go out and the racetrack’s pretty easy because it’s the same every time. So you can say to someone, “I want you to go out and tell me which part of the ripple strip’s got the most rubber on it,” because that’s where the apex of the corner is supposed to be. And they’ll come in and say, “You know, it was like 3 meters past where I thought the apex of the corner was.” And what did that do to your line through the corner and blah, blah, blah?

Andrew Read:
So suddenly, by doing this questioning process, we actually can advance much faster. It can be very uncomfortable, though. I asked a customer this way. I said to him, “Who are you?” Because we were a little bit stuck, and he said, “Well, I don’t understand what you mean.” I said, “Well, who are you? Are you a spiritual being? No, you’re not. So let’s make this simple. If someone was going to describe you to me, what would they say? They’re not going to waste their time on physical appearance. They’re going to tell me about the essence of you. What are they going to say?” Dead silence. And this guy’s a middle-aged guy. He’s a hard worker, he’s successful, he’s married, he’s got, kids. Great. He’s lost himself along the way.

Andrew Read:
Also, if you’re trying to improve yourself or you want to go from point A to point B, you know where point B is. You’ve got definite numbers in your mind in terms of body fat, in terms of how many pull ups you can do, whatever it happens to be. But you don’t even know where point A is. Well, GPS only works if you’ve got two locations, right? How are we going to get to point B if you don’t even know where point A is? So even starting to draw his attention back to something as simple as what are the things that make you you, was really interesting because there was dead silence at the end of the call.

Brenton Ford:
I think as a coach if you can ask those questions, you’re doing him a massive favor. And yeah, it’s going to be uncomfortable may be for you or for him.

Andrew Read:
Super, super awkward. Super awkward.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah, that’s right. There’s a reason that it’s awkward. It’s like, “well, okay, I haven’t addressed this.” That’s why it’s so awkward. I think we’ll probably have to wrap it up here because our call’s about to end. So Andrew, thanks very much for being on the podcast. Let the people know where they can find out about you and maybe a little about the book that you’re writing and the books that you’ve currently got, as well.

Andrew Read:
My website is readpt.com. That’s R-E-A-D-P-T.com. I have a book called Run Strong on there which is basically the running version of everything I’ve just talked about. It’s about consistency and lower intensity work and it’s basically my journey from not having run for over 10 years to going through Ironman and having to figure out because they were putting out Ironman run plans, but there’s no plan to go from I have… Because they all assume you’ve done a lot of running prior to starting Ironman. My second ever triathlon was an Ironman. My first one was a half Ironman. To go from nothing to that, there are some steps that were missing, so I had to create them. That’s what Run Strong is all about.

My website’s readpt.com. On Facebook, you can just find me as Andrew Read. There is a public figure page and there is also a men’s fitness group which is, what is it called? It’s called Andrew Reid’s Strength and Conditioning for the Aging Athlete. It’s a bit of a mouthful at the moment. Basically you’ve got to be a 35 plus male, although I’m probably about to open it up to females as well pretty soon simply because I have both a male and a female group, and managing two is getting very difficult. So I’ll probably just merge them together.

Brenton Ford:
Sounds good. All right, thank you very much again, and I’ll put all those links in our show notes. So yeah, enjoy the rest of your downtime and with the rest of the book.

Podcast Outro:
Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to effortlessswimming.com.

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 Andrew Reid. Andrew has been in the podcast before. He’s a personal trainer. And one of the things I really like about Andrew is he cuts to the chase. And on this episode today, we talk about what’s useful to have someone in your life, a coach, a friend, a partner who can cut to the chase and be critical of some of the things that you’re doing to help you improve and help you become a better person. We also talk about some of the triggers that can lead you to resorting to old habits that you want to avoid, whether that’s eating poorly, missing workouts, or conducting yourself in a way that you don’t want to conduct yourself. We also talk about why a way that you can increase the amount of time that you spent active during the week. And there’s one simple exercise that anyone can do to stay healthier, not increase the load or the intensity of their training, but one

way that he recommends to most of his clients to stay healthier in general, but a very, very simple way. So let’s get into the episode. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while and you haven’t left us a review on the iTunes store, then I would love it if you left us an honest review. That’s all I ask of you. Please leave an honest review on the iTunes store. Let’s get straight into the episode. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. We were on the podcast probably four or five years ago, I think it was, and came across you through a couple of friends who said this guy is a great strength and conditioning coach. He knows his stuff and you should speak to him. So that’s how we got in contact. And since then, well, at the moment, you’re writing a book. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and what you’re kind of looking at at the moment with the situation of the world and where you think people are going wrong and

some things that you think people are doing right. I think that’d be a good place to start. Yeah, I mean, and weirdly, that’s actually kind of exactly what the book is. So the book was, so I run a program called the 20 day challenge. That’s how imaginative I am. It’s 28 days and I called it the 20 day challenge. But I came up with that because I didn’t want to have to talk to clients about food and when they should go to bed and like all the basic stuff that you know, like from a professional viewpoint, you just kind of think, well, of course, everyone knows to do this. But as it turns out, not everyone knows that they need seven or eight hours of sleep every night. Most people are like when you’re talking about

aggressive kind of people with a lot of ambition and they’re hardworking corporate types, CFO kind of people, the guys who’ve done Iron Man and stuff like that. They don’t normally want to rest. They will actually overwork themselves. And so they think it’s normal to sleep five hours a night. I wonder why they can’t get anywhere. So I developed this 28 day challenge to teach them what the basics really were. And the results were really good. And there is a manual that goes with it, which is, you know, including the workout plan. And there’s a score sheet for and stuff. It’s like 40 pages as a PDF, which is really about 20 to 25 pages of material. And I started thinking, well, actually this is something that I should expand on and make applicable to, like, and originally it was like 40 plus, but I think looking at masters age groups, it’s 35 for men and 30 for women in most sports. And so really that’s kind of the age group it’s aimed at. It is

more targeted towards men than women because women have their own specifics about diet that coincide with their menstrual cycle. But beyond that, the rest of it is actually the same. And so as I’ve been writing it, it’s funny that I’ve said to all my clients and I’ve got about 60 clients right now. So even during this corona thing, nothing’s really changed for me. The only thing that’s changed is obviously some people will be working out at home with either very limited equipment or no equipment compared to having access to a gym. But I’ve said to all my clients, I think this is the best opportunity that many of you are ever going to have to get a six pack. Because, well, so and this is one of the things we work on quite a lot. And I’m developing this as well. I’m working with a PhD level therapist on creating a mindset component. It’ll be a 12 month training plan that comes with like a monthly mindset component. Just to help people be as successful

as possible. But we work very much on reframing things. So instead of saying things like, oh, you know, I can’t go to my favorite restaurant. Fantastic. I can’t go out to eat. I have to prepare all my food for myself now. You know, take away is limited. All these things are limited. Well, what a great opportunity to get as lean as possible right now, because you can absolutely control everything you eat. So there’s no more saying, oh, because of this work meeting, you know, I couldn’t eat well or I had to travel for work. Well, there’s none of that either. So everyone right now has this unprecedented opportunity. And because of the lack of commuting time for a lot of people, you know, they’re saving anywhere up to two hours a day for some people. A lot of my guys are actually training twice a day now. So I’ve got 40 to 50 year old guys training twice a day, which most people would tell you is impossible. But it’s not.

The difference is that because we’re really controlling sleep, food, you know, like stress levels, and you know, we’re saying about ambition before. I have a guy who works in Microsoft. He works in like data security in the iCloud department, right? And he started this job literally the week before everyone got sent home to work from home. So he’s got a brand new job. He’s got new customers. He’s got homeschooling. He’s got all this other stuff going on. And he’s like fairly senior. Guy was working 16 hours a day. Well, how do you think he was coping with that? Probably not very well. So again, we came back to like what the basics of the book were and the basics of the book are hey, I need you to get this much sleep every night and not even from an athletic perspective. But just if you want to make, you know, like the process of sleep, we store memory properly when we sleep. We repair cellular damage when we sleep. So

there’s links that show that like Alzheimer’s risk is increased when sleep goes down and obesity risk doubles under six hours a night. Motor control under six hours of sleep a night goes down to the same levels as if you were 0.05 blood alcohol content, which is quite scary when you think if you’re driving around, the majority of people driving around near you have probably had six hours or less of sleep. They’re basically as impaired as if they were too drunk to drive in our country.

Pretty scary, right? And then there’s other people doing that who’ve got their kids in the car, which, you know, you would hope they would never drink, drive with their kids in the car, but they’re basically doing the same thing. So sleep is really important and being able to say to this guy and again reframing going, OK, so let’s look at it from another perspective. I get that you’re ambitious. I get you’ve got a new job. I get there’s a lot of stress going on right now and you and you want to keep your job because let’s be honest, a lot of people are out of work right now. But if you keep going at 16 hour days, how long is that going to last? Like you’re going to blow to pieces in a couple of weeks. And if you have staff on your team doing that, what would you say to them? You go, well, I’d tell them to go to sleep. Well, why is that good enough for the staff and not for you? You know, so being able to talk to people

and and show them what’s important, the book is is really helpful for that or the manual for the 28 Day Challenge gives that framework because all these guys have done that. But the book will actually be available more widely. It will go just straight through my website. People will be able to download it for free. So they’ve got that some information always. It’s so true about the stuff that you think most people know. They don’t know. Like the way I’m thinking about that is with with swimming. It’s like, you know, something I’ve been doing since I was really young kid and you think that it’s just common knowledge. But when I look at the say the videos or the podcasts that I’ve done, the ones where I’m talking about the most basic things, they’re the ones that people have found most helpful. Like I did a video about breathing. Yeah. And and that one just went, you know, it was really, really popular. And I thought that it’s

just too simple. But that’s it. Like it’s these real fundamentals. There’s real basics that a lot of people don’t actually know, especially if they have never had a like a coach or they’ve never had someone talk to them about sleep or diet. Like they just don’t know that stuff. And if you can get those fundamentals right and get the basics right, then you can on such a good platform to then be able to improve all the other aspects of your your life is so much easier. Whereas if you don’t get those fundamentals right, I mean, you just you’re not you’re not building a house on on rock at all. It’s just it’s not going to last. Yeah, I remember training with John Van Wisser and you know, I came from and I swam at school, not at a super high level, but reasonably.

And we were always taught to breathe three strokes. And so that was what I’d always done. And I went and did some sessions with Johnny. He just went breathe every two and I said, oh, but you know, I’m only going to breathe one side then and blah, blah, blah. And he goes, look, it’s an aerobic sport. You need oxygen. Get the oxygen in. Full stop and totally transform my swimming such a small tip. And you know, it’s the same with I can remember I had this guy. He was a world champion power lifter. And I had written in his program that I want him to do SL deal, which in my head stands for single leg deadlift. In his world, it stands for stiff leg and deadlift. And so and he’s a really strong guy, right? But I would look at the weight that he lifted and for how many reps I’d be like, wow, that’s crazy kind of numbers for that exercise. And he’s and he said to me, oh, really? Because, you know, I feel like it’s actually down a

bit and blah, blah, blah. And it wasn’t until we went back and forth a few times, I realized like, wait, you’re talking about something completely different. So even little things like that, like, I’ll say, you know, this exercise, a burpee is another great example. The burpee in my head always has a push-up in it. If it doesn’t have a push-up, it’s called a squat thrust. But you get people now who say, oh, well, do you want me to do burpees with or without the push-ups? There’s only one way. But most people don’t even know that there’s another exercise called something completely, completely different. So for me, always remembering that, hey, I have to make sure that I’m looking at things from their eyes. And, you know, like, when you speak to someone about something for the first time, something as simple as keep your wrist straight, can you see me on the video? So if I grip something, I’ll grab my, you know, grab my water bottle.

If I grip something, right, so this is straight, it looks straight, right? But look at the angle of my knuckles. My hand’s actually pointing back this way. Straight is here, like the hand that I would punch someone with, which if you’re swimming with paddles, it’s the same hand, right? Because I wouldn’t swim like that. So straight is straight. But when you tell someone you want them to hold their wrist straight, when they’re doing something, they’ll immediately revert to this wrong position. But this creates problems either at the elbow or the shoulder later on. And so, you know, like it actually takes time to take pictures and, you know, like point arrows at things and the circle things and all this kind of stuff. So people actually understand. But the little basic things, for a lot of people, like you say, who come to things as an adult without any coaching, it’s very difficult for them because, you know, the things that

they’ve always assumed, and I get this from the customers all the time, even, you know, now online, you know, remotely with video and stuff like that saying, I’ve never had someone coach me as strictly as you. What the hell were you paying for? Right? I mean, imagine someone came to swim coaching and you just let them like flop up and down the lane. However, they wanted to every single time they came, like it’s not really going to be very effective, right? And this is and one of the big disconnects I see with people is people would very clearly understand the technique and the form involved in swimming. They are starting to understand this form involved with running. You know, it’s a little bit slow, but people are starting to go, OK, well, there’s probably some shapes that we need to be making when we do this. If we’re talking martial arts, it’s very like defined form of what it should look like. And then we get to weight lifting or something and

people think, I’ll just do it however you want. You know, everything physical should have a very strict form and body shapes will change. But, you know, like a neutral spine is a neutral spine regardless of how long your spine is. And so getting people to understand this or even getting coaches to explain it is sometimes a bit of a slow process. It’s funny you mentioned about the wrist, right? I mean, in freestyle and swimming, same thing, you need that to be flat, right? And so so many people actually have it that way as well, like they’re trying to pull through the water with. It’s a slight angle. It’s a very slight difference, but it makes a world of a world of difference. Just getting that part right. And when I do the analysis with people in our membership, they’ll send videos sort of every two or three weeks. And I’m being quite particular about some of the things that they’re doing. But there’s a reason for it. It’s like, well, if you get

this part right, it’s these little one percenters that over time are going to add up, might stop you from getting injured. And yeah, it’s been particular. And it’s certainly you’ve got to develop that eye for it, which, you know, which we do when you’re doing that much and that closely with people. But yeah, like it, there’s so much to it that if you’ve got someone like yourself looking at all those finer details, that’s what’s going to stop you from, well, from not being able to do those exercises three months down the track when you’re injured yourself. And just learning it right. I mean, I did a, it was like a, like a lifting class in New South Wales when I was there with a friend. And the guy was a, it was like, I think he was a power lifter. And he was a very good coach was like maybe five of us in there. And I wasn’t using any weight. So I was just using the bar, the most basic stuff. And I started to get them right. I reckon maybe 80% right,

just without any weight. But had I have gone for any sort of weight, like with these sort of movements, it would have, would not have helped at all. Just even putting, yeah. So that sort of technique makes a big difference. So you must see with swimming as well, when people, so intensity obviously in swimming is speed. Right. Or maybe volume kind of adds that extra complexity. But I coach motorcycle riding as well. And to me actually, because the, the group that I work for, they call the California Super Bowl school. They’ve probably got the most detailed coaching process out of any group I’ve ever seen. The, to get in as a coach is super difficult. There’s constant education that has to happen. It’s almost like having when I say another job, I don’t mean like every now and then I mean like you need to spend a lot of time on it. I mean, I mean, I mean, like you need to spend a couple of hours every single week working on this stuff to even stay good

enough to stay in. But someone could do something slow. And the moment they start adding speed, which, which is what the intensity is on the racetrack, it all just falls to pieces. And so people go, oh, well, it’s because I’m going slow. I can’t do it right. Man, if you can’t do it at 60 kilometers an hour, you’re not going to do it at 160. I guarantee when your eyes are as big as dinner plates and you’re worrying about crashing, that’s the right thing at that point. So, you know, if you can’t do it lightly, you’re not going to do it heavy, full stop. Oh, it’s exactly right. And I know you’re a big proponent of one of the things I like about the the things that you post is like you do cut the crap. Like you’re happy to say what you think and speak your mind, which I think is great. And, you know, one of the one of the things that I do enjoy talking about is like you’re a big proponent of just getting out for a walk. Like just walk and get some movement going.

And so, where does that stem from for you? Like why is that such a big proponent of what people should be doing? And were you always at that point where you just sort of cut to the chase and we’re happy to speak your mind or is it something that you just kind of, you got sick of dancing around the topic? No, it’s pretty much always gotten me in trouble. But look, in fairness to the way it is, like if you come to a training session, like a group training environment, right? So most classes are like an hour in most gym setups. Let’s say I’ve got a dozen people. Well, that means realistically, I’m only going to get five minutes with each person, right? Now, someone who’s really good and doesn’t need much help, maybe actually they’re just going to get one or two minutes so I can spend a couple of bonus minutes with someone else, but on average, five minutes per person. I don’t have time to ask you how you feel I need to actually get you to do the right thing

as quickly as possible. So you actually get the result you’re paying for, which is to get fit as stronger, leaner faster, whatever it happens to be. So I can’t afford to waste the time just being around the bush. I have to come to the point. So that’s kind of how it developed and now probably is very developed to the point where it’s difficult. Would I say difficult as in difficult for new people to deal with it because most people will be used to a little bit like softening kind of like social norm sort of stuff beforehand. And like they might send me like an email like this and they’ll get back a one sentence reply which will be me going this is the biggest problem and this is what I want to address and that takes them a little while to get used to in terms of the walking stuff. I think you know over time I’ve started just thinking well you know we’ve been here for about a million years roughly in this shape. So there hasn’t been any huge change

in our body shape for it’s about 650,000 years. So what are the things that made the human body the human body? So bipodal stance is one of them. Hands ability to sweat. So we’ve got a whole bunch of things that kind of set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom but because of some of those adaptations so like the shape of the heel is meant to be quite efficient so you can rock and save energy. We have glutes so you can’t run without glutes you can’t run without glutes so like even though a monkey can stand upright they don’t have glutes like we do so they can’t run the shape of the toes the length of the Achilles tendon there’s even a ligament in the base of your head called the knuckle ligament N-U-C-H-A-L might be neutral depending on school of biology but it stops your head doing this when you run right. No other primate has that because they can’t run that’s a specific adaptation so when I started looking at okay the human body is

designed for this I need to get people instead of trying to take their square pig body and try to bash it into a round hole we need to at least honour the things that make us human so the things that made us human and really set us apart on an evolutionary perspective we’re being able to forage for food for long periods of time in hot temperatures so when a lion or something might have to rest under a tree because of our bipedal stance so we don’t cop as much heat because we’re upright the air higher up off the ground is cooler that means actually we’re not overheating as much plus we sweat we’ve got a really powerful aerobic system we’re designed to move for five to eight hours a day it’s estimated that foraging for food for our ancestors was 15 to 18 kilometres of movement a day so you start to put in perspective when people go you know I’m really active mate you do one hour of exercise seven days a week that’s less than 4% of your week

I don’t really think we can count that as active if we can add an hour walking on a day it’s still not a terrible amount but now we’re up to 8% at least so we’re starting to actually have a little bit more on our side to work with so that was like the first thing it’s done to go well okay what’s the body designed for and if you look at some of the things we can do like while we’re very efficient cycling for instance we’re not designed to cycle our spines don’t actually like being bent over for long periods of time and we actually spend a lot of time and you see this a lot with guys in my age group we start to get a bit older and they gravitate away from something like running because they’ve hurt themselves too many times because they haven’t done all this kind of resiliency work and they gravitate towards cycling wonder why their back hurts because it’s not designed to do that mate you sit down all day long you should have chosen a leisure activity

that wasn’t sitting down you probably actually need something that involves standing up so once you start to add it all together and you start going okay so like swimming for instance awesome and I think the most effective thing you could do to reverse all of the sitting down that people do gets you in a straight line and gets you working all the muscles that go that way which is not something we do very often and allows you to get a lot of reps in which is not something you can do with anything else yeah very so the yeah and then when we look at what is most important so the modern fitness industry wants to sell you a neatly packaged plan right whether it’s because it has to be because that’s a really powerful sales tool new and improves always beats in people’s minds old and trustworthy for some reason right so never never mind that walking’s been around for a million years I’m going to give you a 20 minute to ballet class or something that’s going to be

more effective well for a single class you might burn more calories but I can tell you now that if you train that hard like a pump class or a high intensity exercise kind of things you can’t do that seven days a week and you can’t do it seven days a week for the rest of your life and when we look at what makes the biggest difference with people it’s not intensity it’s consistency that makes the biggest difference so if you and I are picking and this is a good time to talk about this if we’re picking a zombie apocalypse team right at the end of the year we have to pick our team I have a guy who trains seven days a week at 60 to 70% because that gives us 300 sessions roughly for the year if your guy trains flat out three days a week he only has 150 sessions for the year right now he might work harder during the session but when you’re coming to pick your guy who’s going to be durable long lasting able to just keep doing like diesel power and chugging along

I’m picking the 300 session guy every single time and when you start adding that up over 20, 30, 40 years you start to realise the real power of getting in 250 to 300 workouts a year for 10 years is pretty powerful so in the same period of time you know the three-day a week guy he gets if it’s three days a week for five years right so he gets 150 sessions times five years what’s that 7,500 750 sorry 7,500 yeah my guy in the same period of time essentially has running in a five-year period compared to the same guy

the only way you’re going to get there is with lower intensity stuff and so even when you look at elite athletes people would look at like a chugging at the moment and go oh well you know he did this many like four-minute K’s or something four-minute K themes like 60% of his max heart rate he could have had a sleep at that heart rate that’s how fit he is but people see it and they think well that’s how fast I need to be running like six to seven-minute kilometers for a similar effort sorry and you see it with swimming how do you work on technique in swimming if they’re working 100% of the time it’s impossible you actually have to dial them back so they can work on the technique right it’s all about lowering that intensity and getting the consistency yeah that it’s exactly right and speaking with a guy Dan Smith who was on the Olympic team a couple years back he he looked at his stroke and thought I just got to fix this like there’s so much wrong with it

that I can do a lot better and for him at that Olympic level he was something like six to nine months where he he did very little fast swimming and it was just all slow a lot of drills a lot of technique work and he just had to start from from scratch and just like went completely back to basics and then was building up to eventually doing that at higher intensities and at faster speed but even for him like he at those higher speeds straight away it took him a while to build it up and that’s someone who’s touted as the next Ian Thorpe he like at that top level so to think that you’re not going to have to do that if you’re just an average Joe so like it’s you’re kidding yourself you’ve got to just really come back to basics and know that it’s that more long-term approach that is going to to help you as a coach when I first started like I thought you should someone should be able to pick up the things that I’m telling them or teaching them pick it up straight away

and be able to do it but you get a little bit smarter get a little bit older and you start to figure out okay this stuff takes time takes you at least 66 days to change a habit and and it’s not always going to feel good and you know you’re going to go with the people that you are coaching it makes a big difference for them knowing what they’re going to go through and maybe the frustrations of I want to push hard like I’m feeling good but you’ve got to bring them back a little bit sometimes yeah I mean habit building that’s a really interesting thing for now so I’ve got guys and we’re obviously working on food and basic stuff like that all the time and food’s really tricky because if you think about when you were little the pocket money every week when I was little that’s how old I am I was probably worth like about 20 bucks today but I got a dollar and if I got a dollar I could have a candy bar like a sneakers or a Mars bar or something if I didn’t

have the chocolate I got two dollars right so but you see the perceived value of it it’s worth double right and so there was never really junk in our house we had a very limited amount of junk food it would come out for like Easter or Christmas again in fairly limited quantities and then when I did Ironman and you know for people who’ve done Ironman you know you can eat whatever you want and I remember there was a point in the peak weeks where I was I was eating like a family size chocolate bar a day and still losing half a kilo a week and like I’m not carrying a huge amount of extra fat but I was still losing weight every week and so I had this feast or famine kind of thing with junk food right but when I was little it was really valuable right so it was coveted by me and my brother my partner is in the exact same boat but if I did something really successful maybe you did get a treat like if you had a really big win at a sporting event or something

maybe you got taken to McDonald’s or something afterwards but also if you had a really bad day like I remember one day and I was getting off the tram in Melbourne at the school time so the trams are packed and I was little I was only in like grade five or something and the trams started moving before I’d fully got enough and I actually had to jump off a moving tram and so like like I was a bit banged up I didn’t break anything but I was a bit banged up but I got taken to McDonald’s for that too so so good and bad in my house there was this food reward now I’m lucky in that because my job actually revolves somewhat around how I look I am conscious of what I eat all the time so I’ve broken most of that stuff but it’s still there to a little bit but if you have a client they’re in their forties they’re overweight they’ve basically always been overweight you’re not going to break habits revolving around food in a week, a month two months, three months

it’s going to take a while and so one of the things we work on at the moment and this is a mindset thing as well I feel like I’ve had this conversation with half a dozen guys already this week is that you need to be both the carrot and the stick at all times which is a very difficult balancing app I need to be tough on myself and try to always go to a higher level try to make myself better that’s one of the things we work on all the time is we’re not just we’re not just making ourselves physically better we’re actually using this to create leverage for the rest of our lives to create more discipline better relationships to be more clearheaded at work and earn more money we’re actually using this as the springboard for everything because the reality is the only thing you can really control in life is what goes in your mouth and how you treat your body you can’t control and this thing has shown us that right as far as it’s shown is you can have zero control

over anything else other than how you treat your body so I need to be tough on myself but at the same time I’ve got to be realistic and say I’m not breaking 40 years of habits in the first week of lockdown that’s just not going to happen so there are going to be slip ups but then the slip up should be and it’s Wednesday for us today I’m very typical in an early diet setting someone would get to a Wednesday or Thursday having done the early part of the week great for a reason and we also work on identifying the triggers that set off that change in habit and then making plans around them so they fall off the wagon and instead of waiting until Monday because that’s a really common thing is people go I’ll start again Monday then it’s next Monday the Monday after the Monday after next thing you know it’s a year later and actually you’re more out of shape than you are now but we go straight back to the plan at the very next meal so it doesn’t matter

if you woke up today I can get it like you saw the news the news was upsetting in Australia today we woke up to hear four police officers were killed overnight on a freeway my partner’s a firefighter she was on night shift last night she didn’t go to that but at her station one of the other trucks did so she saw the guys coming back from that job they had to fill in at other stations to cover all the other people that went it’s affected the whole community and emergency services right so and I woke up this so it was that on the news a messenger straight away to make sure she was okay but it would be really normal under those sort of circumstances or when you’re reading some of this stuff about coronavirus or what’s going on in the US it’s very easy to get upset and get pulled out of like your like your winner’s mindset where you’re focused and disciplined and head towards that emotional side so yeah I get it you know this is going to happen

that’s okay go straight back to the plan next time once you identify what it is so for me watching the news I’m down to about 10 minutes at night now so I watch it first thing in the morning while I’m having breakfast which is a couple of minutes and then I watch it 10 minutes at night I get all the information I need and then gets turned off because otherwise it’s too easy to get distracted by the whole thing and get pulled into the stuff you see on social media with you know all of a sudden everyone’s a virus expert or a political pundit and you know what I mean the habit-building that people are both tough on themselves and easy at the same time because it’s in a lot of cases when you look at the psychology of it it’s not as simple as I wanted the chocolate bar it’s maybe I wanted the chocolate bar because every time I got bullied at high school and I got bullied nonstop for three years or something but that was what I got when I came home

in crime because of my mum so now when I feel bad my instant reactions I want that chocolate bar because that’s what people are and showing them this is why you’re resorting to that does that give them a little bit more power to be able to go okay I can see what’s happening here and then they can stop it that’s an option for us yeah absolutely so we do a thing called a risk obstacle and trigger document Christmas is a really good example so people will say I’ve got seven office Christmas parties coming up okay also we know the temptation they tend to overeat, they tend to over drink. So let’s create some strategies around that. So the first one always with the alcohol is just to say to people, no, I drive because no one will tempt you to drink if they know you’re driving. Well, no one like sane and mature anyway.

The next one actually is, and we’ve had people that have to call out some of their friends when their friends are like, no, I have a drink, what’s wrong with you? Why don’t you want to have a drink? Hang on, are you my friend? Like the person who’s supposed to be on my side telling me to do something that’s actually gonna make me in danger are the people when I go drive home later on. We need to be like, are you genuinely my friend or not? Because no friend would ever say that to someone. So having people realize things like that, that’s really important. But once you identify, you can make a plan. Otherwise you’re just reactive to everything. So the sitting down and actually writing out the risks and triggers, we have, there’s always food ones. We have alcohol, there can be social situations which drive some of that stuff as well. There can be work, some people avoid going to sleep, some people avoid workouts.

So once we start to figure out where people are falling down and we have a base scoring system in the 28 day challenge. So like for workouts for the week, you should get one point a day, you should get six points for the week. If you come to me and say, well, I got two points and you’re getting two points consistently week after week. Well, there’s a problem with the workouts. We get four meals a day, so you get 28 points for food. If you come along and you say, well, I got an 11 for food, well, we got some problems. But if you’re telling me you’re getting 24 for food and two for workouts, it’s pretty easy to figure out where the problem is. So once we can identify the problems, which is really what the point system does, it shows us where the biggest problems for things are, then we can start to create some strategies around them. And once you’re aware of them and you’ve made some plans, and this is again with habit building,

you’re not gonna be successful every time. So going to a social situation, you might slip up the first three, four, five, 10, whatever times. But each time you do, it’s important not to just chuck your hands in me and say, oh, well, I was at a party, you know, ha, ha, ha, how to drink. Well, if you really wanna make the change, we need a new plan. And so the thing you did, you didn’t quite do well enough. It needs to be tweaked somewhere. And you might end up with, if we’re talking drinking in a social situation, maybe it’s actually version eight, version nine, version 13, 14, 15, whatever. It’s, you know, but always remembering that the goal is to go back to the plan. So you don’t just chuck your hands in the air and say, oh, you know, sorry, I hate to pack the tin cans and, you know, 16 beers. Well, okay, let’s get back to the plan and figure it out, because otherwise you’re just reacting to stuff the whole time.

And it’s not until people are aware of the problems. That’s always the biggest issue is getting them for themselves to be aware that it’s a problem. But then getting them to start thinking about how they can fix the problem. Because it’s no good if I tell you, you need to stop drinking when you go out on a Friday night, right? It’s only good if you say to me, I want to stop drinking on Friday night. You know, and I go, okay, well, what are you gonna do about that? I can’t actually tell you what to do. You have to figure out how to do it. So this is like in the 28 day challenge. I give you how to eat, like what a meal should look like. But I never tell you on day one, week one, usually three eggs and I don’t know a hundred grams of smoked salmon or something. Because on week day 29, when the program finishes and I’m not there to tell you what to eat, how do you know why you were eating what you had to eat for breakfast every day?

You know, it only works if you actually know how to fit it all into your life. And so when you look at my biggest loser which is a good example, the people who do well in biggest loser, they come out and they basically, they fail straight away because they don’t have to control anything in the house. There’s no kids, no work, no distractions. They’ve got time to exercise. They’ve got time to prep their food. They’ve got all the available stuff in front of them with no distractions. And then we put them back into their life. They never got taught how to make it fit into their regular life. Well, of course they’re gonna fail. So, you know, like when you’re building stuff with people, you gotta make them aware of it and then they have to answer the question as to how they’re gonna make it work because I can tell you what works for me but my life isn’t your life. We’ve got different lives. So I can help you because I can say I’ve got 40 guys

and 13 of them had the exact same problem and here’s what they did. You know, maybe you should try this too but I will never say you need to do this. That’s not my job. I think so you go. We’ve had it building stuff. It’s very different to like, if you were lifting weights, you know, I would just fly out and say, I need you to do this. That’s different. But when we’re talking about lifestyle, habit stuff, it’s no good for me to tell you what to do. You have to come to that realization yourself. So, and again, the only way to make that happen is for them to become aware of it in the first place. One of the, I’ve spoken about this before but one of the best articles I’ve ever read about coaching was written about a guy called Bill Sweetman and how he’s changed his approach to coaching. And what he does now, and I think this is, and I sort of tell this to anyone who is a swim coach, like what he does now is instead of telling people,

like do another 200, like you were too slow, you should have gone 222, you know, you were too slow. He asked some questions now. So he’s diving into making them realize where they went wrong or what they did right and then getting them to come up with those solutions. It’s right, you missed your times here. Where do you think you could have found those three seconds? And do you think if you do another two of these that that’s gonna help you make the Olympic team? He’s getting them to come up with the solutions and getting them to think about it. And that’s what I try and do. Even with the younger kids that I sometimes coach, it’s like, yeah, you sort of need to tell them probably more so than the adults. But if you ask them the right questions, they are gonna become so much more knowledgeable about and take ownership of those things and for anything that comes down to like a lifestyle when there’s not a coach there,

it’s like they’ve got the tools there to be able to ask themselves right questions and pick up whether they are making right decisions or not. This is when I mentioned the motorbike school before, the California Superbike School. That’s our coaching process. So when I say it’s the best in the world, I mean, we’re following it. And the guy who came up with it is not an Olympic level swim coach. He actually is just a motorbike junkie in the US, kind of is a California surfer dude.

But we’ll do exactly that. So, you know, you’ll follow a student around and you’ll see them maybe offline in a corner. And when you come in and say, oh, you know, how was that session? And they’ll say, oh, that was great. You know, like, wow, that drill was amazing. And I might say, because I want to draw their attention to something, was that the line you wanted through Turn 4? Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s totally where I want to be. Well, were you able to get on the throttle hard coming out of that corner and actually accelerate down towards the next corner effectively? Oh, no, now that you mentioned it, yeah, I was probably out a little bit wide and I would have run off if I’d come on the throttle. But it’s only when you make them aware of it and you draw their attention to something that they can actually create an answer for themselves. So, I mean, I’ve had people go out and, you know, the racetrack’s pretty easy

because it’s the same every time. And so you can say to someone, I want you to go out and tell me which part of the ripple strip’s got the most rubber on it because that’s where the apex of the corner is supposed to be. And they’ll come in and say, oh, you know, it was like three metres past where I thought the apex of the corner was and what did that do to your line through the corner and blah, blah, blah. And so suddenly by doing this question process, we actually can advance much faster. It can be very uncomfortable though. So I asked the customer this week,

I said to him like, who are you? Because we’re kind of, we’re a little bit stuck. And he said, well, I don’t understand what you meant. I said, well, who are you? Like, oh, well, you know, I’m a spiritual being and well, no, you’re not. So let’s make this simple. If someone was going to describe you to me, what would they say? They’re not going to waste their time on physical appearance. They’re going to tell me about the essence of you. What are they going to say? Dead silence. I mean, and this guy’s a middle-aged guy. He’s hard worker. He’s successful. He’s married. He’s got kids. But he’s lost himself along the way. Also, if you’re trying to improve yourself, you want to go from point A to point B. You know where point B is. You’ve got definite numbers in your mind in terms of body fat, in terms of how many pull-ups you can do, whatever it happens to be. But you don’t even know where point A is. Or how we, GPS only works if you’ve got two locations, right?

Like how are we going to get to point B? If you don’t even know where point A is. And so even starting to draw his attention back to something as simple as, you know, like, what are the things that make you, you, was really interesting because there was dead silence on the end of the call. And it doesn’t, I think it’s, as a coach, if you can ask those questions like, you’re doing them, you’re doing him a massive favor. And yeah, it’s going to be uncomfortable, maybe, for you, for him, probably not for you, because you are super, super awkward, super awkward. Yeah, that’s right. But there’s a reason that it’s awkward. It’s like, well, okay, I haven’t addressed this. Yeah, it’s not, that’s why it’s awkward. We’ll, I think we’ll probably have to wrap it up here because our call’s about to end. So, Andrew, thanks very much for being on the podcast. No, thank you. Let people know where they can find out about you and maybe a little bit about the book that you’re writing

and the books that you’ve currently got as well. Okay, so my website is readpt.com, that’s r-e-a-d-p-t.com. I have a book called Run Strong on there, which is basically the running version of everything I’ve just talked about, it’s about consistency and lower intensity work. And it’s basically my journey from being, not having run for over 10 years to going through Ironman and having to figure out because there were plenty of Ironman run plans, but there’s no plan to go from, because they all assume you’ve done a lot of writing prior to starting at Ironman. My second ever triathlon was an Ironman. My first one was a half Ironman. So to go from nothing to that, there were some steps that were missing. So I had to create them. So that’s what Run Strong is all about.

My website’s readpt.com. On Facebook, you can just find me as Andrew Reid. There is a public finger page.

And there is also a men’s fitness group, which is, what is it called? It’s called Andrew Reid, Strength and Conditioning for the Aging Athlete. It’s a bit of a mouthful at the moment. And basically you’ve got to be a 35 plus male, although I’m probably about to open that up to females as well pretty soon, simply because I have both a male and a female group and managing two is getting very difficult. So I’ll probably just manage them together. Sounds good. Thank you very much again. And I’ll put all those links in our show notes. So yeah, enjoy the rest of your downtime and with the rest of the book. 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 Eliminate Bad Habits And Master The Fundamentals With Andrew Read appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

We are joined by Dr. Greg Wells who is the author of the book Rest, Refocus, Recharge. In this episode, we talked about some of the things that are discussed in his book. He shares some strategies on why doing less will actually achieve more, how to stop reacting to things and be more deliberate, taking full control of your love, refocusing your attention and how you can stop being a slave to busyness

02:05 Slowing Down
04:05 Sleeping As A Tool Tool To Recharge
07:29 Doing Less To Achieve More In A Day To Day Life
08:51 Pump The Breaks, Open More Space and Have More Control
11:29 You Don’t Need To Do What Other People Expect Of You
13:39 From External Validation To Intrinsic Motivation
14:26 Stop Reacting And Start Being Deliberate With What You’re Doing
17:08 Metacognition
21:41 Reaction versus Response
24:50 Helping Kids With Cystic Fibrosis
26:53 Pay Attention To What We Have
29:59 Multitasking Can Lead To Distractions
37:22 Get Away From Your Device – “123 Practice”
39:28 The Psychology Of Being In The Water
43:17 Bring Your Attention Right Back Into The Present Moment
48:00 It’s Process Not Outcome

Dr. Greg Wells:
Rest, Refocus and Recharge
Website
Instagram

Effortless Swimming Camps
Hawaii Swim Camp
2020 Hell Week Camp (Thailand)

Online Membership
Freestyle Clinics Around Australia

Transcription:

Greg Wells:
When we open up space in our lives we can start to fill it with very interesting creativity. And with that it happens, like neuro-physiologically what’s going on is your brain waves are changing, your brain is slowing down its activity levels, it’s relaxing a little bit and we shift.

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

Brenton Ford:
Well Greg thanks so much for being on the podcast. I think your book couldn’t have come at a better time, it’s called Rest, Refocus and Recharge. And after reading through it, I think everyone’s pretty much forced to do exactly that. There’s not much else that they can do at this time.

Greg Wells:
It’s the most bizarre experience ever watching the entire world shut down right as I release a book about taking a moment to pause and breathe, and it’s happening enforced at scale globally. It’s so bizarre. Anyway, I hope it helps people get through this pretty crazy time.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah. I think one of the things that I found and just speaking with a lot of friends is this time has really forced them to slow down. And watching people just go for a walk or sit on a park bench and just not looking at their phone, just kind of staring out into space, it’s a really weird thing where people are forced to do nothing. I find that’ll be one of the positives to come out of all of this.

Greg Wells:
I think so. I was out for a bike ride the other day because we’re still allowed out to do that sort of stuff because you know, keep your distance from people. But people were out cycling with their families, people were out in the parks, as you talk about, like obviously respecting each other’s distances as you absolutely need to. But yeah, it’s amazing to watch people, and they’re just kind of like chilling out there. People are like staring off. People are thinking, people are having meals with their families, people are reading books, people are taking online courses, people are learning to cook. It’s amazing what’s happened now that we’ve paused for a moment just to take a step back.

Greg Wells:
It’s funny, you don’t appreciate what you have until it’s taken away. And so much of our normal lives has been taken away from us. I think a lot of the really interesting thing is going to be when things ramp back up again, can we be a little bit more deliberate about what we put back into our lives so that we don’t end up where we were even two weeks ago, burned out, stressed, fatigue, depression, anxiety, all that sort of stuff.

Greg Wells:
So yeah, I think that there’s tremendous opportunity, knock on wood, like healthy and all that sort of stuff. And obviously a lot of people are going to get sick and are sick. And so there’s no question, going to be some pain as we go through this time. And I want to respect that deeply. But I think that there’s some incredible potential benefits or different courses that we can go on in the future, which is interesting to behold as the world goes through this crisis.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah. And one of the things that I’ve personally found is that I’ve been sleeping until seven o’clock most mornings where before that I was normally up at five o’clock. So the sleep thing is a massive one. I know you talk about that in your book, where using sleep as a tool to recharge and a number of other things. For me, that’s probably been one of the most interesting things is I’ve been sleeping for eight or nine hours a night, which rarely happens. And look, it might be a change in the time of year as well. Like it’s not light until about seven o’clock, where it was light at 5:30 in summer. But I’ve noticed that is a big change. And also just simplifying, it’s like, “All right, what do I really need in life to be happy and to be fulfilled?” And it’s like, it’s pretty simple I think. And this is really shown that where we’re forced to just a really get rid of and purge all of the things that are unnecessary, that can really come into your life when you do get busy.

Greg Wells:
Is that crazy? I’m also sleeping so much right now. I wear an Oura Ring, O-U-R-A. If anyone wants to check it out, it’s pretty interesting technology. It’s tracking all sorts of data. I was kind of feeling a little bit sick the other night. So given the current environment I was like, “Okay, well, I’m going to sleep as much as I possibly can.” Because I know sleep is related to the immune system. I almost like, “I do not want to get sick right now.” So I slept for nine hours. I haven’t slept for nine hours in years. I felt amazing the next day. And I’m not setting an alarm in the morning. I wake up when I wake up. This morning I had to get up early because I did a call through to the UK from Canada where I am. But I think that it’s great to see that we are actually sleeping, and we’re able to sleep in because maybe we’re not commuting as much as we were before.

Greg Wells:
I mean we don’t need to get to the office by eight o’clock or seven o’clock or nine o’clock or whatever it happens to be. And so that is giving us a chance to recover, regenerate. I know you’ve got a lot of swimmers and triathletes listening, and we know that recovery and regeneration is one of the things that’s so important for all of us at all ages. And the way that we recover and we regenerate is through sleep. When we sleep, our brains wash themselves out. We’ve learned about the glial lymphatic system over the last few years, which is the system inside the brain that washes the brain out. Now, we’ve learned about how growth hormone is released from a structure, and that growth hormone circulates throughout the body while we sleep. And that’s what repairs and regenerates all of our tissues like our muscles and our bones and our skin and our eyes.

Greg Wells:
And then we have hormones that are controlled and regulated like Leptin and Ghrelin. And those are the hormones that control our appetites, that we’re better able to make good decisions around food the next day. So when we sleep, when we actually take that time to recover and regenerate, obviously it improves our immune system, which is incredibly important right now as everyone’s paying attention to that. But it also improves the way that your brain works, it also speeds your recovery from exercise, it also makes you able to learn better and be more creative. So it’s pretty cool to see what’s happening.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah. It’s been such a weird experience, and that’s what a lot of friends have said, for them it’s just really, really weird. But I think when everything goes back to normal, will we sleep as much as we are now? I’m not sure. Probably not because we will get busier with work and all that sort of stuff. But I think it’s been a really a real awakening for a lot of people. And one of the, I guess, the crux of the book is really about doing less to achieve more. And one of the things I find going on holidays, and last year we went on a trip to the Maldives for a surf trip. What I found there was like all we did during the day was wake up, eat, surf, and relax. And sort of just keep on top of emails and that sort of thing.

Brenton Ford:
But from that, I found that I was able to choose the one or two things for the business, For Effortless Swimming, that were most important going forwards. I wrote those things down and wrote an action plan and the steps that I need to do to achieve them. And it allowed me to get really clear on the things that were important going forward. And that was by doing very, very little for a week. And just taking a step back and getting out of my normal environment and normal routine. How do you like to use that way of doing things, like doing less to it to achieve more, how do you use that in your day-to-day life?

Greg Wells:
Yeah. I’m a business person, and so I’m usually firing on all cylinders and driving forwards as fast as I can. So I get what you experienced in Maldives. Judith, my wife, took me there three years ago for our 10th anniversary, and it was one of the most spectacular place I’ve ever been in my entire life. We did a lot of diving, not surfing. But it was incredible.

Greg Wells:
Imagine this, you’re getting a great night’s sleep, you’re eating incredibly healthy food, you’re out in the ocean, you’re out in nature, you’re exercising and you’re resting. And in that rest of time, yeah, you got to clear your email just to keep on top of things, but then that opens up hours a day for you to just basically daydream and contemplate. When we have space in our lives, when we have space in terms of space like actual space and location, and also space in terms of time, when we open up space in our lives, we can start to fill it with very interesting creativity.

Greg Wells:
And with that it happens, like neuro-physiologically what’s going on is your brain waves are changing, your brain is slowing down its activity levels. It’s relaxing a little bit. And we shift from beta brain waves, which are these fast, sharp, quick movements of electricity throughout the course of the brain down into theta brain waves, which are slower, larger waves that are reflective of more sort of ideating, creativity, daydreaming. And that’s where we get amazing insights about what we need to do differently, about how we can solve problems, about how we can consider what it is that we’re doing in our lives. And we only have that opportunity when we pause, when we take a moment to consider what’s going on, and to maybe think about doing something a little bit differently.

Greg Wells:
Interesting, the entire planet’s getting that opportunity right now because we’re confined and sheltering in place at home. But when you’re on that beach, when you’re staring out at the ocean, when you’re watching the waves rhythmically and repetitively come to shore, and you’re thinking about what you’re doing and really contemplating what’s important to you, and opening up the gateway to contemplating that maybe there’s a different way of doing things, that you could then carry forwards into the future. I think you end up in a place where you have a lot more control over your life. And I think that a lot of people don’t realize just how much control we all have over our lives and that we can make the tough decisions, that we can change the trajectory of our lives, we can do more of the things that we love to do like swimming and surfing and running a business that’s aligned with what it is that you care about or going to work, getting work done, and then going to your kids’ sports games. Like whatever it is that matters to you is what you can end up spending a lot more time on.

Greg Wells:
So yeah, I think that what you experienced in Maldives was what a lot of people can experience when we pump the brakes a little bit, slow down, pause, breathe, give yourself a little bit of space in terms of location and time. And then all of a sudden you come up with pole new ideas about how to potentially run your life or overcome challenges or solve whatever problem it is that you’re trying to deal with.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah. Over the last few years, one of the things I’ve had to get accustomed to is not feeling guilty when I’m not working. And I think I’m still probably going through that today, but there’s this… I think we’ve been conditioned, particularly from school, it’s like if you’re not busy, if you’re not doing work, then you’re not achieving anything. And it’s not the case. It’s just something that we have been conditioned over many years.

Brenton Ford:
But, as you said, we’re in full control of what we’re doing. And so if you wanted to quit your job tomorrow, you’ve got the choice to do that. I’m not saying go and do it, but you’ve got the choice to do it. And then you’ve got the choice to do whatever it is with your life. And I think it’s easy to lose sight of that when we’re going through the motions and when we have routine, and something like this where we actually get to take a step back and take a bird’s eye view of everything that’s happening, it’s a lot easier to see those things that are most important to us and see that, yeah, look, we actually do have full control of our lives. We don’t need to do what it is that other people are expecting of us. It’s really in our full control.

Greg:
You know that last thing that you said is probably the single most important thing that at least either of us have said so far in this conversation, that is like you don’t need to do what other people expect of you. That is the key to this entire thing. When you let go of other people’s expectations, then all of a sudden you are free to do what it is that you want to do.

Greg Wells:
And by other people’s expectations, we’re talking about friends, family, coworkers, just society in general. Once you liberate yourself from trying to meet other people’s expectations, you can wear whatever clothes you want to wear, you can do whatever work you want to be doing, you can exercise as much as you want to be doing, you can learn what you want to do. And I think that that’s something that’s so many people struggle with in this era where we’re all… Well, up until this point now it seems so silly, but in three weeks ago you’re trying to get likes on social media or you’re worried about how you’re perceived on whatever picture has been taken of you. Like now all that stuff just seems completely ludicrous and so short sighted in the face of what the global sort of challenge that we’re all faced with at the moment.

Greg Wells:
But yeah, once you liberate yourself from external validation, external rewards, you can shift towards intrinsic motivation, which in the sports’ psychology literature is very consistently shown to be better at longterm motivation to do something. So pivot to what you want to do, think about what it is that you want to do, think about what it is that you love to do, what you’re great at, what brings you energy, what lights your fire, and just spend your time on that as much as you possibly can. And then all of a sudden, amazing things start happening in your life when you do that.

Brenton Ford:
And that kind of goes into one of the points that you’re talking about in the book. Talking about how to stop reacting and start being deliberate with the things that you’re doing. I mean, you’re right. It’s so funny, three weeks ago it’s like the things in the book would be like I’d say for 95% of people, would be probably not a challenge to do, but it’s something that really could be really beneficial in their lives, and now it’d say 95% of people are being forced to go through a lot of these steps in the book. For you, what are some tools that you use to stop reacting to things that are happening day-to-day and be less reactive and more deliberate?

Greg Wells:
Yeah, it’s so important. I learned this from a gentleman named Sadhguru, who’s an Indian gentleman who does some really interesting work. And just reading some of his stuff and taking a couple of his online courses and working through some of his thinking. And what I learned from him was the idea of response-ability. So response-ability versus reaction. And so many of us, when something happens to us in, let’s just say someone says something and you get frustrated with them for what they just said, we have this reaction to it. And the reaction can be emotional, it could be something that you think, it could be something that you do. So it’s feel, think, do type explosion that can come out of you.

Greg Wells:
And so that usually doesn’t go well. There’s been so many times when I’ve composed emails to someone and I asked my wife, I’m like, “Judith, do you think I should send this?” And she looks at me and goes, “You absolutely must delete that email right now. Go to sleep, try it again tomorrow. Because if you send that right now, you’re going to be undoing the damage for months, if not years.”

Greg Wells:
And so reaction usually causes problems. Unless it’s sort of like you’re reacting from the start on a gun, to go with the swimming, that’s a positive reaction. It’s reaction time. But when we’re reacting to things that are coming at us very quickly, that is usually extraordinarily problematic unless it’s a trained response that you’re deliberately trying to do. Military for example.

Greg Wells:
But what we find works so much better for people when you actually train this in, is to respond. Respond to the threat, respond to the challenge. And response means that you have this response-ability, like response dash ability, not response ability. And so what you do in that case is you consider what’s happened, you outline a course of action, you think about what you need to do, and then you actually are able to do the right thing, not the quick thing.

Greg Wells:
And there’s this idea called metacognition, and metacognition is thinking about how you think. It’s another brain state. And generally it’s associated with alpha brain waves, which are sort of not quite as fast as beta waves when you’re puzzling and performing, ad not quite as slow as theta waves when you’re ideating. This is sort of the learning and reflection zone and the contemplation and strategic thinking zone. So you’re relaxed, but you’re definitely consciously considering what to do.

Greg Wells:
And a really cool study on this… And I can flip all these references to you afterwards for the show notes. But there was a really cool study that looked at students who practiced metacognition, thinking about how you think. And when they ask themselves, “What do you need to do, how are you going to do it, and why are you going to do it?” They improved their performance on assignments and tests by three to 5%. Now that might not seem like a lot, three to 5%, but if you add that up over time, it can end up in a very, very different place and a very, very different mark.

Greg Wells:
And so if you’re thinking about something right now and there’s a challenge that you’re faced with, that simple pattern of asking yourself, what do I want to have happen, how am I going to get there, and so what am I going to do basically, how am I going to get there, and why do I need to do it? Can make all the difference in the world in terms of guiding your actions.

Greg Wells:
What we can control is very limited. Like literally all that we can actually control is what we think, say and do. And when we practice metacognition, that enables us to take control of what we think, say and do. And that establishes a radical level of control over what we’re able to do in our lives. And then we begin to move in the direction that we want to be moving in very, very consistently rather than just reacting to the environment and getting pushed around by life, which is I think how I was probably operating up until very, very recently. So this is not easy to do and it takes practice and work, but the outcome is that you end up totally moving in the direction of what you want to be doing and loving every second of it as much as possible.

Brenton Ford:
I really liked those three questions that they posed to the students. Looking at I guess how we kind of structure the clinics that we do, and even just looking at how I’ve been going about… I’ve been surfing a lot more, and one of the things that I noticed… So we’ve got this wave pool near the airport that just got built, so you can basically book in for an hour and you end up catching 14 to 16 waves an hour. It’s the first wave pool in Australia, and I’ve been going there quite a bit. And I’ve noticed that my surfing’s improved dramatically. But one of the things that really made a difference was they’ve got these photographers there, and they’re there every session. They’re taking photos and they post them online.

Brenton Ford:
And one of the things that I noticed about my technique when I was surfing was, one of the first things was I wasn’t looking at where I wanted to go, which is one of the key things on being able to turn. I was always looking down. So over the last couple of sessions I was looking at where I wanted to go and that really just helped me shift my weight and be able to do tighter turns and to be able to surf better. What I’m sort of getting at here is, in terms of my surfing technique, which can really relate to your swim technique is, so I go, all right, what do you want to do? Well, I want to surf better. All right, what does that look like? Well, for me, I want to be able to do tighter turns, I want to be able to do some different maneuvers. And what do I need to be able to do that?

Brenton Ford:
And so kind of breaking it down and actually having this environment in the wave pool where you can really practice this stuff and you can learn it and you can repeat these movements over and over again. My surfing’s improved dramatically over the course of the last three months or so. And when we’re looking at running clinics, the way that I like to sort of explain things is, all right, well the goal is you want to swim faster and you generally want to swim longer. That’s what most people want to be able to do. And so we try and keep it really simple. We look at how you can do that. Well, you can reduce drag, increase propulsion, and you can also look at your stroke rate, as another lever that you’ve got to work on.

Brenton Ford:
And then we just kind of go through all of the drills, all of the ways that you can do each of those things. And so just keeping it really simple and thinking about what you’re actually doing, I think it’s such a great approach, and as you said, that three to 5% can really accumulate over time. It’s really interesting to see that. Just actually thinking a bit more about what you’re doing. I mean for you, your background was swimming and you had quite a bad accident when you were younger, and then you came, you were able to sort of come back from that accident. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how this sparked your want to sort of learn about all of this stuff?

Greg Wells:
Yeah, sure. Since we’re talking about surfing, might as well go there. Also, just to leverage off the analogy that you just threw out there before we move on. When you talked about seeing those pictures of yourself and noticing that you were looking down and you needed to be looking where you want it to go rather than where your board was at, I mean, that’s a perfect example of reaction versus response, right? The threat is you might fall off your board or what’s going to happen to you in the immediate environment. That’s the threat. So you’re looking there. As a result, you’re reacting to what’s going on and maybe you’re not surfing to your capabilities. But as soon as you extend your vision beyond the immediate, and you start to think about where do I want to be going in a 10th of a second, half a second, and or one or two seconds down the road, it shifts you out of that reaction mode into the response mode and you’re suddenly doing very, very different things, and you’re able to execute a whole bunch of new skills that you wouldn’t be able to do before.

Greg Wells:
So this applies to absolutely everything. It applies to business, music, drama, sports, arts, math, like all of it. So it’s super cool that just even a couple of minutes we were able to throw a few ideas out there. And the surfing analogy is perfect because that’s what you asked me about. When I was younger I was a swimmer with the Canadian youth team and I was with my club team down in Florida and we were training in March when I was like 15 years old. And a bunch of my friends and I went out into the waves to do some body-surfing before all the meat we had that afternoon. And so while we were out there, there was a particularly big wave on a particularly… A beach with a bad break that was like quite steep.

Greg Wells:
And so I just got picked up by the wave and just driven into the sand. Ended up breaking my neck in a number of different places. So got out of the water, my muscles all seized up to hold the bones in place. So I wasn’t paralyzed. I managed to get to the hospital. And then once in the hospital, they X-Rayed me and they saw all of the broken bones in my neck. So that was obviously pretty difficult to have happen when you’re 15 years old, but spent three months in a halo brace and then had neurosurgery to repair all of the bones and put some metal in my neck to hold it together. Neurosurgeon said, “You’re never going to swim again.” I was basically like, “Screw that. I’m going to swim.” So I spent the summer in physiotherapy, and then came back the following year, got back into the pool and just sort of swam my way into shape, rode my bike into shape. The stationary bikes, I couldn’t really turn my head too much. Lifted weights and just got myself back into swimming.

Greg Wells:
I was able to sort of swim up to the national final level in Canada and swam all the way through college, which was great. Most of my friends made the Olympic team and I ended up having a cool experience at the Barcelona Olympics with Canadian Television, and subsequently in 2010 and 2012, when we were in Vancouver and London as a commentator. That was super cool. And I had my Olympic experience. That was really great.

Greg Wells:
But that whole breaking my neck thing, really started to spark an interest in how the body work. So I ended up taking kinesiology in my undergrad while I was swimming. And then after that did a Master’s and PhD in physiology, and sort of transferred things from swimming into cystic fibrosis, which was a respiratory disease. We applied what we learned about swimming to help kids with breathing problems, because swimming you can’t breathe whenever you want. You’ve got to breathe in time with a stroke.

Greg Wells:
So we applied that to help kids with CF, and then that led to an understanding of what was going on with children who have cancer and go through STEM cell treatments, which then affect the lungs. So we looked at that. So it’s been a long journey into this world of the human body. But it’s pretty fascinating. I’m still involved in swimming triathlon, and I was a training fireman this summer. I’m actually probably training better now that all of this stuff has shut down than I was before. But who knows when we’re going to have the next Ironman, it’ll probably be 2021 before I do one.

Greg Wells:
But yeah, swimming has been part of my life and training and science of the human body and physiology and all that sort of stuff, and continue to play in that world. And it’s just been… I’m very, very fortunate. Like if you asked me to go back right now, I’d be like, if you… 15 minutes before that happened, if someone came up to me and said, “You know what, you can change the trajectory of your life by not going in the water and not breaking your neck.” I think right now, knowing what I know, I would probably go in and go through the whole thing again because it’s put me in a very cool direction with where I’ve ended up.

Brenton Ford:
And that’s how I’m trying to look at all of this Coronavirus stuff. It’s like right now everything’s really strange, really weird and nothing is normal. It’s very easy to kind of get down about that and not being able to go out and see friends and do all the normal things. But then six months, 12 months, and 10 years in the future, I think we’re going to look back at this time in a way and go, “Wow, wasn’t that an amazing time.” I think we might miss a lot of the things that we’re doing now, we’re spending more time with the family, going a little bit slower in life. That stuff, there’s a good chance that we will look back at it and go, “That was pretty incredible.” Aside from all of the obvious stuff that’s that’s happening with it. I’m just trying to look at the positives in the time where it’s very easy to be negative about it.

Greg Wells:
Couldn’t agree with you more. Even just talking to neighbors as they walk by, you can really see who’s taking this as an opportunity and really see who’s struggling with the negativity of it. Just now I was outside and one of my neighbors was like, “This just continues to get worse and worse and worse. Now it’s another week we’re going to be isolated.” And said, “How are you guys doing?” I’m like, “We’re doing great. We’re healthy, we’re happy, we’re doing school at home, we’re all exercising every single day, we’re doing story time. We’re actually enjoying this time.” And again, fully respecting people are sick, people are going to die. This is very, very, very challenging. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to be effected by this. I don’t want to minimize that in any way, shape or form, but in the microscope of my little world in this house, we are trying to take the time to have the family dinners, which we weren’t doing before because I was traveling and everyone’s “so busy”. Swim practice is at night for my daughter and stuff like that. We’re reading the books.

Greg Wells:
I recently have been taking a lot of courses on photography at night just for fun to learn something new. Was not doing that before. And you’re right, I think we will look back upon this as a time that provided us with a new perspective on what was going on and gratitude, a level of gratitude that I don’t think existed three weeks ago. It’s amazing how people come together in this time. Like even in the United Kingdom, the National Health Service put out a call for people to help elderly people in this country. And so 400,000 people in the United Kingdom this week volunteered to go help elderly people, maybe go grab them some groceries or go do a couple errands, maybe go pick up some medicine. But almost half a million people volunteered to go help people in the community. That would not have happened three weeks ago, right?

Greg Wells:
If NHS put out a call for people to go help elderly people in the community, they would not have gotten the response that they got now. We should, as much as possible, take care of ourselves, be safe, be healthy, pay attention to all of the things you need to do in order to minimize the effect of this globally, like social distancing and physical isolation, so that we flatten the curve and we minimize the duration of this crisis. But at the same time, also pay attention to the fact that we can be grateful for what we have. Pay attention to what we have. Given that so much of it suddenly had been taken away. And really take this time like this is the time to get healthier, this is the time to eat better, this is the time to take up meditation, this is the time to practice your ability to stay focused, this is the time to have those conversations with your family members who are with you.

Greg Wells:
Pick up the phone, make that phone call to a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while because I’m sure that they’re looking for something to do. And getting a call from you at that moment might be something that’s really cool for them to experience. So yeah, I think that you’re right, we’re going to look back upon this and it’s going to be obviously a time of tremendous pain but also a time of tremendous opportunity.

Brenton Ford:
I completely agree. One of the things I was reading about in the book was about focusing your attention. I mean I’m a great procrastinator, I can do that really, really well. I don’t know if it was a video or a podcast I was listening to, but just one day I was having trouble just sitting down and doing the thing that I really wanted to do out. I can’t remember exactly what it was, I put it off for days. I remember hearing someone say, “Whatever task you’ve got in front of you, do it.” And that means shut your phone off, get rid of all distractions, just sit down and do the task.

Brenton Ford:
Typically, when you do that, a task that could take four or five hours, I can get it done in 30 to 40 minutes if I’m focused purely on that task. An example was this morning I got up at six o’clock, an hour before the kids woke up, and I’m running a live training, like a webinar for our members. I was able to sit down, schedule it, put together about 80% of the slides, and it didn’t take that long, but I’d sat down and I couldn’t really get much done. I got about 5% done over the course of four or five days, but I decided, no, I’ll just wake up early and do it before the kids are up, when there’s no distractions.

Brenton Ford:
I left my phone, didn’t check my phone when I woke up. I just got up, had a coffee, and just got to work. And now I feel great about it because I’ve finally got it done. So what are some strategies that that you like to use to be able to focus your attention and do the thing that’s in front of you?

Greg Wells:
Yeah. I have been speaking about the book and saying, okay, so you’re talking about like rest, refocus, recharge. That means slowing down. And yes, that’s all true. But I also believe that we need to go absolutely flat out at certain times, like perform at 100%, perform at 110%. Get the work done, do the presentation, hammer the practice in the pool. Do the training, execute like crazy, because we need to do that in our lives. Like whether you’re a musician, if you’re an actor, if you’re a business person, if you’re an athlete, whatever, there’s moments to perform, there’s moments to get the job done. And I think there’s a way of doing that that is hyper effective. And I think that there’s a way of doing that that’s exhausting. And the way to do it that’s hyper effective is once you start into it, getting rid of every single distraction, having a laser clear focus on what it is that you want to do, and getting that in front of you, eliminating all distractions.

Greg Wells:
When you’re working on a project, turn off email, turn off messaging, turn off social, get rid of your phone so you can’t see it. Turn off all of the audio notifications on all of your devices forever so that they’re not going off, not pinging you, and you’re not a slave to someone else’s attention demands. You are controlling your own attention so that you can drive it into whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish at that time. I’m hyper busy. I’ve got a lab at a hospital, I’ve got a business that I’m running, I write books, I’ve got a podcast and social media flying around. But when it’s time to get stuff done, I’m pretty good at turning off absolutely everything and deeply focusing on what it is that I’m trying to accomplish.

Greg Wells:
And I think that that’s something that we can practice. So basically it’s like the opposite of multitasking, right? We think that we can accomplish a lot by multitasking, do many things at once, that just leads to exhaustion. It’s hyper inefficient for the brain and the way that it works. And when we eliminate those distractions and do one thing, and basically single task, we’re able to do a lot more in less time. The other really interesting thing to think about is when are you at your best during the day? For me, I know that mentally I’m at my best sort of 6:30 in the morning until 10, 10:30, maybe 11. So I do all of my work at that time. And I’ve actually in this time right now, where I’ve got more freedom, I’ve moved my workouts to the afternoon and I’m feeling so much better when I wake up, sort of get myself organized, take a shower, meditate for a couple of minutes, and then dive into work and just crush it when I’m totally clear. And then once I get a little bit burned out on work, grab a bite to eat, rest for a little while, clear my head, do a workout, and then I’m good again for a little bit more later on.

Greg Wells:
But eliminating the distractions, thinking about when you are at your best. I’m a morning person, but there’s night owls that would work better in the evenings. So pick and choose which one of those you think you go into and do your best work, do your most important work at those times. And I think that if you eliminate distractions and align your work with your circadian rhythms, that you’ll be noticing that you have a lot more energy, you’re getting a lot more done with a lot less fatigue. You’re going to become a lot more effective in whatever it is that you’re trying to do. And that can make a massive difference for you.

Brenton Ford:
One of the weirder experiences I had recently was, I was in Sydney a few weeks back and I was staying in the city. I had a conference there. I got up early, at five o’clock, and got an Uber down to the Bondai Icebergs Pool, which is that ocean pool.

Greg Wells:
Favorite pool in the world. I love that place.

Brenton Ford:
It’s unreal. And I went down there and I trained with the squad, and went for a swim, got out of the water, and I couldn’t find my phone. And looking for it, looking for it, couldn’t find it anywhere. And so I asked at the desk, they didn’t have it. I thought it’s either been taken from my bag, which was unlikely, especially at that time of morning, or I’ve left it in the Uber. And that’s what I eventually found out had happened.

Brenton Ford:
I’m in Bondai, I needed to figure out a way to get back to the city with no communication, no maps or anything. So look, there’s a lot more remote places you could be stuck, but it was a really freeing experience. My mind eventually after I sort of got over the whole, “Oh crap, I’ve lost my phone. I really sort of need it for the next couple of days.” After I got over that, being in Bondai and then just having to figure out, okay, how do I get home? All right. I went to a bus stop. Got that as far as I could. And then I found at that station that that stopped at, then I had to get a train to the closest train station. I actually had to talk to people, ask them, “Does this bus go to this location?”

Brenton Ford:
And then when I’m sitting on that bus, I’m looking at people, 90% of people are on their phone and there was maybe one or two that that weren’t, now just sort of wandering off into space. It was actually a really freeing experience. Like my mind was able to just take this big deep breath and then exhale, and for the rest of the morning while I didn’t have my phone, it was actually really nice. It was peaceful. I thought, okay, I need to do that a little bit more often because I’m just a lot more aware of what’s happening and you’re actually looking at other people and you’re noticing a lot of things that are happening around you. Whereas with my phone in hand, I’m typically just… I’m focused in on, I’ve got this routine where I open my phone, check emails, check social media, and just going through that routine day after day.

Brenton Ford:
So what I’ve tried to do since then is just turn my phone off and just leave it in my bedroom or leave it somewhere where I’m not looking at it for at least an hour at a time. And surfing I think is a great thing for doing that, where if I’m in the water for two or three hours, I’m not looking at it, not checking it, and the mind just really opens up. And then get a lot more ideas about what you can do, what I can do with my swimming and training, and then with effortless swimming. It’s a great way I’ve found to just be able to be a lot more creative.

Greg Wells:
Brenton, that’s so important. I love the fact that it took you losing your phone to make that happen. I also was out paddleboarding this year and dropped my phone in the lake. Why I had it with me, I don’t know. Anyway did. And it was dead obviously. So I had a few days without it. And it was great. It was great. And I realized, oh my gosh, I actually don’t think I really need it that much.

Greg Wells:
I’ve been trying to take time to not use my phone, to turn it off. Little things like when you’re having dinner with your family, make sure all the phones are away. That’s an easy place to get started. One hour a day, put away your phone and just don’t… Like turn it off, put it away, get away from your device. Whether that’s you go for a walk without it, which is a radical idea these days. And it’s also one of the great things about swimming, you cannot take it into the pool with you. You are free from it at that moment in time.

Greg Wells:
And another really cool thing people can experiment with is a weekend a month. So one weekend a month, turn off your device, see if you can get through an entire weekend without a screen. And that’s a huge challenge. But believe me, it will open up lots of space for journaling, for running, swimming, biking, all the things that we love to do if you’re listening to this podcast. Spending time with friends, going for coffee, like whatever it happens to be, you will have a lot more time when you’re not mindlessly scrolling through social.

Greg Wells:
I’ve summarized it as sort of the one to three tactics, like one hour a day. Just disconnect. Two days a month, disconnect. And then if you can get to three weeks a year when you go on vacation, like you said, to Maldives, and turn it off while you’re on vacation, just put the autoresponder on, let everybody know you’re going to be on vacation, and see how good your team is at handling business while you’re away. That can also be quite liberating and freeing once you realize that you can actually go away and the world will continue without you for a few days while you’re away and not necessarily checking your email. So a few strategies for you, but the one to three practice is something that people might be able to use to put that idea that you brought up into practice.

Brenton Ford:
And what do you think it is about the water that… Aside from obviously no phones and a lot less electronics in there. What do you think it is about the water that helps people sort of, I guess, meditate in a way and mentally just come out so refreshed? Like I was talking to the mum of a kid that I’ve been doing some coaching with, and he hadn’t been able to swim for… It was only a week that he couldn’t get in the pool, and then he finally found a friend where they have an outdoor 25 meter pool in their backyard. So he’s been able to swim there by himself while all the pools are closed.

Brenton Ford:
And she said to me that he was just a different kid as soon as he got out of the pool after that week off. I mean I know what that feels like if I’m out of the pool for two or three days and then I finally get in, I’m able to just feel much different. And I think it’s, yes, it’s certainly something to do with exercise, but there’s something about being in the water, whether it’s at the beach or in the pool, that can really have that effect. And what do you think it is?

Greg Wells:
I don’t know specifically what it is. We know that it exists. So just think about real estate prices. If you’re right on the beach, you’ve got a certain price. If you’re across the road, it’s much, much lower. Even in a hotel, ocean facing views are priced higher than garden facing views. It’s like we know that when we look at the water, it makes us feel better. And I know as a swimmer that when I’m in the water, I am healthier and happier. Like everyone can identify that feeling of after a good swim, you get up out of the water and you just stand there and your body just feels so great.

Greg Wells:
I think the person who has dug into this the most is Dr. Wallace Nichols. He wrote a book called Blue Mind, which gets into the psychology of being near water. And that’s a fascinating read for everyone in the audience today because if you’re into swimming and triathlon, that’s a window into your mind when it’s near water. So check that one out.

Greg Wells:
But specifically what’s the neurophysiology of it? I’m not sure. I just know that I’ve gravitated to water my entire life. I know that when I’m in and around water, I am infinitely happier. I live on a beach here in Toronto, Canada. It’s right near downtown. We wanted to be on the water because I know that’s where I’m happiest when I’m paddleboarding. I don’t surf anymore because I broke my neck. When I’m in open water swimming, I’m so happy. There’s a 50 meter outdoor pool near here that we swim in all summer long. It’s just spectacular. Obviously not in the winter in Canada. But yeah, when we’re near it, it just makes us feel better. We’re like, we’re so lucky to have this sport of swimming and open water swimming and triathlon because there’s unique benefits to being in the water. Probably worth digging into that a little more. Maybe that’s the next book. I’m not sure. But yeah, it’s an incredible sport, and the water is definitely something to understand.

Greg Wells:
I guess the final thing to leave with, just the new evidence that’s coming out around this, that’s sort of emerging. There’s a research project going on right now in Los Angeles with soldiers who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq who have had horrific post-traumatic stress disorder. And what they’ve done is created something called the Veteran Surf Project, where they’re taking veterans with PTSD out into the waves and evaluating surfing as a tool to help people to mitigate their anxiety and depression and panic, and all the other conditions that are associated with PTSD. And they’re finding that the surfing has tremendous benefits, not just while they are in the ocean, but for hours afterwards. So that’s an interesting project for people to look up around the psychological benefits of being in and around the water. Especially for people who have undergone some sort of trauma.

Brenton Ford:
There’s certainly something to it. And I got to go for an open water swim last week with some friend after being out of the water for a week. It was an awesome day, it was sunny, water was really clear, finally got to catch up with three friends. It was only a small swim that we did. But just afterwards, we messaged each other at night, this is probably five, six hours after the swim, and we were just like, “How good was that swim?” We really appreciated being able to do it when it’s not something that we’re able to do for a while. So yeah, there’s certainly something to it.

Brenton Ford:
And I’ve even seen a lot of friends that don’t… They’re triathletes, but they don’t necessarily love the swim part of it. They’ve been saying, “I’ve really missed the pool. I want to get back in the pool.” That will certainly be a positive that’ll come from it where I think people are starting to actually appreciate when they’re not able to do it.

Greg Wells:
I know those triathletes. I know you guys. I know who you are. You’re going to love it. Next time you’re back in the pool, I want you remember how it feels to get back in and just swim. Like don’t worry about the black line, don’t worry about just going up and down the pool. Bring your attention right back into the present moment, and how does it feel to be in the water? Your body is supported, your weight less. How does it feel for the water to go over your skin? How does it feel as you’re moving down the pool and you can feel the water go from your head, through your chest, through your back, down over your quads, off of your toes? And how does it feel with the water on your hand when you get your hand in the right position so you can actually put pressure on the water and move yourself forwards? And how does it feel when your muscles contract when you’re swimming? And when you take that deep breath and you blow it out underneath the water and do that over and over and over again. Like it is an incredible feeling.

Greg Wells:
And sometimes we get so caught up in the lactic acid or the sets or the training that we’re doing, all of this external stuff that we forget about it, you know what, it just feels really good to be in the water and to swim. After I quit swimming after university, I don’t think I touched the water for like six years. And then one day I jumped into the pool and I was like, “Oh my God, I totally forgot that I love to swim. I haven’t felt like this since I was like 14 years old. This is incredible.” And ever since then, I am all over swimming in lakes, swimming in oceans, swimming with every Marine creature that I can possibly find, and also swimming in outdoor pools as often as possible. I don’t love indoor swimming quite as much. The smell of chlorine still gets me after all those years of 5:00 AM wake ups and all those sets that I did.

Greg Wells:
But yeah, I think that there’s definitely something for all of us to take advantage of and to really lean into being “swimmers” or triathletes or people that are into endurance sports. It is an incredible thing for us, especially when we bring our attention right back into the instantaneous present moment. And sometimes that’s what it takes to re-inspire us now that we’re all out of the pool because they’re all closed all over the world. The next time that we get in, I’m sure it’s going to be a pretty special moment for all of us.

Brenton Ford:
I’m putting together a six week training program for when people are able to get back into the pool. And what you said about just remember how good it feels like, that’s sort of prompted me to think like with this six week program, do not worry about what your times are during for the next six weeks because there’s a good chance, a really high chance, at least for the next three or four weeks that you’re not going to be swimming anywhere close to what you were before. Even if you’ve been doing all of the dry land stuff and keeping fit, it’ll take you a while to get back into it and to be able to maintain some good times over some distance. So if you can just think about how it feels and… It helps you so much with your technique as well when you haven’t got the distraction of your watch or you’re looking too much at the time to just think about how it feels.

Brenton Ford:
You might be thinking about your stroke, that is going to get you so much further, especially in the first six weeks of when you do get back into the pool, than worrying about how much you have slowed down in that time. Because I think in six weeks time, and this was sort of my benchmark for when I went to university, I’d be doing a bit of rowing and a little bit of gym work, but we weren’t swimming much. But then I came back during the… I think it was mid semester break, and I trained really hard for six weeks with my old squad. And I was able to get back to pretty much where I was when I finished school, when I finished I mean competitively. And so with six weeks of some decent training, you can really get some good fitness back. But the first three weeks or so was horrendous. I felt like crap, I was slow. But after that, it does come back pretty quickly after those initial couple of weeks.

Greg Wells:
It’s process not outcome, right? Like you’re not worried about what the time is, you’re not worried about your fitness. You’re just simply back in the pool and swimming. And so take off the watch, turn off the pace clock, just get through the miles, fix your technique, enjoy the process of getting fitter again. And ultimately, I mean we’re all going to be hopefully doing something like this for the rest of our lives. We’re going to be racing for the rest of our lives. We’re going to be testing ourselves for the rest of our lives. There is no end point here, it’s all about process.

Greg Wells:
I guess there is an end point but we’re not too worried about that. That’s like long, long, long, hopefully like when we’re 120 or whatever, and then we can just upload our consciousness into the cloud and carry on. But it’s the process of getting fitters, it’s the process of going to practice, it’s the process of doing the sets, of fixing the technique, of building the discipline, of getting mentally stronger, of eating the healthier foods, right? Like it’s just process, process, process. And the people who are enjoying the process are the ones who end up doing best. Like Michael Phelps is a great example of that actually. It just popped into my brain.

Greg Wells:
People forget that after the 2012 Olympics, even though he’d won a record number of medals. I had a chance to go to London, and while I watched a lot of swimming, I saw him swimming and he was very business likely. He could get the job done, but he was not a happy person. He wasn’t touching anyone on the podium, he was just getting the job done. He was at work. And you could tell that he was interested in getting medals and doing the sponsorship stuff and all that sort of thing.

Greg Wells:
And then two years later, in 2014, he was deeply unhappy. He really struggled with mental health. And he was depressed and even ended up being suicidal at one point. His coach got him checked into rehab because he had been abusing alcohol and drugs. And while he was in rehab, he went one day to the little tiny pool that was in the rehab facility, put on his shorts and went for a swim, and rediscovered the fact that he just loved to swim. He just loved to train. And he said he got so caught up in the money, the medals, the fortune, the fame, the sponsorships, all of that stuff that he completely forgot about the love of swimming. And if you look at him in 2016 in Rio, just look at the pictures of him on the blocks, he’s happy. Look at the picture of him in the water after he went to medals, he’s smiling ear to ear. Those pictures do not exist from 2012. He was not happy, he was not hugging people, he was not high fiving, he was not having a good time.

Greg Wells:
So even Michael Phelps has to rediscover this love of swimming and the practice of training. Like the practice of the mindset of process, not outcomes. If it can happen to Michael Phelps, it can happen to any of us. It’s something we all need to work on and play with and learn from and move our lives forwards.

Brenton Ford:
What a great place to end it. Greg, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Your book is called Rest, Refocus and Recharge. And we will put all the links in our show notes. Where’s the best place to people to get in contact with you? And I know you’re working on a couple of ways that people can learn the things that you’re teaching online. So you’re not speaking as much at the moment, but working on the online stuff. So where’s the best place to get in contact?

Greg Wells:
Yeah. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, the best place is through my website drgregwells.com. You can check me out on social @DrGregWells. We have a new app coming out soon called VIIVIO, V-I-I-V-I-O. It’s Latin for life, that will use Apple watch and iPhone to track your physiology and give you individualized recommendations. It’s a pretty cool app. We’re super psyched about that. It’s got sleep tracking and stress. So check that out as well. And if you want to pick up my book, I would be infinitely honored. And that’s on Amazon. So you can search Dr. Greg Wells on Amazon. You’ll find all the books there.

Brenton Ford:
Awesome. Thank you very much.

Greg Wells:
Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I just had so much fun and great to talk to swimmers, so it’s all good.

Podcast Outro:
Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to effortlessswimming.com.

When we open up space in our lives, we can start to fill it with very interesting creativity. And with that, it happens like neurophysiologically. What’s going on is your brain waves are changing. Your brain is slowing down its activity levels. It’s it’s relaxing a little bit and we shift. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Dr. Greg Wales, and this episode couldn’t have come at a better time, because right now you’re probably forced to be slowing down to not be doing as many things as you’d normally do and getting out of the busyness cycle. And on today’s podcast, we discuss some of the things that he talks about in his book called Rest, Refocus and Recharge. We’re going to share with you some strategies on why doing less will

actually help you achieve more, how you can stop reacting to things and be more deliberate and take full control of the things in your life so that you can do more of the things that you love and less of the things that you don’t love, because in the end, it’s you who has the final decision. I’m going to talk about how you can refocus your attention, some ways that you can really dial into the tasks that you want to get done. So you can do that task in a quarter of the time. I’m also going to talk about how you can stop becoming a slave to busyness. And this is what I think we’re finding was really happening right now where where people are able to get out of that busyness cycle and just focus on the things that give them more purpose and the things that really matter to them. So let’s jump into the chat with Dr. Greg Wells. Well, Greg, thanks very much for being on the podcast. I think your book couldn’t have come at a better time.

It’s called Rest, Refocus and Recharge. And after reading through it, I think everyone’s pretty much forced to do exactly that. There’s not much else that they can do at this time. It’s the most bizarre experience ever, like watching the entire world shut down. Rate as I, you know, release a book about taking a moment to pause and breathe. And it’s like happening enforced at scale globally. It’s so bizarre. And anyway, I hope it helps people get through this pretty crazy time. Yeah. And I think one of the things that I’ve found and just speaking with with a lot of friends is it’s really forced this time has really forced them to slow down and just and watching people just like go for a walk or sit on a park bench and just like just not looking at their phone, just kind of staring out into space. It’s a really weird thing where people are forced to to do nothing. And I find that like that would be one of the real positives to come out of all of this.

I think so, like I was out for a bike ride the other day because we’re still out to do that sort of stuff is, you know, keep your distance from people. But people were out cycling with their families. People were out in the parks as you were talking about. Like obviously respecting each other’s distances as you absolutely need to. But yeah, it was it’s amazing to watch people and they’re just kind of like chilling out. Their people are like staring off. People are thinking people are having meals with their families. People are reading books. People are taking online courses. People are learning to cook. Like it’s it’s amazing what’s happened now that we’ve paused for a moment just to take a step back. And it’s funny. You don’t appreciate what you have until it’s taken away. And so much of our normal lives has been taken away from us. And I think a lot of the really interesting thing is going to be like when things

ramp back up again, can we be a little bit more deliberate about what we put back into our lives so that we don’t end up where we were even two weeks ago, you know, burned out, stressed, fatigue, depression, anxiety, all that sort of stuff. So yeah, I think that there’s tremendous opportunity to knock on wood like healthy and all that sort of stuff. And obviously a lot of people are going to get sick and and are sick. And so there is no question going to be some pain as we go through this time. And I want to respect that deeply. But I think that there’s some incredible potential benefits or, you know, different courses that we can go on in the future, which which is interesting to behold as the world goes through this crisis. Yeah. And one of the things that I’ve personally found is that like I’ve been sleeping until seven o’clock most mornings, where before that I was normally up at five o’clock. So that the sleep things are massive one.

I know you talk about that in your book where using sleep as a tool to to recharge and a number of other things like for me, that’s probably been one of the most interesting things. I’ve been sleeping for eight or nine hours a night, which rarely happens. And look, it might be a change in the in the time of year as well. Like it’s not light until about seven o’clock or it was light at five thirty in summer. But I’ve noticed that is a big change and also just simplifying. It’s like, all right, what do I really need in life to be to be happy and to be fulfilled? And it’s like, it’s pretty simple, I think. And this is really shown that where we’re forced to just really get rid of and purge all of the things that that are unnecessary that can really come into your life when you do get busy. Isn’t it crazy? Like I’m also sleeping so much right now. I I wear an ORA ring. ORA, if anyone wants to check it out, it’s pretty interesting technology.

It’s tracking all sorts of data. And I was kind of feeling a little bit sick the other night. So, you know, given the current environment is like, OK, well, I’m going to sleep as much as I possibly can, because I know sleep is related to the immune system. I was like, I do not want to get sick right now. So I slept for nine hours. I haven’t slept for nine hours in like years. I felt amazing the next day. And I’m not setting an alarm in the morning. Like I wake up when I wake up this morning. I had to get up early because I did a call through to the UK from Canada where I am. But I think that it’s great to see that, you know, we are actually like sleeping and we’re able to sleep in because maybe we’re not commuting as much as we were before. Maybe we don’t need to get to the office by eight o’clock or seven o’clock or nine o’clock or whatever it happens to be. And so that is giving us a chance to recover, regenerate.

And, you know, I know you’ve got a lot of swimmers and triathletes listening. And we know that recovery and regeneration is one of the things that’s so important for all of us at all ages. And the way that we recover and we regenerate is through sleep. You know, when we sleep, our brains wash themselves out. We’ve learned about the the glial lymphatic system over the last few years, which is the system inside the brain that washes the brain out. We’ve learned about how growth hormone is released from a structure that and that growth hormones circulates throughout the body while we sleep. And that’s what repairs and regenerates all of our tissues, like our muscles and our bones and our skin and our eyes. And then we have hormones that are controlled and regulated, like leptin and ghrelin, and those are the hormones that control our appetites that we’re better able to make good decisions around food the next day.

So when we sleep, when we actually take that time to recover and regenerate, obviously, it improves our immune system, which is incredibly important right now as everyone’s paying attention to that. But it also improves like the way that your brain works. It also speeds your recovery from exercise. It also makes you able to learn better and be more creative. So it’s pretty cool to see what’s happening. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s it’s just so it’s been such a weird experience. And that’s what a lot of friends have said for them. It’s just really, really weird. But I think I know when everything goes back to normal, will we sleep as much as we are now? I’m not sure. Probably not because we we will get busier with work and all that sort of stuff. But I think it’s been a really, you know, a real awakening for for a lot of people. And one of the I guess that the crux of the book is bookies really about doing less to achieve more.

And one of the things I find going on holidays and last year went on a trip to the Maldives for a surf trip. And what I found there was like all we did during the day was wake up, eat, surf and just and relax. And I sort of just keep on top of emails and that sort of thing. But from that, I found that I was able to choose the one or two things for for the business for effort of swimming that were most important going forwards. And I wrote these things down and wrote an action plan and the steps that I needed to do to achieve them. And it allowed me to get really clear on the things that were important going forwards. And that was by doing very, very little for a week and just taking a step back and getting out of my normal environment and normal routine. And how do you like to to use that that way of doing things like doing less to achieve more? What how do you use that in your day to day life? Yeah, I’m also like I’m a business person.

And so I’m usually firing on all cylinders and, you know, driving forwards as fast as I can. So I get what you experienced in Maldives. Judith, my wife took me there three years ago, and it was, you know, the 10th anniversary and it was one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever been in my entire life. We did a lot of diving, not surfing, but it was it was incredible. So imagine this. You’re getting a great night’s sleep. You’re eating incredibly healthy food. You’re out in the ocean. You’re out in nature. You’re exercising and you’re resting and in that rest time. Yeah, you got a clear email just to keep on top of things. But then that opens up hours a day for you to just basically daydream and contemplate and to when we have space in our lives, when we have space in terms of space, like actual space in location and also space in terms of time. When we open up space in our lives, we can start to fill it

with very interesting creativity. And with that, it happens like neurophysiologically, what’s going on is your brain waves are changing. Your brain is slowing down its activity levels. It’s relaxing a little bit. We shift from beta brain waves, which are these fast, sharp, quick movements of electricity throughout the course of the brain down into theta brain waves, which are slower, larger waves that are reflective of more sort of ideating creativity, daydreaming. And that’s where we get amazing insights about what we need to do differently about how we can solve problems, about how we can consider what it is that we’re doing in our lives. And we only have that opportunity when we pause, when we take a moment to consider what’s going on and maybe think about doing something a little bit differently, interesting the entire planet’s getting that opportunity right now because we’re confined and sheltering in place at home.

But when you’re on that beach, when you’re staring out at the ocean, when you’re watching the waves rhythmically or repetitively come to shore and you’re thinking about what you’re doing and really contemplating what’s important to you and opening up the gateway to contemplating that maybe there is a different way of doing things that you could then carry forwards into the future, I think you end up in a place where you have a lot more control over your life. And I think that a lot of people don’t realize just how much control we all have over our lives and that we can make the tough decisions and we can change the trajectory of our lives and we can do more of the things that we love to do like swimming and surfing and running a business that’s aligned with what it is that you care about or going to work, getting work done and then going to your kids sports games, right? Like whatever it is that matters to you

is what you can end up spending a lot more time on. So yeah, I think that what you experienced in Maldives was what a lot of people can experience when we pump the brakes a little bit, slow down, pause, breathe, give yourself a little bit of space in terms of location and time. And then all of a sudden you come up with whole new ideas about how to potentially run your life or overcome challenges or solve whatever problem is that you’re trying to deal with. Yeah, and I’ve been over the last few years one of the things I’ve had to get accustomed to is not feeling guilty when I’m not working. And I think I’m still probably going through that today but there’s this, I think we’ve been conditioned particularly from school, it’s like, yeah, if you’re not busy, if you’re not doing work then you’re not achieving anything. And it’s just, it’s not the case. It’s just something that we have been conditioned over over many years, but as you said,

we’re in full control of what we’re doing. And so if you wanted to quit your job tomorrow, you’ve got the choice to do that. I’m not saying come and do it but you’ve got the choice to do it and then you’ve got the choice to do whatever it is with your life. And I think it’s easy to lose sight of that when we’re going through the motions and we’re in our routine. And something like this where we actually get to take a step back and take a bird’s eye view of everything that’s happening. It’s a lot easier to see those things that are most important to us and see that, yeah, look, we actually do have full control of our lives and it’s not, it’s, we don’t need to do what it is that other people are expecting of us. It’s really in our full control. You know, that last thing that you said is probably the single most important thing that we’ve either of us have said so far in this conversation that is like, you don’t need to do what other people expect of you.

That is the key to this entire thing. When you let go of other people’s expectations, then all of a sudden you are free to do what it is that you want to do. And by other people’s expectations, like we’re talking about friends, family, co-workers,

society in general, like once you liberate yourself from trying to meet other people’s expectations, you can wear whatever clothes you wanna wear, you can do whatever work you wanna be doing, you can exercise as much as you wanna be doing, you can learn what you wanna do. And I think that that’s something that so many people struggle with in this era where we’re all, well, up until this point now, it seems so silly, but you know, in three weeks ago, there was, you’re trying to get likes on social media or you’re worried about how you’re perceived on whatever picture’s been taken of you. Like now that stuff just seems completely ludicrous and so short-sighted in the face of what, you know, the global sort of challenge that we’re all faced with at the moment. But yeah, once you liberate yourself from external validation, external rewards, you can shift towards intrinsic motivation, which in the sports psychology literatures

very consistently shown to be better at long-term motivation to do something. So yeah, pivot to what you want to do, think about what it is that you want to do, think about what it is that you love to do, what you’re great at, what brings you energy, what lights your fire and just spend your time on that as much as you possibly can. And then all of a sudden amazing things start happening in your life when you do that. And that kind of goes into one of the points that you’re talking about in the book, it’s talking about how to stop reacting and start being deliberate with the things that you’re doing. And I mean, it’s so funny, three weeks ago, it’s like the things in the book would be like, I’d say for 95% of people would be, probably not a challenge to do, but it’s something that is probably really, could be really beneficial in their lives. And now it’s like 95% of people are being forced to go through each of these,

a lot of these steps in the book. And for you, like how, what are some tools that you use to stop reacting to things that are happening day to day and be less reactive and more deliberate? Yeah, it’s so important. And I learned this from a gentleman named Sat Guru who’s an Indian gentleman who does some really interesting work and just reading some of his stuff and taking a couple of his online courses and working through some of his thinking. And what I learned from him was the idea of responsibility, so response dash ability versus reaction. And so so many of us, when something happens to us, let’s just say someone says something and you get frustrated with them for what they just said, we have this reaction to it. And the reaction could be emotional, it could be something that you think, it could be something that you do. So it’s feel, think, do type, explosion that can come out of you. And so that usually doesn’t go well.

Like there’s been so many times when I’ve composed emails to someone and I ask my wife, I’m like, Judith, do you think I should send this? And she looks at me and goes, you absolutely must delete that email right now. Go to sleep, try it again tomorrow because if you send that right now you’re gonna be undoing the damage for months, if not years. And so reaction usually causes problems unless it’s sort of like you’re reacting from the start on a gun, to go at the swim meet, that’s a positive reaction in its reaction time. But like when we’re reacting to things that are coming at us very quickly, that is usually extraordinarily problematic unless it’s a trained response that you’re deliberately trying to do. Military examples for military, for example. But what we find works so much better for people when you actually train this in is to respond. Respond to the threat, respond to the challenge. And response means that you have this responsibility

and like response dash ability, not response ability. And so what you do in that case is you consider what’s happened, you outline a course of action, you think about what you need to do and then you actually are able to do the right thing, not the quick thing. And there’s this idea called metacognition and metacognition is thinking about how you think it’s another brain state and generally it’s associated with alpha brain waves which are sort of not quite as fast as beta waves when you’re hustling and performing and not quite as slow as theta waves when you’re ideating. This is sort of the learning and reflection zone and the contemplation and strategic thinking zone. So you’re relaxed but you’re definitely consciously considering what to do. And a really cool study on this and I can flip all these references to you afterwards for the show notes, but there was a really cool study that looked at students who practiced metacognition

thinking about how you think. And when they ask themselves what do you need to do, how are you going to do it and why are you going to do it? They improved their performance on assignments and tests by three to 5%. Now that might not seem like a lot three to 5% but if you add that up over time it can end up in a very, very different place in a very, very different mark. And so if you’re thinking about something right now and there’s a challenge that you’re faced with that simple pattern of asking yourself what do I want to have happen? How am I going to get there? And so what am I going to do basically? How am I going to get there? And why do I need to do it? Can make all the difference in the world in terms of guiding your actions. And what we can control is very limited. Like literally all that we can actually control is what we think, say and do. And when we practice metacognition that enables us to take control

of what we think, say and do. And that establishes a radical level of control over what we’re able to do in our lives. And then we begin to move in the direction that we want to be moving in very, very consistently rather than just reacting to the environment and getting pushed around by life. Which is I think how I was probably operating up until very, very recently. So this is not easy to do and it takes practice and work but the outcome is that you end up totally moving in the direction of what you want to be doing and loving every second of it as much as possible. I really like those three questions that they pose to the students. Looking at what, I guess how we kind of structure the clinics that we do and even just looking at how I’ve been going about, I’ve been surfing a lot more and one of the things that I noticed, so we’ve got this wave pool near the airport that just got built so it’s like a, you can basically book in for an hour

and you end up catching 14 to 16 waves an hour. So it’s the first wave pool in Australia and I’ve been going there quite a bit and I’ve noticed that my surfings improved dramatically but one of the things that really made a difference was they’ve got these photographers there and they’re there every session they’re taking photos and they post them online. And one of the things I noticed about my technique in when I was surfing was one of the first things was I wasn’t looking at where I wanted to go which is one of the key things on being able to turn and I was always looking down. So over the last couple of sessions I was looking at where I wanted to go and that really just helped me shift my weight and be able to do tighter turns and to be able to surf better. And the way, what I’m sort of getting at here is in terms of my surfing technique which can really relate to your swim technique is like, all right, what do you want to do?

Well, I want to surf better. All right, what does that look like? Well, for me I want to be able to do tighter turns, I want to be able to do some different maneuvers and what do I need to be able to do that? And so kind of breaking it down and actually having this environment in the wave pool where you can really practice this stuff and you can learn it and you can repeat these movements over and over again. My surfings improves dramatically over the course of the last three months or so. And when we’re looking at running clinics, the way that I like to sort of explain things is, all right, well, the goal is you want to swim fast and you generally want to swim longer. That’s what most people want to be able to do. And so we try and keep it really simple. We look at how you can do that while you can reduce drag, increase propulsion and you can also look at your stroke rate as another lever that you’ve got to work on.

And then we just kind of go through all of the drills, all of the ways that you can do each of those things. And so just keep it really simple and thinking about what you’re actually doing. I think it’s such a great approach and I just said that three to 5% can really accumulate over time. So it’s really interesting to see that, just actually thinking a bit more about what you’re doing. And I mean, for you, your background was swimming and you had quite a bad accident when you were younger and then you came, you were able to sort of come back from that accident. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how this sparked your want to sort of learn more about all of this stuff? Yeah, sure, since we’re talking about surfing, might as well go there.

Also, just to like leverage off the analogy that you just threw out there before we move on, but when you talked about seeing those pictures of yourself and noticing that you were looking down and you needed to be looking where you wanted to go rather than where your board was at, I mean, that’s a perfect example of reaction versus response, right? Like if you, the threat is you might fall off your board or what’s going to happen to you in the immediate environment, that’s the threat. So you’re looking there as a result, you’re reacting to what’s going on and maybe you’re not surfing to your capabilities. But as soon as you extend your vision beyond the immediate and you start to think about where do I want to be going in a 10th of a second, half a second or one or two seconds down the road, it shifts you out of that reaction mode into the response mode and you’re suddenly doing very, very different things and you’re able to execute a whole bunch of new skills

that you wouldn’t be able to do before. So this applies to absolutely everything. It applies to business, music, drama, sports, arts, math, like all of it. So it’s super cool that just, you know, even in a couple of minutes we were able to throw a few ideas out there about and surfing analogy is perfect because that’s what you asked me about when I was younger, I was a swimmer with the Canadian youth team and I was with my club team down in Florida. We were training in March when I was like 15 years old and we buddy, a bunch of my friends and I went out into the waves to do some body surfing before the meet we had that afternoon. And so while we were out there, it was a particularly big wave on a particularly a beach with a bad break that was like quite steep. And so I just got picked up by the wave and just driven into the sand, ended up breaking my neck in a number of different places. So I got out of the water,

my muscles all seized up to hold the bones in place. I wasn’t paralyzed, managed to get to the hospital and then once in the hospital, they x-rayed me and I saw all of the, they saw all of the broken bones in my neck. So that was obviously pretty difficult to have happen when you’re 15 years old, but spent three months in a halo brace and then had neurosurgery to repair all of the bones and put some metal in my neck to hold it together. Neurosurgeon said you’re never gonna swim again. I was basically like, screw that, I’m gonna swim. So that spent the summer in physiotherapy and then came back the following year, got back into the pool and just sort of swam my way into shape, rode my bike into shape, you know, the stationary bike cause it couldn’t really turn my head too much, lifted weights and just, you know, got myself back and assuming was able to sort of swim up to the national final level and in Canada and swam all the way through college,

which was great. Most of my friends made the Olympic team and I ended up having a cool experience at the Barcelona Olympics with Canadian television and subsequently in 2010 and 2012 when we were in Vancouver and London as a commentator. So that was super cool and I had my Olympic experience. That was really great. But that whole breaking my neck thing really started to spark an interest in how the body worked. So I ended up taking kinesiology in my undergrad while I was swimming and then after that did a masters in PhD in physiology and sort of transferred things from swimming into cystic fibrosis, which was a respiratory disease. We applied what we learned about swimming to help kids with breathing problems. Cause, you know, swimming, you can’t breathe whenever you want. You’ve got to breathe in time with the stroke. So we applied that to help kids with CF and then that led to an understanding of what was going on with children who have cancer

and go through stem cell treatments, which then affect the lungs. So we, you know, looked at that. So it’s been a long journey into this world of the human body, but it’s pretty fascinating. And, you know, I’m still involved in swimming to Iron Trathlon. And I was training fireman this summer. I’m actually probably training better now that all of this stuff has shut down than I was before. But who knows when we’re going to have the next Iron Man, probably be 2021 before I do one. But yeah, swimming’s been part of my life and training and science of the human body and physiology and all that sort of stuff and continue to play in that world. And it’s just been, I’m very, very fortunate. Like if you asked me to go back right now and be like, if you, you know, 15 minutes before that happened, if someone came up to me and said, you know what? You can change the trajectory of life by not going in the water and not breaking your neck.

I think right now, knowing what I know, I would probably go in and go through the whole thing again, cause it’s put me in a very cool direction with where I’ve ended up. And that’s how I’m trying to look at all of this coronavirus stuff. It’s like, right now, everything’s really strange, really weird and it’s, and nothing is normal. And it’s very easy to kind of get down about that and not being able to go out and see friends and do all the normal things. But then six months, 12 months and 10 years in the future, I think we’re going to look back at this time in a way and go, well, wasn’t that an amazing time I think we might miss a lot of the things that we’re doing now, where spending more time with the family, going a little bit slower in life. Like that stuff, there’s a good chance that we will look back at it and go, that was pretty incredible. Aside from all of the obvious stuff that’s happening with it. So I’m just trying to look at the positives

in the time where it’s very easy to be negative about it.

Couldn’t agree with you more. Even just like talking to neighbors as they walk by, you can really see who’s taking this as an opportunity and really see who’s struggling with the negativity of it. Just now I was outside and someone, one of my neighbors was like, this just continues to get worse and worse and worse. Like now it’s another week, we’re going to be isolated. And she said, how are you guys doing? I’m like, I think we’re doing great. Like we’re healthy, we’re happy. We’re doing school at home. We’re all exercising every single day. Like we’re doing story time. Like we’re actually enjoying this time. Again, you know, fully respecting people are sick. People are going to die. This is very, very, very challenging. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to be affected by this. Like I don’t want to minimize that in any way, shape, or form. But in the microscope of my little world in this house, we are trying to take the time to have the family dinners

which we weren’t doing before because I was traveling and everyone’s quote unquote so busy, you know, swim practices at night for my daughter and stuff like that. We’re reading the books. I recently have been taking a lot of courses on photography at night just for fun, to learn something new was not doing that before. And you’re right, I think we will look back upon this as a time that provided us with a new perspective

on what was going on and a gratitude, a level of gratitude that I don’t think existed three weeks ago. And it’s amazing how people come together in this time. Like even in the United Kingdom, the National Health Service put out a call for people to help elderly people in the country. And so 400,000 people in the United Kingdom this week volunteered to go help elderly people, maybe go grab them some groceries or go do a couple errands, maybe go pick up some medicine. But 400, almost half a million people volunteered to go help people in the community. That would not have happened three weeks ago. Right, if the NHS put out a call for people to go help elderly people in the community, they would not have gotten the response that they got now. And I think that we should, as much as possible, take care of ourselves, be safe, be healthy, pay attention to all of the things we need to do in order to minimize the effect of this globally,

like social distancing and physical isolation, so that we flatten the curve and we minimize the duration of this crisis. But at the same time, also pay attention to the fact that we can be grateful for what we have, pay attention to what we have, given that so much of it’s suddenly been taken away and really take this time, like this is the time to get healthier, this is the time to eat better, this is the time to take up meditation, this is the time to practice your ability to stay focused, this is the time to have those conversations with your family members who are with you. Pick up the phone, make that phone call to a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while, because I’m sure that they’re looking for something to do and getting a call from you at that moment might be something that’s really cool for them to experience, so I think that you’re right, we’re gonna look back upon this and it’s going to be obviously a time of tremendous pain,

but also a time of tremendous opportunity. Completely agree. And one of the things I was reading about in the book was about focusing your attention and I mean, I’m a great procrastinator, I can do that really, really well. And I remember, I don’t know if it was a video or a podcast I was listening to, but it’s one day I was having trouble just sitting down and doing the thing that I really wanted to do. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I’d put it off for days and I remember hearing someone say, whatever task you’ve got in front of you, do it. And that means shut your phone off, get rid of all distractions, just sit down and do the task. And typically when you do that, a task that could take four or five hours, I can get it done in 30 to 40 minutes if I’m focused purely on that task. An example was this morning I got up at six o’clock an hour before the kids woke up and we’ve got this, I’m running a live training,

like a webinar for our members. And I was able to sit down, schedule it, put together about 80% of the slides and it didn’t take that long, but I’d sort of, I’d sat down and I couldn’t really get much done. I got about 5% done over the course of four or five days but I decided no, I’ll just wake up early and do it before the kids are up when there’s no distraction. So I left my phone, didn’t check my phone when I woke up, I just got up, had a coffee and just got to work. And it was so, like, and now I feel great about it because I’ve finally got it done. So what are some strategies that you like to use to be able to focus your attention and do the thing that’s in front of you? Oh yeah, a lot of people consider, I’ve been speaking about the book and saying, okay, so you’re talking about like, rest, refocus, recharge, that means slowing down and yes, that’s all true. But I also believe that we need to go absolutely flat out at certain times,

like perform at 100%, perform at 110%, get the work done, do the presentation, hammer the practice in the pool, like do the training, execute like crazy because we need to do that in our lives. Like whether you’re a musician, if you’re an actor, if you’re a business person, if you’re an athlete, whatever, there’s moments to perform, there’s moments to get the job done. And I think there’s a way of doing that that is hyper effective. And I think that there’s a way of doing that that’s exhausting and the way to do it that’s hyper effective is once you start into it, getting rid of every single distraction, having a laser clear focus on what it is that you want to do and getting that in front of you, eliminating all distractions. When you’re working on a project, turn off email, turn off messaging, turn off social, get rid of your phones, you can’t see it. Turn off all of the audio notifications on all of your devices forever,

so they’re not going off, they’re not pinging you and you’re not a slave to someone else’s attention demands. You are controlling your own attention so that you can drive it into whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish at that time. I’m hyper busy, I’ve got a lab at a hospital, I’ve got a business that I’m running, I write books, I’ve got a podcast and social media flying around, but when it’s time to get stuff done, I’m pretty good at turning off absolutely everything and deeply focusing on what it is that I’m trying to accomplish. And I think that that’s something that we can practice. So basically it’s like the opposite of multitasking, right, so often we think that we can accomplish a lot of multitasking, do many things at once, that just leads to exhaustion. It’s hyper inefficient for the brain in the way that it works. And when we eliminate those distractions and do one thing and basically single task,

we’re able to do a lot more in less time. The other really interesting thing to think about is like, when are you at your best during the day? For me, I know that mentally I’m at my best sort of 6.30 in the morning until 10, 10.30, maybe 11, so I do all of my work at that time. And I’ve actually in this time right now where I’ve got more freedom, I’ve moved my workouts the afternoon and I’m feeling so much better when I wake up, sort of get myself organized, take a shower, meditate for a couple of minutes and then dive into work and just crush it when I’m totally clear. And then once I get a little bit burned out on work, grab my IT, rest for a little while, clear my head, do a workout and then I’m good again for a little bit more later on. But eliminating the distractions, thinking about when you are at your best, I’m a morning person, but there’s night owls that would work better in the evening. So pick and choose which one of those

that you think you go into and do your best work, do your most important work at those times. And I think that if you eliminate distractions and align your work with your circadian rhythms that you’ll be noticing that you have a lot more energy, you’re getting a lot more done with a lot less fatigue, you’re gonna become a lot more effective in whatever it is that you’re trying to do and that can make a massive difference for you. One of the weird experiences I had recently was I was in Sydney a few weeks back and I was staying in the city, I had a conference there and I got up early, five o’clock and got an Uber down to the Bondi Icebergs Pool which is that ocean pool. Favorite pool in the world, love that place. So it’s unreal and I went down there and I trained with the squad and went for a swim, got out of the water and I couldn’t find my phone and looking for it, couldn’t find it anywhere. And so I asked at the desk, they didn’t have it.

I thought it’s either been taken from my bag which was unlikely, especially at that time of morning or I’ve left it in the Uber and that’s what I eventually found out had happened. So I’m in Bondi, I needed to figure out a way to get back to the city with no communication, no maps or anything. So look, there’s a lot more remote places that could be stuck but it was just, it was a really freeing experience. Like my mind eventually after I sort of got over the whole, oh crap, I’ve lost my phone, I really sort of need it for the next couple of days after I got over that, being in Bondi and then just having to figure out, okay, how do I get home, all right? I went to a bus stop, I got that as far as I could and then I found at that station that that stopped at then I had to get a train to the closest train station and this is just, I actually had to talk to people, ask them where does this bus go to this location

and then when I’m sitting on that bus, I’m looking at people, 90 cent of people are on their phone and there was maybe one or two that weren’t now just sort of wandering off into space and it was actually a really freeing experience like my mind was able to just take this big, big deep breath and then exhale and for the rest of the morning while I didn’t have my phone, it was actually really nice, it was peaceful and I thought, okay, I need to do that a little bit more often because I’m just a lot more aware of what’s happening and you’re actually looking at other people and you’re noticing a lot of things that are happening around you whereas with my phone in hand, I’m typically just, I’m focused in on, I’ve got this routine where you open my phone, it’s check emails, check social media and just going through that routine day after day. So what I’ve tried to do since then is just turn my phone off and just leave it in my bedroom

or leave it somewhere where I’m not looking at it for at least an hour at a time and surfing I think is a great thing for doing that where if I’m in the water for two or three hours, I’m not looking at it, not checking it and the mind just really opens up and then get a lot more ideas about what you can do, what I can do with my swimming and training and then with effortless swimming and it’s a great way I’ve found to just be able to be a lot more creative. Brent, that’s so important and I love the fact that it took you losing your phone to make that happen. I also was out paddle boarding this year and dropped my phone in the lake. Why I had it with me? I don’t know, I don’t know what I did. It was, and it was dead obviously. So I had a few days without it and it was great. It was great. And I realized, oh my gosh, I actually don’t think I really need it that much. So I’ve been trying to take time to not use my phone to turn it off.

Little things like when you’re having dinner with your family, make sure all the phones are away. That’s an easy place to get started. One hour a day, put away your phone and just don’t like turn it off, put it away, get away from your device, whether that’s you go for a walk without it, which is a radical idea these days. And it’s also one of the great things about swimming. Like you cannot take it into the pool with you. You are free from it at that moment in time. And another really cool thing people can experiment with is a weekend a month. So one weekend a month, turn off your device. See if you can get through an entire weekend without a screen and that’s a huge challenge. But believe me, it will open up lots of space for journaling, for running, swimming, biking, all the things that we love to do if you’re listening to this podcast.

Spending time with friends, going for coffee, like whatever it happens to be, you will have a lot more time when you’re not mindlessly scrolling through social. I’ve summarized it as sort of the one, two, three tactics, like one hour a day, just disconnect two days a month, disconnect. And then if you can get to three weeks a year when you go on vacation, like you said to Maldives, and turn it off while you’re on vacation, just put the auto responder on, let everybody know you’re gonna be on vacation, and see how good your team is at handling business while you’re away. That can also be quite liberating and freeing once you realize that you can actually go away and the world will continue without you for a few days while you’re away and not necessarily checking your email. So a few strategies for you, but the one, two, three practice is something that people might be able to use to put that idea that you brought up into practice.

And what do you think it is about the water that aside from obviously no phones and a lot less electronics in the areas, what do you think it is about the water that helps people sort of, I guess, meditate in a way and feel and mentally just come out so refreshed? Like I was talking to the mum of a kid that I’ve been doing some coaching with and he hadn’t been able to swim for, it was only a week that he couldn’t get in the pool and then he finally found a friend where they have an outdoor 25-meter pool in their backyard. So he’s been able to swim there by himself to just, well, all the pools are closed. And she said to me that he was just a different kid as soon as he got out of the pool after that week off. And like it’s, I mean, I know what that feels like. It’s if I’m out of the pool for two or three days and then I finally get in, it’s just, I’m able to just feel much different. And I think it’s, yeah, it’s certainly something to do with exercise,

but there’s something about being in the water, whether it’s at the beach or in the pool that can really have that effect. And what do you think it is? I don’t know specifically what it is. We know that it exists. They just think about real estate prices. You know, if you’re right on the beach, you’ve got a certain price. If you’re across the road, it’s much, much lower. You know, even in a hotel, ocean facing views are priced higher than garden facing views. Like we know that when we look at the water, it makes us feel better. And I know as a swimmer that when I’m in the water, I am healthier and happier. Like everyone can identify that with that feeling of after a good swim, you get up out of the water and you just stand there and your body just feels so great. I think the person who has dug into this the most is Dr. Wallace Nichols. He wrote a book called Blue Mind, which gets into the psychology of being near water.

And that’s a fascinating read for everyone in the audience today, because if you’re into swimming and triathlon, that’s a window into your mind when it’s near water. So check that one out. But specifically, like what’s the neurophysiology of it? I’m not sure. I just know that I’ve gravitated to water my entire life. I know that when I’m in and around water, I am infinitely happier. I live on a beach here in Toronto, Canada. It’s right near downtown, but we wanted to be on the water because I know that’s where I’m happiest. When I’m paddle boarding, I don’t surf anymore because I broke my neck. When I’m open water swimming, I’m so happy. There’s a 50-meter outdoor pool near here that we swim in all summer long. It’s just spectacular. Obviously not in the winter in Canada, but yeah, when we’re near it, it just makes us feel better. We’re so lucky to have this sport of swimming and open water swimming in triathlon because there’s unique benefits to being in the water.

Probably worth digging into that a little bit more. Maybe that’s the next book. I’m not sure, but yeah, it’s an incredible sport and the water is definitely something to understand. I guess the final thing to leave with is the new evidence that’s coming out around this is sort of emerging. There’s a research project going on right now in Los Angeles with soldiers who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, who have had horrific post-traumatic stress disorder, and what they’ve done is created something called the Veteran Surf Project where they’re taking veterans with PTSD out into the waves and evaluating surfing as a tool to help people to mitigate their anxiety and depression and panic and the other conditions that are associated with PTSD. And they’re finding that the surfing has tremendous benefits, not just while they are in the ocean, but for hours afterwards. So that’s an interesting project for people

to look up around the psychological benefits of being in and around the water, especially for people who have undergone some sort of trauma.

There’s certainly something to it. And I got to go for an open water swim last week with some friends and after being out of the water for a week and it was just, it was awesome day. It was sunny, water was really clear. Finally got to catch up with three friends. Like it was only a small swim that we did, but just afterwards like we were all like, we messaged each other at night. This is probably five, six hours after the swim and we’re just like, how good was that swim? Like it was just, we really appreciated being able to do it when we, it’s not something that we’re able to do for a while. So yeah, there’s certainly something to it. And I’ve even seen a lot of friends that don’t necessarily, they’re triathletes, but they don’t necessarily love the swim part of it. They’ve been saying, I’ve really missed the pool. Like I want to get back in the pool. So that’ll certainly be a positive that’ll come from it. Where I think people will start to actually appreciate it

when they’re not able to do it. I know those triathletes. I know you guys, I know who you are. You’re gonna love it. When next time you’re back in the pool, when you remember how it feels, get back in and just swim. Like don’t worry about the black line. Don’t worry about, you know, that just going up and down the pool. Bring your attention right back into the present moment and how does it feel to be in the water? Your body has supported your weight list. How does it feel for the water to go over your skin? How does it feel as you’re moving down the pool and you can feel the water go from your head, through your chest, through your back, down over your quads and out off of your toes? And how does it feel with the water on your hand? When you get your hand in the right position, so you can actually put pressure on the water and move yourself forwards. And how does it feel when your muscles contract, when you’re swimming and when you take that deep breath

and you blow it out underneath the water and do that over and over and over again? Like it is an incredible feeling. And sometimes we get so caught up in the lactic acid or the sets or the training that we’re doing. All of this external stuff that we forget about it, you know what, it just feels really good to be in the water and to swim. After I quit swimming, after university, I don’t think I touched the water for like six years and then one day I jumped into the pool and I was like, oh my God, I totally forgot that I love to swim. I haven’t felt like this since I was like 14 years old. This is incredible. And ever since then, I am all over swimming in lakes, swimming in oceans, swimming with every marine creature that I can possibly find and also swimming in outdoor pools as often as possible. I don’t love indoor swimming quite as much. The smell of chlorine still gets me after all those years of 5 a.m. wake-ups

and all those sets that I did. But yeah, I think that there’s definitely something for all of us to take advantage of and to really lean into being quote-unquote somers or triathletes or people that are into endurance sports. It is an incredible thing for us, especially when we bring our attention right back into the instantaneous present moment. And sometimes that’s what it takes to re-inspire us now that we’re all out of the pool because they’re all closed all over the world. You know, the next time that we get in, I’m sure it’s gonna be a pretty special moment for all of us. I’m putting together a six-week training program for when people are able to get back into the pool. And what you said about just remember how good it feels, like that sort of prompted me to think like this, with this six-week program, do not worry about what your times are doing for the next six weeks because there’s a good chance, a really high chance at least for the next three

or four weeks that you’re not going to be swimming anywhere close to what you were before. Even if you’ve been doing all of the dryland stuff and keeping fit, it’ll take you a while to get back into it and to be able to maintain some good times over some distance. So if you can just think about how it feels and it helps you so much with your technique as well when you haven’t got the distraction of your watch or you’re looking too much at the time, just think about how it feels. You might be thinking about your stroke. That is gonna get you so much further, especially in the first six weeks of when you do get back into the pool, then worrying about how much you have slowed down in that time because I think in six weeks time, and this was sort of my benchmark for when I was, when I went to university, like I’d be doing a bit of rowing and a little bit of gym work, but we weren’t swimming much. But then I came back during the,

I think it was a mid-semester break and I trained really hard for six weeks with my old squad and I was able to get back to pretty much where I was when I finished school, when I finished me competitively. And so with six weeks of some decent training, you can really get some good fitness back, but the first three weeks or so was horrendous. I felt like crap, I was slow. But after that, like it does come back pretty quickly after those initial couple of weeks. It’s process not outcome, right? Like you’re not worried about what the time is, you’re not worried about your fitness, you’re just simply back in the pool and swimming. So take off the watch, turn off the pace clock, just get through the miles, fix your technique, enjoy the process of getting fitter again. And ultimately, I mean, we’re all going to be hopefully doing something like this for the rest of our lives. We’re going to be racing for the rest of our lives.

We’re going to be testing ourselves for the rest of our lives. Like there is no end point here, which is all about process. So I guess there is an end point, but we’re not too worried about that. You know, that’s like long, long, long, hopefully like when we’re 120 or whatever. And then we can just upload our consciousness into the cloud and carry on. But like it’s the process of getting fitter. It’s the process of going to practice. It’s the process of doing the sets, of fixing the technique, of building the discipline, of getting mentally stronger, of eating the healthier foods, right? Like it’s just process, process, process. And the people who are enjoying the process are the ones who end up doing best. Like Michael Phelps is a great example of that, actually just popped into my brain. Like people forget that, you know, after the 2012 Olympics, even though he’d won, you know, a record number of medals and had a chance to go to London

and while I watched a lot of swimming, I saw him swim and he was very businesslike. Like he got the job done, but he was not a happy person. Like he wasn’t touching anyone on the podium. He was just getting the job done. He was at work and you could tell that he was interested in getting medals and doing the sponsorship stuff and all that sort of thing. And then two years later in 2014, he was deeply unhappy. He really struggled with mental health and he was depressed and even ended up being suicidal at one point as coach got him checked into rehab because he’d been abusing alcohol and drugs. And while he was in rehab, he went one day to the little tiny pool that was in the rehab facility, put on his shorts and went for a swim and rediscovered the fact that he just loved to swim. He just loved to train. And he said he got so caught up in the money, the medals, the fortune, the fame, the sponsorships, all of that stuff that he completely forgot

about the love of swimming. And if you look at him in 2016 in Rio, just look at the pictures of him on the blocks. Like he’s happy. Look at the picture of him in the water after he wins medals. He’s smiling ear to ear. Those pictures do not exist from 2012. Like he was not happy. He was not hugging people. He was not high-fiving. He was not having a good time. So even Michael Phelps has to rediscover this love of swimming and the practice of training, right? Like the practice of the mindset of process, not outcome. So if it can happen to Michael Phelps, it can happen to any of us. And it’s something we all need to work on and play with and learn from and move our lives forwards. What a great place to end it. Greg, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Your book is called Rest, Refocus and Recharge. And we will put all the links in our show notes to where’s the best place for people to get in contact with you?

And I know you’re working on a couple of ways that people can learn the things that you’re teaching online. So you’re not speaking as much at the moment, but working on the online stuff. Yeah, so where’s the best place to get in contact? Yeah, if anyone wants to get in touch with me, the best place is through my website, drgregwells.com. You can check me out on social at drgregwells. We have a new app coming out soon called Vivio. It’s Latin for life that will use Apple Watch and iPhone to track your physiology and give you individualized recommendations. Pretty cool app. So we’re super psyched about that. It’s got sleep tracking and stress. So check that out as well. And if you want to pick up my book, I would be infinitely honored. And that’s on Amazon. So you just search Dr. Greg Wells on Amazon. You’ll find all the books there. Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I just had so much fun

and great to talk to swimmers. So it’s all good. 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 Do Less To Achieve More with Dr. Greg Wells appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Marc Evans joins us in this episode to talk about the possible things you can do at your home during these times. In this episode, Marc discussed maintaining the feel of the water, the importance of mobility, stability, and flexibility.

00:38 Triathletes In Motion
02:40 It’s Not The Strongest Athlete That Wins The Gold Medals
06:19 Functional Strength
06:58 Most Of The Triathletes Underswim In Volume
08:01 Having A High Elbow Catch
08:40 Sculling Your Hands In A Tub Of Water
10:10 Mobility Test
11:30 Technique Is Related To Mobility And Stability
12:43 Put Your Heart Monitors And GPS Aside
17:24 Using Therabands
18:55 If You Can Get It Right Out Of The Water, You Can Get It Right In The Water
19:18 Fingertip Wall Slide
22:42 Q Swim App
23:09 Swimm Specific Yoga
23:48 Cold Showers

Q Swim App
Swim Specific Yoga

Effortless Swimming Camps
Noosa
Hawaii Swim Camp
2020 Hell Week Camp (Thailand)

Online Membership
Freestyle Clinics Around Australia

Transcription:

Brenton Ford:
Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Mark Evans.

Brenton Ford:
You were on our podcast a couple of years ago and, from memory, it was the most listened to podcast that we’ve ever had and I think for good reason. And what we’re going to talk about today is the situation most people are in right now is that they can’t get to a pool. So what can they do for the next couple of weeks, potentially a couple of months, to possibly keep their swimming fitness, somehow keep their feel for the water and so by the time that they can get back into the pool then they can start training again, that they won’t be too far from where they were when all of the pools closed. And I think you’re probably the best person to speak to, because in front of me I’ve got your book which is Triathletes in Motion and it’s probably, well I’d say, it’s the most in depth, comprehensive book on movement for triathletes that is out there. And I know we’ve spoken about this before, but there’s so much detail and thought that’s gone into the book and looking through it now it is really like a Bible for movement for triathletes. So I think you’re probably the best person to speak to.

Mark Evans:
Oh, I appreciate that. That’s quite a compliment coming from you. I really appreciate it. Yeah, we put quite an effort into that book and maybe it’ll be around for a long time, because it is, I think, a pretty instructive resource for coaches and athletes and exercise science people. But yeah, we do focus on the movement and I think that’s why I was thinking about you and what you’re doing and what people do during these difficult, surreal times that we’re in with the COVID19 and so forth, and pools are pretty much closing everywhere I know. And it reminded me that it’s no different than when I used to coach, clients would go on holiday or something like that and we were swimming 15,000 or 20,000 meters a week, how do we keep them fit? What are kinds of exercises that they need to do in order to maintain some fitness in their swimming?

Mark Evans:
And so I asked myself the questions back then, and even just the other day when I was thinking about this podcast was, “What’s the most important thing?” And I think it might be surprising to the listeners, but it’s not strength, it’s feel. It’s how you feel in the water. And if you can’t get in the water, there’s always the bathtub, there’s even a kitchen sink, there are hot tubs sometimes, even just a few seconds of sculling can add or help maintain that feel for the water. And a technique is by far and away the single most important thing in swimming. And so what you do for so many people is to help them develop their technique. I think I’m kind of speaking to the choir here.

Mark Evans:
But I will just say that one of my business partners, [Jane Cappaert PhD, we worked together at the Olympic training center and also the International Center for Aquatic Research in Colorado Springs and she was working on studies that identified that it’s not the strongest athletes that win the gold medals, it’s the ones with the highest amount of efficiency and technique. And so with that said, that’s kind of my segue into a lot of athletes think that a strength is what you work on, say for example, when they’re doing pulling sets, using hand paddles, and I’ve seen even some of my older paddles, the contour paddle, the slim foil paddles that I invented and patented years ago that kind of set a standard for design, I’ve seen them being used. And even on some podcasts, they talk about how paddles improved strength and strength isn’t the thing, it’s technique. And that’s why we made the shapes that we did years ago and whatnot. So it’s really about technique and it’s what you do and what you do in your podcast.

Brenton Ford:
And I think there’s… Particularly for triathletes, you certainly need both to have a… Especially over the longer distances. Let’s say it’s an iron man race, technique I’d say is certainly number one, but to sort of race well across that distance, you still want to have the strength there. But without the technique then you’re just going to be working very hard. And I think what a lot of people may not know about your background was that you’ve designed products and had a number of paddles that have been licensed by Speedo for a very long time. And so your background’s in not only coaching at a very high level, but also product design and we’re kind of working on something at the moment, which is a swimming paddle that’s going to help people with their catch and their pull. And it’s a very unique design, and I can’t wait until we get to share this when we’re at that stage. But it’s something that I think will make a big difference for people who are looking to improve their technique. And we’ll talk about this down the track when we’re a little bit closer to it, but in terms of what can someone do if they’re listening to this and they can’t get to a pool, where should they start? What would the first thing that you’d advise your clients to do if you’re coaching them today?

Mark Evans:
Well, what I like to say in terms of strength, it’s functional strength. I mean you have to have the commensurate strength in order to complete the movement and complete the exercise. And so that includes not only your flexibility but the joint mobility and the stability of the area and the muscles. So I don’t mean strength in general isn’t important, but functional strength is the key thing. But you don’t want to be over strong for the task. And I might in just a second here, is it… You mentioned triathletes, I think most of the triathletes under swim in volume, you need to put in significant amount of volume in order to improve your swimming and to develop that technique.

Mark Evans:
But some of the exercises, the characteristics of the mobilizers and the stabilizing exercises, stabilizing muscles are along the thoracic area and the shoulder area. And probably the most important exercises are for the what’s called the serratus anterior muscles. And I’ve got a whole host of exercises in my book that we specifically identify. We show you what muscles to do, how the exercises are done and number of repetitions and so forth, and what sort of movement that the serratus anterior does, and it’s really exercise and it works with the trapezius muscles to rotate the scapula as you’re trying to make a high elbow catch, which we know is really the number one thing in swimming, along with streamlining and alignment, is having that high elbow catch. So doing exercises for facilitating more stability and mobility of the serratus anterior and those muscle groups in addition to 20, 30, 40 seconds of sculling your hands in a tub of water will help maintain some feel for the water.

Mark Evans:
But if you have difficulty raising one hand overhead, that’s a limiter in motion and movement and doing exercises that are specific to you, that person, if you have ranges of motion that are limited in one area or another, and doing corrective exercises for those muscles is important. But by and large, the serratus anterior is one of the key muscles in swimming. And we’ve got simple exercises that you can do without any real equipment to improve the stability of those muscles. And you’ll see a very nice, how should I say, flat upper back with athletes that have a strong upper posture where their scapula isn’t winged. You’ll see a winged kind of format with a weak scapula and or back. And there are exercises to help you improve that. And so during these times and just in general, that would be a fantastic exercise that you could do or a series of exercises that you could do.

Brenton Ford:
And one of the tests we used to do at clinics was we used to, it was called the combined lateral raise, where people would lie face down on the ground, they’d have their chin on the ground, they put both hands out in front of them and they would link up their thumbs together, and while keeping their arms straight, we’d se how high they could lift their arms up off the floor. And that mobility for, say, probably half to two thirds of the swimmers wouldn’t be able to get it above zero. So, let’s say minus 10 degrees is you can’t get off the ground, half to two thirds weren’t able to get there, and then some swimmers were able to just get above essentially the flat range and it’s that sort of mobility, that test was looking at your ability to get a high elbow position. And so in a time like this where you’re not going to be in the pool, you might be saving yourself say a couple hours a week, working on that sort of mobility could have a huge difference in your ability to swim faster by getting into better positions in the water. And I know that’s what the book addresses a lot is that-

Mark Evans:
Right, those trapezius muscles are specifically to that particular type of exercise. And since you’re prone in the water, you’re laying face down, the inability to have that kind of range of motion overhead or just slightly outside, it will impact the way you enter the water, how you disturb the water or don’t disturb it, how you’ll achieve a high elbow catch. One incorrect motion is going to cause a cascade of other corrections that may or may not be as efficient. And oftentimes technique is related to mobility, stability and mobility and improve performance through exercises that stabilize the trapezius area, like the muscle groups will go a long way in improving. I mean going in the water and constantly repeating poor movements doesn’t do anything for those stabilizers, for the flexibility and the mobility and stability of the right muscle groups.

Mark Evans:
So having someone like yourself do corrections of technique and I know you do some mobility and stability to stuff too, that’s really what athletes could do during this time is they could really take that seriously. They could put their heart monitors, their GPS to the side, all of their techniques and gadgets and get a video camera and take some of the stuff out of the books, use some of your stuff, go to a physical therapist for a musculoskeletal assessment, get specific exercises for what they need to do. But targeting like you do in your clinics, that overhead flexed arms test is excellent. And that’s what people can do right now. They can really take these moments as an opportunity. And that’s kind of what I was thinking is taking it as an opportunity to improve technique, improve functional strength when they’re unable to swim for a period of time.

Mark Evans:
We’ve all seen TheraBands and stretch cords and things like this and swim benches, some people have swim benches, we used to make our own swim bench back in the day. And in fact I was thinking of making one as an example for people to show them how that they could do that. But the key thing is stabilize exercises for the shoulder groups, getting enough mobility and flexibility in and around those joints is absolutely key, and keeping the feel for the water with small oblique changes of shifting of the hand. And one thing I think I heard from yours, and you and I haven’t talked about this, but I remember hearing it in one of your videos some time back, I hope it’s yours, is that you said that put the hand under the elbow for a high elbow catch. Is that right? Isn’t that something that you teach?

Brenton Ford:
The hand under the elbow? Like if you’re looking from the side you mean?

Mark Evans:
Yeah. Right. So that gives you that high elbow catch. You’d end up with a vertical forearm and if the hand and the fingertips are underneath the elbow, the elbow is at the surface. So, you’re bringing that hand underneath the elbow and now you have your high elbow catch and that’s something that I remember hearing from one of your videos, I believe it was. And I always thought that that was a great visual technique because that’s what people need to do. And you know, you’re going to be a little bit more a mobile on one side or another. If you watch some of the great swimmers, they’re going to have one side, generally it as more of a high elbow catch. And that means they’re getting to 90 degrees where the hand is directly under the elbow when the elbow is at the surface of the water.

Mark Evans:
And I’m talking about this because you can use very light TheraBands, and again we’re not looking for strength but we’re looking for endurance and proper technique, but you could use TheraBands or stretch cords and just work on bringing that hand under the elbow and the elbow isn’t moving, it’s not moving down or back, and the shoulder’s rotating and the forearm and the hand come down below the elbow and to an almost vertical point. And using a TheraBand with light resistance like the color yellow or I think even a blue is all that you need, it’s not necessary to sit there and use black TheraBands with the really hard tension. What we’re looking for is to place that hand in a vertical posture.

Mark Evans:
And to that point, if I may, you don’t want to put too much pressure on the water after you make your entry and heading down to the catch or the down sweep because that pushes water in an array of directions. Your goal is to move forward and the reason for the high elbow catch is because it puts the hand in a further out front quadrant posture in order to catch and pull more water. So make sure that the people, when they’re putting their hand in that there aren’t a lot of forces on the water as you’re moving your hand down to that high elbow position. That make sense?

Brenton Ford:
Yeah. I think seeing people at clinics make changes, one of the real realizations that a lot of people have is that when we talk about from when you’re at full extension down to when you’re sort of starting the catch there, that’s the setup phase and when you actually look at the better swimmers, they apply less power than the slower swimmers during that setup phase. And so when people hear that for the first time, if they didn’t know it already, it can really have this big shift because at the start they think, “I’ve got to pull harder to go faster and if I can just muscle my way through it, then I’m going to be quicker.” But it’s not the case. As you mentioned, if you can just get yourself in a good position at the end of the catch there, then you can start to apply a little bit of force. But again, it’s not this huge amount of force where you’re ripping hard at the water. It’s just you just need to gradually increase the speed at which you’re pulling through.

Mark Evans:
Right.

Brenton Ford:
And then that sort of trans-

Mark Evans:
You should do this… I’m sorry, go ahead.

Brenton Ford:
I was just going to say, and that translates into the TheraBand exercises that you were talking about, we use the red TheraBands, which are one of the lighter ones.

Mark Evans:
Yeah, yeah.

Brenton Ford:
And when you’re practicing the catch and the pull with it, the only thing you really need to worry about is just getting that set up, that catch right at the start. Because then you know you’re going to be training this movement, you’re going to repeating this movement and if you can get it right out of the water, you can get it right in the water. And when we used to do this at camps at [inaudible 00:18:56] camp and there’s quite a few people who it takes a little bit of refining of that catch to get it where they need it to, but once they get it that they’ve got it. And so you really just need to go slow with it to get that movement.

Mark Evans:
Right. I had a drill, I called it the fingertip wall slide, and you stand facing the wall and you put your hands overhead with your fingertips on the wall, you’d be about one of your feet away from the wall and both fingertips on the wall. And so what you do is you slowly bring your fingertips down until they’re at shoulder height, and so the hand and the forearm are all in alignment with the elbow. And so that causes that rotation of the scapula and the serratus interiors activated. But there’s no pressure, there’s no tension, it’s just mobility, stability and learning. It was an excellent exercise. In fact I think it’s in the book as well, Triathletes in Motion. Yeah, I’m sure it is. But it was just an excellent learning exercise.

Mark Evans:
The only trouble was is we wouldn’t do it enough, I think. As I was thinking about this podcast, this is a great opportunity to do things that maybe we don’t always have time to do or think about doing. But technique is just so critical in swimming and like you say, less forces are being generated as you’re approaching the catch from the elite swimmer. They’re looking for posture and position and that’s kind of way I used to coach; posture, position, how are you… Having a very light feather light a down sweep to the catch. It really is feather light. And if you’re in the front quadrant too, it really keeps the continuum of the stroke moving as well. In other words, there’s always one hand in front of the head, is a simple way of talking about the front quadrant. And then it also raises the hips. So hips higher means there’s less water over the body and less drag.

Mark Evans:
So there’s all kinds of opportunities here for small exercises that maybe in our normal daily lives aren’t easy to do, we don’t do, don’t have time for, but I think people are going to have time for that now. And I would highly recommend that they try to keep the feel, work on stability, maybe do some tests to find out which corrective exercises they need to do. And then some of these key things are the serratus anterior, the trapezius, doing high elbow catch drills with light tension bands. I know that there are swim benches out there and some companies that are producing those things and some of them are really actually good for other kinds of exercises beyond swimming as well. And of course I think maybe swim flumes are going to be popular now too. People will start buying more indoor swimming pools for their houses.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah, there’s a few resources that could be worth checking out. So I think the book’s a great resource for all the stuff we’re talking about. There’s an app called the Q Swim app, which is developed by a guy, Tom Barton, who works with a lot of the Australian swim team and you can essentially measure yourself in some of these tests and then it will have prescriptive exercises as well for it. So it’s called the Q Swim app.

Mark Evans:
Oh. Yeah, yeah.

Brenton Ford:
And then there’s another guy, Jeff Grace, who I’ve had in the podcast before, he teaches a lot of swimming specific yoga. Actually that’s the name of his business, Swim Specific Yoga, and he’s put out a couple of routines. I think they’re like 30 minute routines that you can go through, and so I’ll put those links in the show notes as well. But just really good stuff to be able to do while we can’t swim. And I think one of the tough parts as well is just the mental health aspects of not being able to swim and go to squad and that sort of thing as well, because I think for myself personally, I need to get in the water of some kind, whether it’s the ocean, whether it’s the pool, I need that access to water and I think there’s probably a lot of other people in that same boat. And so something that I like to do in the morning just to sort of feel refreshed and just invigorated is I’ve started just going back to cold showers. So I normally start with like a minute of a warm shower and then for a couple of minutes I’ll put on the shower to as cold as possible.

Brenton Ford:
Now I think you live in a slightly colder place than I do at the moment, so depends how long you could that last in there, but just cold showers, it kind of gives me a little bit of that feel of having been in the ocean or been in the pool.

Mark Evans:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brenton Ford:
And you have that same sort of feeling. Because if you’re out of the water for four or five or six weeks, I don’t think I’ve ever been out of the water for that long since I was probably two. But yeah, just being able to replicate that feeling of being in the water a little bit I think can certainly help too.

Mark Evans:
Yeah, I think that’s an innovative thought. You know, I think it’s more of a cognitive mental thought than anything else.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah.

Mark Evans:
And I agree with it. But I was really serious that half a bathtub full of cold… I hadn’t think about being cold. But now that you’ve mentioned the cold water, it might be good to do that. But if you can just do some sculling on your hands and forearms in any kind of water, it will at least help you keep some of the feel that is so important, that we talk about, in terms of making that motion from the extension down sleep to the catch. It’s such a subtle and soft posture position that anything like what you’re talking about and I’m sure other people will come up with other ideas, but I think it’s really important to not only just that, but if you can’t do that, then walking, biking, running, hiking, other kinds of outdoor activities are so critical here. It’s hopefully not going to be too much longer that we don’t get passed this very difficult time in our world. And I know as we’re speaking, we don’t really know where that’s going to be in a week from now, but all we can do is just keep doing the best we can and and somehow we’re going to all come out of this in good shape.

Brenton Ford:
Sounds good. It’s interesting to see what the next couple of weeks bring and hopefully it means that we can start to return back to normal life fairly, fairly soon. So Mark, thanks so much for being on the podcast. We’re certainly going to have you back on in the near future. I’m looking forward to sharing a bit more about this paddle that we’ve, well and particularly you, have been working on for quite a while because it’s a very unique design and I think it’s really going to help swimmers and triathletes a lot with their techniques. So thanks again for being-

Mark Evans:
Yeah very excited to have you on board, thank you, yeah.

Brenton Ford:
Yeah, looking forward to it. So thanks again Mark. And I’ll put all these links in the show notes for those of you that are listening. So if you would like to get your hands on Mark’s book, which is called Triathletes in Motion, it’s very in depth, especially if you are a coach or you love your details, it’s the best resource out there that I’ve found. So thanks again, Mark, and we’ll talk soon.

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Mark Evans. You were on a podcast a couple of years ago and from memory it was the most listened to podcast that we’ve ever had and I think for good reason and what we’re gonna talk about today is the situation that most people are in right now is that they can’t get to a pool. So what can they do for the next couple of weeks, potentially a couple of months to possibly keep their swimming fitness, somehow keep their feel for the water and so while at the time they can get back into the pool and they can start training again that they won’t be too far from where they were when all of the pools closed and I think you’re probably the best person to speak to because in front of me I’ve got your book which is Triathletes in Motion and it’s probably, well I’d say it’s the most in-depth comprehensive book on movement for triathletes that is out there and I know we’ve spoken about this before

but there’s so much detail and thought that’s gone into the book and looking through it now it’s just it is really like a bible for movement, for triathletes so I think you’re probably the best person to speak to.

I appreciate that, that’s quite a compliment coming from you, I really appreciate it. Yeah, we put quite an effort into that book and maybe it’ll be around for a long time because it is I think a pretty instructive resource for coaches and athletes and exercise science people but we do focus on the movement and I think that’s why I was thinking about you and what you’re doing and what people do during these difficult surreal times that we’re in with the COVID-19 and so forth and pools are pretty much closing everywhere I know and it reminded me that it’s no different when I used to coach clients would go on holiday or something like that and we were swimming 15 or 20,000 meters a week how do we keep them fit? What are kinds of exercises that they need to do in order to maintain some fitness in their swimming?

And so I asked myself the question back then and even just the other day when I was thinking about this podcast was what’s the most important thing? And I think it might be surprising to the listeners but it’s not strength, it’s feel, it’s how you feel in the water and if you can’t get in the water there’s always a bathtub, there’s even a kitchen sink, there are hot tub sometimes that will even just a few seconds of schooling can add or help maintain that feel for the water. And technique is by far and away the single most important thing in swimming and it’s what you do for so many people is to help them develop their technique. I think I’m kind of speaking to the choir here but I will just say that one of my business partners

Jane Kaepert, PhD, we worked together at the Olympic Training Center and also the International Center for Aquatic Research in Colorado Springs and she was working on studies that identified that it’s not the strongest athletes

that win the gold medals, it’s the ones with the highest amount of efficiency and technique. And so with that said, that’s kind of my segue into a lot of athletes think that strength is what you work on, say for example when they’re doing polling sets using hand paddles and I’ve seen even some of my older paddles, the contour paddle, the swimfoil paddles that I invented and patented years ago that kind of set a standard for design.

I’ve seen them being used and even on some podcasts they talk about how paddles improve strength and strength isn’t the thing, it’s technique and that’s why we made the shapes that we did years ago and whatnot. So it’s really about technique and it’s what you do and what you do in your podcast. And I think there’s, particularly for triathletes, you certainly need both to have a, especially over the longer distances, let’s say it’s an Ironman race, technique I’d say is certainly number one, but to sort of race well across that distance, like you still want to have the strength there so, but without the technique then you’re just gonna be working very hard and I think what a lot of people may not know about your background was that you’ve designed products and had a number of paddles that have been licensed by Speedo for a very long time and so your background’s in not only coaching at a very high level but also product design

and we’re kind of working on something at the moment which is a swimming paddle that’s gonna help people with their catch and their pool and it’s a very unique design and I can’t wait until we get to share this when we’re at that stage but it’s something that I think will make a big difference for people who are looking to improve their technique and we’ll talk about this down the track when we’re a little bit closer to it but in terms of what can someone do if they’re listening to this and they can’t get to a pool where should they start? What would the first thing that you’d advise your clients to do if you were coaching them today? Well, what I like to say in terms of strength it’s functional strength. I mean, you have to have the commensurate strength in order to complete the movement, complete the exercise

and so that includes not only your flexibility but the joint mobility and the stability of the area and the muscles. So I don’t mean strength in general isn’t important but functional strength is the key thing but you don’t wanna be over strong for the task and I might, in just a second here is that you mentioned triathletes. I think most of the triathletes under swim and volume.

You need to put in a significant amount of volume in order to improve your swimming and to develop that technique Some of the exercises, the characteristics of the mobilizers and the stabilizing exercises, stabilizing muscles are along the thoracic area and the shoulder area

and probably the most important exercises are for what’s called the serratus anterior muscles and I’ve got a whole host of exercises in my book that we specifically identify. We show you what muscles to do, how the exercises are done and number of repetitions and so forth and what sort of movement that the serratus anterior does and it’s really a exercise that works with the trapezius muscles to rotate the scapula as you’re trying to make a high elbow catch which, if we know, is really the number one thing in swimming along with streamlining and alignment

is having that high elbow catch. So doing exercises for facilitating more stability

and mobility of the serratus anterior and those muscle groups in addition to 20, 30, 40 seconds of scolding your hands

in the tub of water will help maintain some feel for the water but if you have difficulty raising one hand overhead, that’s a limiter in motion and movement

and doing exercises that are specific to you, that person. If you have ranges of motion that are limited in one area or another, then doing corrective exercises for those muscles is important but by and large, the serratus anterior is one of the key muscles in swimming and we’ve got simple exercises that you can do without any real equipment to improve the stability of those muscles and you’ll see a very nice, how should I say,

flat upper back with athletes that have a strong upper posture where their scapula isn’t winged.

You’ll see a winged kind of format with a weak scapula and a back and there are exercises to help you improve that and so during these times than just in general, that would be a fantastic exercise that you could do or a series of exercises that you could do. And one of the tests that we used to do at clinics was called the combined lateral raise where people would lie face down on the ground that have their chin on the ground, they put both hands out in front of them and they would link up their thumbs together and while keeping their arms straight we’d see how high they could lift their arms up off the floor and that mobility for say probably half to two thirds of the swimmers wouldn’t be able to get it above zero so let’s say minus 10 degrees as you can’t get off the ground, half to two thirds weren’t able to get there and then some swimmers were able to just get above the essentially the flat range and it’s that sort of mobility

that test was looking at your ability to get a high elbow position so in a time like this where you’re not gonna be in the pool you might be saving yourself say a couple of hours a week working on that sort of mobility could have a huge difference in your ability to swim faster by getting into better positions in the water and I know that’s what the book addresses a lot of you. Oh, that’s a, those trapezius muscles are specifically to that particular type of exercise and since you’re prone in the water you’re laying face down the inability to have that kind of range of motion overhead or just slightly outside it will impact the way you enter the water how you disturb the water or don’t disturb it how you’ll achieve a high elbow catch. One incorrect motion is gonna cause a cascade

of other corrections that may or may not be as efficient and oftentimes technique is related to mobility, stability and mobility and improve performance

through exercises that stabilize the trapezius area like the muscle groups will go a long way in improving, I mean, going in the water and constantly repeating poor movements doesn’t do anything for those stabilizers for the flexibility and the mobility and stability of the right muscle groups. So having someone like yourself do corrections of technique and I know you do some mobility and stability to stuff too that’s really what athletes could do during this time is they could really take that seriously. They could put their heart monitors, their GPS to the side all of their techniques and gadgets and get a video camera and work with, take some of the stuff out of the books use some of your stuff, go to a physical therapist for a musculoskeletal assessment, get specific exercises for what they need to do but targeting like you do in your clinics that overhead flexed arms test is excellent, you know

and that’s what people can do right now they can really take these moments as an opportunity and that’s kind of what I was thinking is taking it as an opportunity to improve technique improves functional strength and when they’re unable to swim for a period of time and we’ve all seen therapists and stretch cords and things like this and swim benches some people have swim benches we used to make our own swim bench back in the day and in fact, I was thinking of making one as an example for people

to show them how that they could do that but the key thing is stabilize exercises for the shoulder groups getting enough mobility and flexibility in and around those joints is absolutely key and keeping the feel for the water with small oblique changes of shifting of the hand and you know, one thing I think I heard from yours and you and I haven’t talked about this but I remember hearing it in one of your videos some time back, I hope it’s yours is that you said to put the hand under the elbow for a high elbow catch so is that right? Isn’t that something that you teach? The hand under the elbow like if you’re looking from the side, you mean? Yeah, right. So that gives you that high elbow catch you’d end up with a vertical forearm and if the hand or the fingertips are underneath the elbow the elbow’s at the surface so you’re bringing that hand underneath the elbow and there you have your high elbow catch and that’s something that I remember hearing

from one of your videos, I believe it was and I always thought that that was a great visual technique because that’s what people need to do and you know, you’re gonna be a little bit more mobile on one side or another. If you watch some of the great swimmers they’re gonna have one side generally that has more of a high elbow catch and that means they’re getting to a 90 degrees where the hand is directly under the elbow when the elbow is at the surface of the water. So, and I’m talking about this because you can use very light therabands like and again, we’re not looking for strength but we’re looking for endurance and proper technique but you could use therabands or stretch cords and just work on bringing that hand under the elbow and the elbow isn’t moving, it’s not moving down or back and the hand or the shoulders rotating and the forearm and the hand come down below the elbow and to an almost vertical point

and using a theraband with light resistance like the color yellow or I think even a blue is all that you need. It’s not necessary to sit there and use black therabands with a really hard tension. What we’re looking for is to place that hand in a vertical posture. And to that point, if I may, you don’t wanna put too much pressure on the water as after you make your entry and heading down to the catch or the downsweep because that pushes water in an array of directions. Your goal is to move forward and the reason for the high elbow catches because it puts the hand in a further out front quadrant posture in order to catch and pull more water. So make sure that the people when they’re putting their hand in that there aren’t a lot of forces on the water as you’re moving your hand down to that high elbow position. That makes sense. Yeah, I think seeing people at clinics make changes. One of the real realizations that a lot of people have

is that when we talk about the,

from when you’re at full extension down to when you’re sort of starting to catch there, like that’s the setup phase. And when you actually look at the better swimmers, they apply less power than the slower swimmers during that setup phase. And so when people hear that for the first time, if they didn’t know it already, it can really have this big shift because at the start they think I’ve got to pull harder to go faster and if I can just muscle my way through it, then I’m going to be quicker. But it’s not the case. As you mentioned, if you can just get yourself in a good position at the end of the catch there, then you can start to apply a little bit of force. But again, it’s not this huge amount of force where you’re ripping hard at the water. It’s just, you know, you just need to gradually increase the speed at which you’re pulling through. So, and then that sort of- We should do this, I’m sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say,

and that translates into the TheraBand exercises that you were talking about as like, we use the Red TheraBands, which are one of the lighter ones. And when you do, when you’re practicing the catch and the pull with it, the only thing you really need to worry about is just getting that, set up that catch right at the start because then, you know, you’re going to be training this movement. You’re going to be repeating this movement. And if you can get it right out of the water, you can get it right in the water. And when we used to do this at camps, at Hell Week Camp, and there’s quite a few people who, it takes a little bit of refining of that catch to get it where they need it to. But once they get it, they’ve got it. And so you really just need to go slow with it to get that movement. Right, we, I had a drill called at the fingertip wall slide

and you’d stand facing the wall and you put your hands overhead with your fingertips on the wall. You’d be about one of your feet away from the wall and both hands on the, both fingertips on the wall. And so what you do is you slowly bring your fingertips down until they’re at shoulder height. And so the hand and the forearm are all in alignment with the elbow. And so that causes that rotation of the scapula and the serratus interiors activated. But there’s no pressure. There’s no tension. It’s just mobility, stability and learning. Excellent, excellent effect. I think it’s in that book as well. Thanks for athletes in motion. Yeah, I’m sure it is. And but it wasn’t just an excellent learning exercise. The only trouble was is we wouldn’t do it enough, I think, you know, and as I was thinking about this podcast, this is a great opportunity to do things that maybe we don’t always have time to do or think about doing, but technique is just so critical

in swimming. And like you say, less forces are being generated

as you’re approaching the catch from the elite swimmer. They’re looking for posture and position. And, you know, that’s kind of what I used to coach, posture position, where, how are you, you know, having a very light feather-like downsweep to the catch. It really is feather-like. And if you’re in the front quadrant too, it really keeps the continuum of the stroke moving as well. In other words, both, there’s always one hand in front of the head is a simple way of talking about the front quadrant. And it also raises the hips. So hips higher means there’s more or less water over the body and less drag. So there’s all kinds of opportunities here for small changes that can make small exercises that are maybe in our normal daily lives, aren’t easy to do, we don’t do, don’t have time for, but I think people are gonna have time for that now. And I would highly recommend that they try to keep the feel, work on stability,

maybe do some tests to find out which exercises, corrective exercises they need to do. And then some of these key things are the serratus interior, the trapezius doing high elbow catch drills with light tension bands or, you know, I’m not a, I know that there are swim benches out there and some companies that are producing those things. And some of them are really actually good for other kinds of exercises beyond swimming as well. And of course, I think maybe swim flumes are gonna be popular now too, right? People will start buying more indoor swimming pools, you know, for their houses. Yeah, it’s a few resources that could be worth checking out. So I think the book’s a great resource for all the stuff we’re talking about. There’s an app called the Q Swim app, which is developed by a guy, Tom Barton, who works with a lot of the Australian swim team. And you can essentially measure yourself in some of these tests

and then it will have prescriptive exercises as well for it. So it’s called the Q Swim app. And then there’s another guy, Jeff, or Jeff Grace, who I’ve had in the podcast before, he teaches a lot of swimming, swimming specific yoga. Actually, that’s the name of his business, swim specific yoga. And he’s put out a couple of routines, I think they’re like 30 minute routines that you can go through. And so I’ll put those links in the show notes as well. But just really good stuff to be able to do while we can’t swim. And I think one of the tough parts as well is just the mental health aspects of not being able to swim and go to squat and that sort of thing as well. Cause I think for myself personally, I need to get in the water of some kind, whether it’s the ocean, whether it’s the pool, like I just, I need that access to water. And I think there’s probably a lot of other people in that same boat. And so something that I like to do in the morning,

just to sort of feel refreshed and just invigorated is I’ve started just going back to cold showers. So I normally start with like a minute of a warm shower and then for a couple of minutes, I’ll just, I’ll put on the shower too, as cold as possible. Now I think you live in a slightly colder place than I do at the moment. So it depends how long you could last in there, but just like cold showers, it kind of gives me a little bit of that feel of having been in the ocean or been in the pool and just, you know, and you have that same sort of feeling because if you’re out of the water for four, five or six weeks, I don’t think I’ve ever been out of the water for that long in my, since I was probably two. But yeah, just being able to replicate that feeling of being in the water a little bit, I think can certainly help too. Yeah, I think that’s an innovative thought. You know, I think it is more of a cognitive mental thought

than anything else. Yeah. And I agree with it. But I was really serious that, you know, a half a bathtub full of cold, I hadn’t think about it being cold, but now that you’ve mentioned the cold water, it might be good to do that. But if you can just do some scolding on your hands and forearms in any kind of water, it will at least help you keep some of the feel that is so important that we talk about in terms of, you know, making that motion from the extension downsweep to the catch. It’s such a subtle and soft posture position that anything like what you’re talking about, and I’m sure other people come up with other ideas, but, you know, I think it’s really important to, you know, not only just that, but if you can’t do that, then, you know, walking, biking, running, hiking, you know, other kinds of outdoor activities are, you know, so critical here. It’s not, hopefully not gonna be too much longer that, you know, we don’t get past

this very difficult time in our world, but, and I know as we’re speaking, we don’t really know where that’s gonna be in a week from now, but, you know, all we can do is just keep doing the best we can and somehow we’re gonna all come out of this in good shape. Sounds good. It’s, yeah, interesting to see what the next couple of weeks bring, and hopefully it means that we can start to return back to normal life fairly, fairly soon. So, Mark, thanks very much for being on the podcast, we’re certainly gonna have you back on in the near future. I’m looking forward to sharing a bit more about this paddle that we’ve, well, and particularly you have been working on for quite a while, because it’s very unique design, and I think it’s really gonna help swimmers and triathletes a lot with their technique. So, thanks again for being on this. I’m very excited to have you on board. Thank you. Yeah, looking forward to it. So, thanks again, Mark,

and I’ll put all these links in the show notes for those that are listening. So, if you would like to get your hands on Mark’s book, which is called Triathletes in Motion, it’s very in-depth, especially if you are a coach or you love your details, it’s the best resource out there that I’ve found. So, thanks again, Mark, and we’ll talk soon.

The post What To Do If Your Pool Has Closed with Marc Evans appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Tim Ballintine is a full-time endurance coach and the owner of Koa Sports. In this episode, he shares about being a coach, finding your passion, not having all the answers and intensity in training.

02:56 Coaching Philosophy
05:30 “You’ve Got To Find What Works For You”
06:17 You Can’t Be All Things To All People
07:01 “It’s Not The Words, It’s How You Say Them”
09:25 “If You Don’t Like It, You’re Not Going To Last Very Long”
10:31 There Is No Cookie Cutter Here
14:48 Swimming As A Barrier To Entry In Triathlon
19:02 Coaching Remotely
20:18 “Don’t Be Afraid To Say That You Don’t Have All The Answers”
24:20 Injecting Intensity In Swimming
31:19 There’s Always Something To Work On

Tim Ballintine
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Transcription:

Brenton:
Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Tim Ballintine, who I’ve known for quite a few years now. And Tim, you are up on the Sunshine Coast up towards Noosa, where you run a camp there every year and you moved up there pretty recently from Melbourne. So, how are you enjoying it up there and welcome to the podcast.

Tim Ballintine:
Thanks Brenton mate. Yeah, it’s been a great move. We’ve been up here on the sunny coast for a couple of years albeit. We were on the Gold Coast for about eight years, mate, so we got a bit of a taste and is probably how I sort of fell into endurance sports to be frank. And then we found out we’re having our firstborn and decided we’d move back to Melbourne to be closer to friends and family and lasted 18 months. Because our lifestyle, it just changed so much, to be frank. Even just the getting up early bit, you know, we moved to the Gold Coast when we were about 20, 21, which is not a bad age to move to the Gold Coast, mind you. But then yeah, just totally, in seven, eight years, which life happens, we just changed our behaviors, our lifestyle and tried to pick all that up and move it to Melbourne.

Tim Ballintine:
I still consider Melbourne where I’m from obviously, but just with work, life, business and all the hats that you wear, it made sense to come back to Queensland and such as the business that I run, you can sort of run it from anywhere. And, we used to come to Coolum Beach for a holiday and so we just picked that we’d live here. It’s kind of like without rubbing it in, but yeah, very, very lucky. Very, very lucky. We love it. You have a couple of camps up here, so all your listeners and Effortless Swimming people would know, it’s Noosa and around here made it, so it’s pretty hard to beat, Brenton, pretty hard to beat, mate.

Brenton:
Look, I do whatever I can to get up there. And so that’s why I think it’s important to escape the coal when you get the chance, so it’s a great place to train. And, you obviously come from a high level of sport background but also coaching a number of athletes who have gone on to compete in Kona and you’ve got quite a widespread of athletes that you coach, and on this podcast I want to talk about, and kind of get out of you, what are some of those things that you’ve learned over the last seven or eight years as an athlete and as a coach, that you could pass on to those people that are listening? Because we have a whole bunch of triathletes and endurance athletes that listen to this and I think it would be great to pick your brain and see what some of those things are. So, from a, I guess a coaching perspective, where did you start with that and where have you sort of got to? How’s your philosophy changed over the last couple of years?

Tim Ballintine:
Good question. I think like most coaches, they start out with just a toe in the water. I find coaching, and you know, some coaches who have been doing it for 20, 30 years might cringe, but I still find it quite an immature industry or an immature career. I still think that it’s sort of finding it’s way, maybe in a different context of the way that we operate as well, but it’s very hard to just dive head first into and leave whatever it is that you’re doing behind. You need obviously the underpin by good qualifications and good mentorship, and I think as a coach starting out, that’s really, really critical that you get good people around you. I think that’s like anything in life, isn’t it mate? Part on one of those people, I’ll be honest, without your head wobbling off. I saw you as a real sort of leading thinker in the context of swimming, which is why I sort of cold called you and asked to sort of tag along in a few bits and pieces and pick your brain. And I also was partnered up there with Craig Percival and did a lot of stuff with him in Melbourne.

Tim Ballintine:
And you know, sadly we lost Craig tragically. And that really changed the whole landscape for me in a really heavyhearted kind of way. It sort of maybe forced my hand to make some harder decisions. But he was a great man. And that’s the picture, if you have got the video going, I don’t know, but he’s the one right there behind me. And yeah. So great people, man.

Tim Ballintine:
It’s like your athletes top Brenton and you’d be the same. You just learn so much from good people and hopefully as a coach also, you know, you try and impart some of that knowledge. But certainly for me starting out, if you are thinking about having a go at coaching, surround yourself with good mentors. And there’s some great coaches out there, like really great coaches, but they just might not be for you as well. It’s a bit like you as an athlete as well. Like there would be some great coaches out there who if I put my athlete hat on for a second, just wouldn’t be right for me. And the same goes for mentors in business and in coaching. You’ve got to find what sort of works for you as well.

Brenton:
Yeah, exactly. I think if I had to be a hard ass old school sort of swimming coach, that wouldn’t, that’s not me. I’m just a little bit more laid back. I’m probably a bit more friendlier than some of the hard ass coaches and I’m getting better at sort of putting the foot down when I need to. Not in a controlling way, but just in a way of a lot of people respond well to that sort of coaching where they want to be told, “All right, you’ve got to go for it now.” That sort of thing. And so just learning to change for the athlete that you’re working with. But I guess the overall way that I coach is not going to be like that. So I think yeah, you sort of find your style, you find your groove and then the people who are attracted to that will come to you and they’ll be the ones that want to work with you.

Tim Ballintine:
Well, you’re not for everyone, right? I mean you can’t be all things to all people. And that’s also a thing that you try and work out early days when you’re thinking, even if you’re sort of that part time, full time sort of thing, am I going to do this full time? It’s like you try to be everything to everyone because you think you have all the answers and frankly, yeah, I can help you with this and that, and then the further you get down the road, you start to work out your strengths as a coach as well and what your weaknesses are and also the type of athletes that you like working with. That’s the bottom line. That’s, to be perfectly frank, there’s certain types of athletes that as a coach you like working with them.

Tim Ballintine:
There’s some that you don’t, and that’s okay. I don’t see any problem with that. You’d rather be honest up front. So I remember when I first did my swimming Australia accreditation that your old man, I think Brian is he?

Brenton:
Yeah.

Tim Ballintine:
He spoke and he would be genuinely one of the more impressive people I’ve heard speak about swim coaching, his passion was just like you could really, you could feel it in the room and like you could just, I remember seeing you, this was at least five or six years ago. You’re sitting in the front row. I remember looking down at you, because I was in the back of the auditorium going, “Wow, for you, knowing that you’re a swim coach? Like what a great mentor.” You know, I hope I haven’t thrown you under the bus there, but I think that I certainly just in that one hour in the room with your old man, what a marvelous mentor and I’m not sure whether he’s still swim coaching is he?

Brenton:
He is, yeah. Yeah. I was going to say he’s doing less, a little bit less, but no, he’s still coaching, I don’t know how many sessions a week, eight to 10 sessions a week. And yeah, mum and dad run a learn to swim business, which is quite, quite large. And yeah, I was very lucky to, I was coached by him and obviously saw him coaching others and I think that’s where I got a lot of my coaching personality from that and that and the way that I coach and one of the best things that he did, I think when I was probably maybe 18 at the time. He said, “You should go and see this guy in New Zealand. He’s a trainer and he sort of trains people how to train or how to like present and how to coach”, and this guy was awesome.

Brenton:
So I went to this two day course and he was basically how do you get people involved and part of the learning process instead of just talking at them? And so just with different exercises and different ways to approach it. And I learned so much from that course and my dad had been to that twice I think. And that made a huge difference. And so when we run our camps in Thailand and that kind of thing, it’s a way to really just get people involved and working in small groups. And it made it a huge difference to my approach of how people learn because as you know, you learn so much more from actually doing, being involved, talking with others, sharing your experience than sitting down and watching a presentation. As you said, you could feel the passion that he was talking with and it’s not the words, it’s how you say them and how you convey it. So I think that’s really important.

Tim Ballintine:
There’s that mentor man, that’s what I was sort of touching on. You get those right people and yeah, it sort of sets you on the path and then there does come a point where you sort of have to pull the rip cord and decide, do I want to make a [inaudible 00:09:13] of this? Do I want to make a career out of this and you don’t really come across many coaches that don’t like their jobs. And not to generalize, but in the general sense, maybe if it’s lawyers, accountants, bankers, like you’re going to come across the odd person that it’s just a job, they genuinely don’t like what they do, but I’m trying to think. Coaching’s that sort of job where if you don’t like it, you’re not going to last very long and that is of great benefit to athletes and clients or whatever because you’re genuinely, you’re connected to someone that likes what they do and it’s because it’d be one of those jobs.

Tim Ballintine:
I’d find if you didn’t like it then I don’t think you’d last long at all. I really don’t. So yeah, that’s certainly, I think something pretty unique to the coaching landscape that the majority of people actually like their job, as horrible as that might sound.

Brenton:
It’s very true. I think in thinking of the way that you like to sort of program with athletes and work with them, how do you go about it? How often are you talking with people? How do you set the programs looking at their events coming up, what’s the sort of process that you’d go through?

Tim Ballintine:
Yeah, sure. So every, I mean it’s very cliche, but everyone is truly different and the reality is is some athletes require a little more communication than others for sure. I mean, you sort of find that mate, there’s some blokes that are kind of like, “Mate, just tell me what to do and we’ll chat once a month and that’s all good.”

Tim Ballintine:
And there’s some athletes that that two or three times a week you sort of hear from or talk to and that’s fine. I think that there’s also a point as a coach, you got to be really careful, particularly as an online coach, is that if you find that you’re having to talk to you’re athlete every day, I actually put that back on me to say I’m not doing my job to get the message across. Because genuinely if you’re needing to speak and get clarification or feedback every single day, not only is that a bit heavy, but I just think that it probably just not doing your job as a coach to try and get the message through as to what sort of each week means. We use training peaks as our program delivery tool, but really the program is, it’s really just the surface as a coach.

Tim Ballintine:
I think one of the most underrated things is accountability and some athletes who were just dialed in don’t really require accountability. They want the science side and after a probably a month or two, you’d kind of find what works, Brenton, for certain athletes. You’ve got an athlete who has been on the couch and wanting to do their first half marathon in 12 months. The approach with that athlete is very different to someone who might be wanting to qualify for Kona after their fifth Ironman, there’s no cookie cutter here. We don’t use any, one of the things we do here, not to plug their business, but certainly my other two coaches as well and me are much the same. We don’t use any libraries or any any workout templates or anything like that.

Tim Ballintine:
So there’s no kind of drag and drop. It’s all literally, sounds inefficient, but you get better at it. We write every session for what it is and that seems to work pretty well. We get really good results. We don’t sort of beat our chest about them, but certainly if you look sort of pound for pound, our team does pretty well and we’re across the world. We’re over 30 countries now, so really great diversity in the squad and that’s for two reasons. One, it reduces the seasonality of endurance coaching for sure. So we’re literally 54-46 Northern-Southern hemisphere as of the end of last year and it just really smooths income because the reality is Brenton, we’re trying to make a living too. And I think that any athlete would want their coach not having to worry about whether they can pay the mortgage.

Tim Ballintine:
It’s more about focusing on trying to get the best out of their athletes. So we’ve made a real effort to try and spread that athlete base. And as a coach it’s amazing working with people in so many different cultures. Whether it’s in Japan, you can’t swim at times, whether it’s in the middle East, you can’t basically swim in a pool for about four months a year because it’s like a bath, whether it’s in Europe where they have ice issues, whether it’s in Australia, there’s all kinds of different coaching methods as well. So yeah, it’s good fun. It’s good fun.

Brenton:
It’s funny you bring that up. I’ve got three ladies who I do stroke analysis coaching with online and they’re in Japan and they’ve recently moved pool so they can start to use a snorkel and fins cause their pools don’t allows it.

Brenton:
I remember a friend of mine, she’s Japanese, she went back home couple of years ago. She was swimming in the fast lane in a pool and there was a guy walking in that lane and he basically, he physically grabbed her and stopped her and told her to stop swimming so fast. Wow. If you tried that in a pool here in Melbourne, like good luck to you. That’s just-

Tim Ballintine:
You’d start doing butterfly with paddles if that happened.

Brenton:
Yeah, just the complete opposite. So yeah, you learn a lot from seeing what it’s like in other countries. And I think we’re very lucky here in Australia too with the training environment that we’ve got, particularly the pools, like there’s so many pools around that you’re hard pressed not to find one within-

Tim Ballintine:
Swimming’s part of our culture as Australians and this is one other thing, like they talk about sort of the barriers to entry of triathlon and obviously financial is a big thing, but I would say I’ve said this many times on other podcasts or whatever that swimming’s almost an equal barrier of entry to triathlon as is financially. I think pretty close. It’s the one thing that probably creates the most anxiety or scares the most people off that you’ve got to get through the swim. I have athletes I’ve got or worked with where they just want to get through the swim and then they bike run. Because the reality if you, without scaring too many people, but if you stop pedaling on the bike, you just slow down and if you stop running or you just stop, but if you stopped swimming, that’s the reality. So it’s a big thing getting past that barrier to entry of swimming. And that’s something that I think triathlon can do a much when they don’t have all the answers, but I think triathlon needs to always constantly work out trying to break down those barriers and I think swimming is definitely a big part of that.

Brenton:
Yeah, I completely agree. We have a lot of students who come to our clinics who have, they’re either wanting to start triathlon and they don’t know how to swim or they can barely swim or they’ve done a triathlon realize they can’t. They just made it through. And they might’ve had to hold onto the kayak of the lifesavers there for a while. But then, and we’ve had so many swimmers who have then after, all right, they know what they need to do and they’ve got the understanding of the fundamentals that will help them survive and then eventually enjoy it. And after a couple of months, and sometimes it can take six to 12 months, when they start to enjoy it, it makes such a big difference in their training and their swimming and how they approach the swim when they’re racing because as you said, most people just want to get through it.

Brenton:
But if you can enjoy the swim, I’d love to swim all day and not have to do the bike and run if that was triathlon but it’s not the case, but boy it can make a huge difference. And I think it just takes that level of confidence and that only comes from experience and having a little bit of education I think around it. And then just putting in the work as well because most people don’t want to go to the pool and train.

Tim Ballintine:
Yeah. It’s a funny one. I like that you go to that culture thing, I’ve got a four year old daughter who’s in the surf at the moment doing body boarding and just crunching through waves. And you think about some people in most parts of the world who might be jumping in a pool for the first time in their thirties. It’s a totally different and that’s always sometimes a challenge even for me as a coach is obviously swimming always came quite naturally to me because I was lucky. I was part of a squad. Because in Australia, you just kind of swim and sometimes you’ve got to be really careful as a coach to not make it sound like it should be all too easy because the reality is is it’s such a technical sport, but also then there’s those layers how you’d really want to try and simplify, it’s a bit like a golf swing.

Tim Ballintine:
I use that analogy a little bit, like you change one thing, it’s going to have a trickle down effect. And certainly when obviously we do some camps, but if there is a challenge there of distance where I think certainly myself as a coach in the early days I tried to be the pool deck coach by correspondence and it just really wasn’t working. I was pretty well overloading my athletes with corrections and the more and more I pulled back. So if someone sends me a swim video, I’d probably just like you, I could give them 10 red lines and 10 things to work on, but I kind of archive that and just give them literally one thing at a time. That’s what I’ve found sort of works, one or two things.

Tim Ballintine:
And then naturally as they correct those one or two things, it may inherently maybe create one other problem or it may fix five or six others as well. So I found that as a coach, a really, really important step myself. Most of my athletes are certainly able to with GoPros now and underwater cameras, they’re sending me videos all the time. So, but then it’s the doing of it. It’s all very well to have a glossy picture but then you’ve got to go do it.

Brenton:
Yeah, and that’s what I’ve really come down to as well. Like when I first started doing the online coaching, will actually will this actually work? Can I help someone improve their swimming if they’re in the US or somewhere else and can I do that by being remote. And the thing I found about it, and I spoke to a guy Baden who runs the skill stack, which is what we use for analysis and he does that with golf and we kind of came to-

Tim Ballintine:
There’s golf and swimming.

Brenton:
Exactly, like it’s so similar and we sort of came to the same conclusion that like what we both found was you can actually improve sometimes even more than face to face coaching because if you keep it really simple it’s like these one or two things, this is what you need to do, this is the drill that might help and this is what you might expect to experience or feel and you might need to exaggerate the thing that you’re trying to change. But sometimes that can actually be better for them because they’ve got the time and the space to be able to just make that change. I think that’s probably similar as well with you know, coaching by correspondence. People can kind of think about the session. They’re not feeling pressured with maybe other people around or the coach. So it can actually work better in many instances, which is surprising.

Tim Ballintine:
Yeah. Well as you would know, I think there’s a triathlon coach and an endurance coach. You do have to wear a few hats too, Brenton. So like we have to understand, not to downplay, obviously just focusing on one sport, but you have to kind of know a fair bit about the three disciplines. So what I also did is, I have quite a few athletes that consult with you, mate. I have a lower expert ceiling than you do because you think and breathe it every single day, swimming. So if I kind of get to a point where I’m struggling to get through or potentially need a different voice, you obviously help quite a few of my athletes as well.

Tim Ballintine:
So again, if you are a coach, don’t be afraid to say that you don’t actually have all the answers. It’s a hard thing to say because you think that the athlete may think less of you, but I would only stress that nine times out of 10 and I would actually hope 10 the athlete should appreciate that. And then, in the end, it’s for their benefit. So, certainly there has to be a lot of trust there. But yeah, man, lots of lessons, you sort of got to learn the hard way and fall on your face from time to time. But that’s life, right?

Brenton:
Yeah. I say it all the time. I cringe looking at the stuff that I used to teach and coach 10 years ago when I first started, but that’s a good thing. It means that you’ve actually changed what you’ve done and you’ve learnt something. And it’s probably good not to look back at that too much. Even some of the videos I used to do, even just on YouTube from that long ago, I can’t look back at them, it’s painful.

Tim Ballintine:
I don’t know about you, but like for me, I always find that very, very common, the thing is that it usually starts with breathing in swimming, that’s where the kind of, because people who are uncomfortable in the water or swimming environment, they’re trying to find a way to get oxygen because when they’ve got their face down, there’s no O2 down there that they can appropriately filter. So it’s like they’re just always just trying to find 02 in whatever way that seems to work in this kind of almost a survival mode. And so that for me is the coaches, my first go to is, “How are these people trying to get air?” It’s trying to simplify it, right? That’s where I’ll start with particularly with regions that aren’t, have a strong cultural swimming background, be it Asia or India or the Middle East, that they’re just not as adverse to swimming all the time.

Tim Ballintine:
And typically I see that it’s the breathing that that lies at the heart. Obviously the leg sinking, those sorts of things. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to breathe before you can kick your legs. Get that right first, get the breathing bit right first and then that often will settle them into an environment that they are probably never fully comfortable in, mate. Probably never, it’s not a natural, but certainly enough to get through a 1.9 or a 3.8K open water swim. It’s tough though. It’s hard. I don’t get it because I’m a swimmer, but I get it. I get the scary bit. I get it. Nobody wants to die.

Brenton:
I was thinking about this the other day, if I wasn’t a swimmer and I was out in the surf, if I was surfing in a reasonable sized swell, how comfortable would I actually be out there if I was not a handy swimmer. If I was a fairly weak swimmer. That’d be really scary if I felt like I might struggle to make 200 meters swimming if you lost your surfboard and you’re out there. And I thought, okay, I can relate to that a bit because I imagine what it would be like if you’re brand new to the sport, you’re in a big pool. It might be deep, that’s going to create some anxiety.

Tim Ballintine:
100%. 100%, so I think that that’s, if there’s anything that I can kind of, is certainly that breathing aspect and there’s all sorts of fixes for all different issues and then with the drills. But that’s always sort of come through for me is this sort of the primary thing when people are starting is getting that breathing right and all the things associated with it.

Brenton:
And with some athletes that you’ve coached, let’s say ones that you’ve coached for a longer period of time and the ones that have improved their swimming, what are some of those factors that you see making a difference? And maybe some examples of athletes, don’t need to give names or anything, but what are some of those things that you see making a difference?

Tim Ballintine:
Well, for the guys that I’ve coached for a long period of time, typically, I’d like to think they’ve improved. So they get to a level where they’re not so relatively competitive, but they’re comfortable in the environment in which that they race or belong in. So let’s say triathlon. One of a bit of a breakthrough things, so just sort of park technique but just sit in the helicopter of just swimming in general is that swimming is often approached in the wrong way, I think for triathletes that sometimes it can just be seen as a recovery session to the bike and the run. And they just don’t bring the intensity required to make improvements. So you think about bike or run, there’s got to be some intensity there to get faster or to get stronger, you’ve got to put in efforts, but people aren’t often willing to do the hard 100s and 200s in the pool.

Tim Ballintine:
And this is past the point of can I swim or not? This is just genuinely hard work. And so what a lot of athletes make the mistake, or they tend to do is they just increase volume. So like, I’m doing Basso, I’ve got a long swim coming up. I’ll just chuck the paddles on for two Ks. That’ll make me stronger. I’d much rather you go and do ten 100s to be frank and half the distance, but increase the intensity because the reality is, Brenton, also when they’re trying to balance swim, bike, run, they can’t swim 20 Ks a week typically. So we’re doing maybe three, maybe four swims for some of the guys going to Kona certainly. But three swims a week, three to four Ks. You and I both know that those high, high level swimmers are swimming 50, 60 Ks, right?

Tim Ballintine:
So we’re trying to get kind of marginally improvement out of in reality in the pool, in terms of time commitment, not all that much. If you have got a pie chart or a wedge where swimming gets the smallest portion. So I think you’ve got to try and inject some intensity in there. And that’s really hard to do initially because typically that the notion is, Oh, I’ll just chuck the poor boy in, I’ll just kind of go through the motions and when they get to understand or they get on the clock, get on the clock, like start to use the clock at the pool. This thing that has a time thing on it, it rotates around 60.

Brenton:
It’s there for a reason.

Tim Ballintine:
You just stop, start you going to get on the clock. That’s also a big thing that I find gets people to break through because you don’t win. It’s such a cliche, you’re not winning a triathlon with a swim, but God damn like you can set up such a great race with having a good swim or if you have it bad swim and you’re trying to do something in terms of qualifying or just move up the order in your age group, you’re just chasing tail all day and yeah, it’s a tricky one. So I think intensity is a big thing. I think that that is something that often is just sort of left on the side.

Brenton:
Yeah. And I think along with that and it kind of plays into it. It’s just that that change of pace, and I get it too. I’m looking at the running that I’ve done over the last two months and I’ve started to run a bit more.

Tim Ballintine:
You’ve been running?

Brenton:
Well, I’ve sort of tapered off now.

Tim Ballintine:
Is it on Strava?

Brenton:
It’s on Strava, I had a 70 K week, but now I’m back down to about 10 to 15, but it’s kind of waned off now and I’m probably doing like 15 Ks a week so back into it. But the pace has just been pretty consistent. I haven’t done any hardly any efforts. It’s kind of like I’m going to the pool and just swimming. But when I look back at the training I was doing for Ironman, I had a lot of varied pace and yeah, it might be one K on, one K off, and my speed was so much better when I’m looking at the times that I was doing in races. And so I can see how it’s easy to just slip into sitting at one speed. But if you can just throw in some efforts or variable pace work, you just get so much better at actually racing.

Tim Ballintine:
100%, because races have a great, very high level of variable pace, don’t they? From the start to the finish of whatever distance, the start is usually like well and truly over threshold, and even trying to swim to get around people or swim to have people go past you or people swimming over the top of you. It’s not like following a black line in the open water. So you’ve got to get used to that variance in heart rate or whatever mechanism that you’re using. But also, if you are on limited time, I genuinely think that you’ve just got to bring the heat as they say in the pool and knowing what that sort of feels like. For even myself who, not a bad swimmer in the context of triathlon, like when I’m at the end of the hard 200 or 10 by 200 like I’m over the lane ropes.

Tim Ballintine:
I’m not in pain, but I’m certainly looking for oxygen and I very rarely see that at the pool. If I think about people sort of touching the wall and coming up to have a drink, I always kind of look and I go, they’re not working hard enough and I just stay to stay in my own little bubble. But some people might look at me and go, “Jeez, that looks nuts.” But that’s kind of what’s required I think. Not all the time. Obviously you don’t have to do it every swim set, the coach will guide you. But if it says hard or if it says sprint, that’s what it’s there to be there to be done. But you’ve got to be underpinned by pretty good technique to be able to do it too.

Brenton:
I think it becomes quite, it’s quite a fun, quite an addictive thing to do. When I’m leading up to some, like I’m going to do Pier to Pub, which is a 1200 meter race and hopefully some other events around that. But I’ll do some sets that might be some 400s or 200s looking to hit that same sort of pace that I want to do in the race. And look forward to that session every time I do it. It might be one or two sessions a week, but it’s like, “I want to get in there and have a go and see if I can go a little bit quicker this week and see that progression over the course of eight to 12 weeks.”

Brenton:
Look, when you’re not fit and you’re not feeling good, it’s a grind. So you normally have to sit, I mean I normally have to sit a couple seconds slower than where I would ideally like to be, but when that’s the case, you just suck it up and go, “Okay, today’s not my day, but I’ve still got to put in the effort. But I know the times won’t be there.”

Tim Ballintine:
I always find, even if you’ve got a big pedigree in swimming, it even shows like you take two weeks off swimming or you’re out of the pool for an extended period. I really think that percentage wise it feels the sting, it comes back relatively quick. But you know, if you take a couple of weeks off the bike or maybe even running, you can kind of claw it back. I found with swimming though, it’s the audit kind of where you’re at, fine with swimming. Like it’ll tell you where you’re at. So, it’s a funny one. But yeah mate, absolutely love it. You’ve got to got to enjoy getting in the water and it’s a good environment to be.

Brenton:
I just love that there’s always something to work on. So in the start of November, I did a 12 200 set and it was the quickest I’ve ever done in training. And then the next, or I think it was like the next day, I came off the mountain bike and I couldn’t move my arm above there for four weeks. So I just stuffed up my AC joint and so I’m about 98% of the way.

Tim Ballintine:
You know the issue. Do you know the issue? You’re on a mountain bike.

Brenton:
Yeah, and it’s gotten two rides since and they’ve been pretty tame. So yeah, my preferred route.

Tim Ballintine:
Fixed ride doesn’t count.

Brenton:
Exactly. Yeah.

Tim Ballintine:
Down to the cafe and you get your soy latte.

Brenton:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s all I think all I’m going to do now is not going downhill at all. That was well beyond my ability, but it’s taken me, what is it now, it’s nearly four November. December. Okay. So it’s three and a half months and I’m about back to where I was then. And obviously that’s the sort of injury, but I was out for a few weeks and it just takes a while to get back. But the good thing about it is I’ve been able to work on my stroke while I couldn’t swim fast and while I couldn’t swim hard, and I feel like this sort of change in strokes that I’ve been able to work on will actually help me to go quicker again in probably the next four to six weeks time. So there’s always something to improve, even at a high level and it’s a great thing that I love about the sport.

Tim Ballintine:
I think if I was listening to this right now, I’d have one thing. What’s he swim for 12 by two hundreds, can you say your times?

Brenton:
Yeah, it’s short course. So it doesn’t count. Long course would be different, but yeah.

Tim Ballintine:
What’s your 200 times?

Brenton:
It was, it was 10 to, Oh, sorry, 12 how many was it?.

Tim Ballintine:
12?

Brenton:
No, sorry, I lied. I was 10 twos on 2:30 coming in on 2:20.

Tim Ballintine:
Solid, mate.

Brenton:
That was short course though. So long course probably add five seconds in overall, I think. Yeah, that bloody killed me.

Tim Ballintine:
That’s really interesting. Not to turn it into a weighing contest, so when I’m coming right into my peak swimming into say an Ironman, I’ll do 10 twos and I’ll try and touch under 2:30 and leave on the 2:45, that’s about for me. So if I get to that, it’s funny just a yardstick. Once I can do that for say a month, I’m know that I’m ready to swim an Ironman in around kind of under 55 and that’s typically, I was trying really hard for a long period of time as an athlete to try and get my Ironman swim under 50 minutes. And at the end of the day, I was putting way too many eggs in that basket and I should be just happy with the 53, 54 but trying to put more time towards my bike.

Tim Ballintine:
And that changed the game for me, Brenton, in terms of just in a half context, that was a real game changer. So I think even when I was asking you a few things, I was trying to get my time under 50 and I kind of just, I gave up on that. It was just taking way too much time. I probably would have got there, but my bike was just suffering too much. And so I just am now content being a 54 and riding a lot better. So, that’s definitely changed racing tracing for me for sure. But yeah, no, it’s interesting, [inaudible 00:34:10] Holy moly. But yeah, that’s flying.

Brenton:
I say that and then I speak to someone like Dan Smith.

Tim Ballintine:
Oh, stop.

Brenton:
Some of the sets that he was doing, like he’s doing 400, no 300s coming in on like, oh, what was it? It was descending. It was like 2:56, 2:54, 2:50 or something. This is short course again, but oh my God. All right. That’s a whole nother level.

Tim Ballintine:
Yeah, it is. Triathletes will say, or then you’ve got to go run a 2:50 marathon though. Try to do that. That’s the battle though. Where do you shift? So if you’ve got eight hours to train a week, where do you put, so as a coach or as an athlete, where do you allocate the time? And so if you’ve got eight hours, 10, 12, 15, whatever it may be, and then you’ve got strength as well. You’re really just project managing people’s time a lot of the time. And like a swim, a 60 minute swim set is actually a couple of hours by the time you get to the pool, get out of the pool, do all those things, it’s two hours. Whereas like say an indoor train on the bike, two hours, a one hour trainer sets about a one 15 time commitment. So that’s genuinely like, you’re trying to crunch people’s schedules so much these days as well. So that’s also, I think, where swimming suffers is that unless you’ve got a 50 meter lap pool in your house, which we don’t all do like you do in your mansion but it’s tricky to do.

Brenton:
I mean I look back at when I was doing triathlon and next time I do a half Ironman or full distance Ironman, so much more time needs to go on to the bike. I was doing 250, 300 Ks a week, it needs to be a lot more than that to actually do well because that bike was just a huge chunk of my race and I put too much time into the swim. That was it.

Tim Ballintine:
Rewind two minutes mate. That’s exactly like what I kind of discovered and real breakthrough. So if you’re looking for a coach, hit me up.

Brenton:
Yeah. So in terms of our getting in touch with you, and you run a podcast as well, which we haven’t talked about. So do you want to maybe talk about where people can find you and your podcast and get in touch with you?

Tim Ballintine:
Yeah, so our coaching business is called Koa Sports. So we’re an online coaching business with, like I said, athletes around the world so they can just go to koasports.com. We do do a podcast, which will be coming on in May when I drag you up here as well.

Brenton:
There’s is fancy, they’re in person so.

Tim Ballintine:
We’ve got a bit of a studio, but we do a lot of e-sports stuff as well in the Swift world. So we do a lot of stuff. But I’ve got two other full time coaches, Ken Cross and Greg McDermott, so we’re all full time. That’s a really big thing for me but there’s plenty of coaching businesses with a lot more coaches and a lot more athletes. But I really believe as I kind of project myself as an athlete, sometimes I’d want my coach to be full time, to be frank.

Tim Ballintine:
I want them to be thinking not so much about me, but about the career or the discipline or the industry of coaching and all the different ways and the changes and the innovation and the different tools. And that’s really hard, I think, if you’re an accountant Monday to Friday and you’re writing programs on a Friday night after a big week, that’s really difficult to do. You’ve got three full time coaches here, that’s pretty unique because, like I said, coaching still quite an immature thing. So very, very lucky.

Tim Ballintine:
But yeah, hit us up on the website, my own Twitter, I’ve got a blog and all sorts of stuff so maybe you would chuck it in the notes, but I’m always looking for new talent and I think we’ve got about half a dozen or eight going to Kona next year already. So it should be pretty. Topo 70.3 local, 70.3 world champs, which is going to be massive and we’re up in Asia all the time racing and doing some stuff up there as well. So, yeah, love it, mate. Just full all in. Just absolutely love it.

Brenton:
Very busy. Yeah, that’s great. And it sounds like it’s really growing, especially with athletes in 30 countries as well. So it’s huge. And I’ll put all those links in there in the show notes and people listening to be able to find everything there. So mate, thanks for coming on the podcast and looking forward to being on yours in a couple months time.

Tim Ballintine:
No worries. Maybe we’ll see you then.

I don’t know about you, but like for me, like I always find that very, very common. The thing is, is that it usually starts with breathing in swimming. Because people who are uncomfortable in the water or a swimming environment, they’re just, they’re trying to find a way to get oxygen. 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 Tim Ballantine, who I’ve known for quite a few years now. And Tim, you’re up on the Sunshine Coast up, well, up towards Noosa, where we run a camp every year. And you moved up there pretty recently from Melbourne. So, how are you enjoying it up there? And welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Brenton, mate. Yeah, it’s a, it’s been a great move. We’ve been up here on the sunny coast for a couple of years, albeit we were on the Gold Coast for about eight years, mate. So we got a bit of a taste in as probably how I sort of fell into endurance sports to be frank. And then we found out we’re having our first born and decided we’d move back to Melbourne to be close to the sort of friends and family and lasted 18 months. Because our lifestyle had just changed so much to be frank, even just the getting up early bit, you know, we just, we moved to the Gold Coast when we’re

about 2021, which is not a bad age to move to the Gold Coast, mind you. But then, yeah, just totally, you know, in seven or eight years, which life happens, we just changed our behaviors, our lifestyle and tried to sort of pick all that up and move it to Melbourne. I still love, I still consider Melbourne where I’m from, obviously, but just with with work, life, business and all the, all the hats that, that you wear. It made sense to come back to Queensland and, and such is the business that I run, you can sort of run it from, from anywhere. And we picked, we used to come to Coolham Beach for a holiday. And so we just picked that we’d live here. It’s kind of like without rubbing it in. But yeah, very, very lucky, very, very lucky. We love it. It’s a, you have a couple of camps up here. So all your listeners and effortless, we would know it’s noose or an around here, mate. It’s pretty hard to beat, for instance, pretty hard to beat, mate.

Look, I do whatever I can to get up there. And so that’s why I think it’s important to escape the cold when you, when you get the chance. So it’s a great place to, to train. And, and you obviously come from a high level of sport background, but also coaching a number of athletes who have gone on to competing Kona. And you’ve got quite a widespread of athletes that you’re coaching. And on this podcast, I want to talk about and kind of get out of you. What are some of those things that you’ve learned over the last seven, eight years as an athlete and as a coach that, that you could pass on to those people that are listening? Because we have a whole bunch of triathletes and endurance athletes that, that listen to this. And I think it’d be great to kind of pick your brain and see what some of those things are. So from a, I guess, a coaching perspective, what, where did you start with that? And where have you sort of got to, how has your philosophy changed over

the last couple of years? Good, good question. I think like most coaches, they, they start out with just a toe in the water. It’s, it’s a, I find coaching, and you know, some coaches have been doing for 20, 30 years, Mike cringe, but it’s, I still find it quite an immature industry or an immature career. I still think that it’s, it’s sort of finding its way, maybe in a different context of the way that we operate as well, but it’s very hard to just dive headfirst into and leave whatever it is that you’re doing behind. You need obviously to be underpinned by, by good qualifications and good mentorship. And I think as a coach starting out, that’s really, really critical that, that you get good people around you. I think that’s like anything in life, isn’t it? Like you, and part of one of those people, I’ll be honest, without your head wobbling off, I saw you as, as a real sort of leading thinker in the context of swimming, which is why I sort of cold called you and asked to sort of tag

along in a few bits and pieces and pick your brain. And I also was partnered up there with Craig Percival and did a lot of stuff with him in Melbourne. And, you know, sadly, we lost Craig tragically. And that really changed the whole landscape for me in a really heavy, heavy-hearted kind of way. It sort of maybe forced my hand to make some, some harder decisions. And, but he was, he was a great man. And that’s the picture. If you have got the video going, I don’t know, live, but he’s the one right there behind me. And yeah, so great people, man. It’s like your athletes too, Brenton, you’d be the same. You just learned so much from good people. And hopefully as a coach also, you know, you’re trying to impart some of that knowledge. But certainly for me starting out, if you are thinking about having a go at coaching,

surround yourself with good mentors. And there’s some great coaches out there, like really great coaches, but they just might not be for you as well. It’s a bit like you was an athlete as well. Like there would be some great coaches out there who, if I put my athlete head on for a second, just wouldn’t be right for me. And the same goes for mentors in business and in coaching. You’ve got to find what sort of works for you as well. Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, if I had to be a hard-ass old school sort of swimming coach, I would, that wouldn’t, that’s not me. I’m just a little bit more laid back, probably a bit more friendlier than some of the hard-ass coaches. And I’m getting better at sort of putting the foot down when I need to, not in a, you know, like a controlling way, but just in a way of, a lot of people respond well to that sort of coaching where they want to be told, all right, you’ve got to go for it now, that sort of thing. And so just learning to change for the athlete

that you’re working with. But the overall, I guess the overall way that I coach is not going to be like that. So I think, yeah, you sort of find your style, you find your groove. And then the people who are attracted to that will come to you and they’ll be the ones that want to work with you. Well, you’re not for everyone, right? I mean, you can’t, you can’t be all things to all people. And that’s also a thing that you try and, you try and work out early days when you’re, when you’re thinking, even if you’re sort of that part-time, full-time, sort of thing, am I going to do this full-time? It’s like, you try to be everything to everyone because you think you have all the answers. And frankly, yeah, I can help you with this, that. And then the further you get down the road, you start to work out your strengths as a coach as well and what your weaknesses are. And, and also the type of athletes that you like working

with, you know, that’s, that’s the bottom line. That’s that to be perfectly frank. There’s certain types of athletes that as a coach you like working with, and there’s some that you don’t. And that’s okay. You know, that’s, that’s, I don’t see any problem with that. You’d rather be honest up front. So I remember when I first did my swimming Australia accreditation that your old man, I think Brian, is he Brian? Yeah, he spoke and he would, he would be genuinely one of the more impressive people I’ve heard speak about swim coaching. His passion, his passion was just like, you could, you could really, you could feel it in the room. And like you could just, I remember seeing you, this was at least five or six years ago, you were sitting in the front row. I remember looking down at you and because I was in the back of the auditorium going, wow, what a, like for you knowing that you’re a swim coach, like

what a great mentor. You know, I hope I haven’t thrown you under the bus there, but I, I think that, you know, I certainly just in that one hour in the room with your old man, but you know, what a marvelous mentor and I’m not sure whether he’s still swim coaching. Is he? He is. Yeah. Yeah. He’s, I was going to say he’s doing less, a little bit less, but no, he’s still, still coaching. I don’t know how many sessions a week, eight to 10 sessions a week. And yeah, mum and dad run a learn to swim business, which is quite, quite large. And yeah, I was very lucky to, I was coached by him and obviously saw him coaching others. And I think that’s where I got a lot of my coaching personality from that and the way that I coach and one of the best things that he did, I think when I was probably set, maybe 18 at the time, he sent me over. He said, you should go and see this guy in New Zealand. He’s a, he’s a trainer and he sort of trains people how to train or how to like present and how to

coach. And, and this guy was awesome. So I went to this two day course and he was basically how to, how to get people involved and, and part of the learning process instead of just talking at them. And so just with different exercises and different ways to approach it. And I learnt so much from that course and dad had been to that twice, I think. And, and that made a huge difference. And so when we run our camps in Thailand and that kind of thing, it’s, it’s a way to really just get, get people involved and, and working in small groups. And it made a huge difference to my approach of how people learn because they learn, as you know, you learn so much more from actually doing, being involved, talking with others, sharing your experience than sitting down and watching a, like a presentation, you know, and, and as you said, you could feel the passion that he was talking with. And it’s like, yeah, it’s not the words, it’s, it’s how you say them and, and how you convey it. So I think that’s

really important. There’s that mentor, man. Like, you know, you, you know, that’s what I was sort of touching on. You get those right people. And yeah, it sort of sets you, sets you on the path. And then there does come a point where, you know, you sort of have to, you pull the ripcord and decide, do I want to, do I want to make a fist of this? Like, do I want to make a career out of this? And you don’t really come across many coaches that don’t like their jobs. And not to generalize, but in the, in the general sense, maybe if it’s lawyers, accountants, bankers, like, you’re going to come across the odd person, that it’s just a job or they just, they genuinely don’t like what they do. But let’s try to think coaching is that sort of job where they, if you don’t like it, you’re not going to last very long. And that, and that is of great benefit to athletes and, and clients or whatever, because you’re genuinely, you’re connected to someone that

likes what they do. And it’s because it’d be one of those jobs, I’d find it very, if you didn’t like it, then I don’t think it lasts long at all. I really don’t. So, yeah, that’s certainly, I think something pretty unique to the coaching landscape that, that the majority of people actually like their job as horrible as that might sound. Yeah, well, it’s very true, I think. And thinking of the, the way that you like to sort of program with athletes and work with them, what’s your, how do you go about it? How often are you talking with people? How, how do you set the programs looking at their, at their events coming up? What’s the sort of process that you’d go through? Yeah, sure. So every, I mean, it’s very cliche, but everyone is truly different. And the reality is, is some athletes require a little more communication than others, for sure. I mean, you sort of find that mark, there’s some blokes that, that are kind of like,

mate, just tell me what to do and we’ll, you know, chat once a month and that’s all good. And there’s some athletes that, that sort of, you know, two or three times a week, you sort of hear from or talk to, and that’s fine. And I think that there’s also a point as a coach, you got to be really careful, particularly as an online coach, is that if you find that you’re having to talk to an athlete every day, I actually put that back on me to say, I’m not doing my job to get the message across, because genuinely, if you’re needing to speak and get clarification or feedback every single day, not only is that a bit heavy, but I just think that you’re probably just not doing your job as a coach to try and get the message through as as to what sort of each week means. We use training peaks as our program delivery tool. But really, the program is, is really just the surface as a coach. It’s that I think one of the most underrated things is accountability. And some

athletes who are just dialed in don’t really require accountability. They want the science side. And you just after probably a month or two, you’re kind of fine. What works, Brenton, for, for certain athletes, you know, you got the, you got an athlete who has been on the couch and wanting to do their first half marathon in 12 months. The approach with that athlete is very different to someone who might be wanting to qualify for Kona after their fifth Ironman. I mean, there’s no, there’s no cookie cutter here. We don’t use any, one of the things we do here, not to plug the business, but certainly my other two coaches, well, I’m not much the same. We don’t do any libraries or any, any workout templates or anything like that. So there’s no kind of drag and drop. It’s all literally sounds inefficient, but you get better at it. We write every session for, for what it, for what it is. And that seems to work pretty well. We get

really good results. We don’t sort of, you know, beat our chest about them. But, but certainly if you look sort of pound for pound out, our team does pretty well. And we’re across the world. We’re over 30 countries now. So it’s a great, great diversity in the squad.

And that’s for two reasons. One, it reduces the seasonality of, of, of endurance coaching for sure. So we’re literally 54, 46, Northern Southern Hemisphere as, as of the end of last year. And it just really smooths the income because the reality is, Brenton, we’re trying to make a living too. And I think that any athlete would want their coach not having to worry about whether they can pay the mortgage, it’s more about focusing on trying to get the best out of their athletes. So we’ve made a real effort to try and spread that athlete base. And as a coach, it’s amazing working with people in, in so many different cultures, you know, whether it’s in Japan, you can’t swim the toys, whether it’s in the Middle East, you can’t basically swim in a pool for about four months a year, because it’s like a bath, you know, whether it’s in Europe where, you know, they have ice issues, whether it’s in Australia, like, you know, there’s all kind of different coaching methods as well.

So yeah, it’s good fun. It’s good fun. It’s funny you bring that up. I’ve got, I’ve got three ladies who I do stroke analysis coaching with online and they’re in Japan. And they, and they’ve recently moved pools so they can start to use a snorkel and fins because their pools don’t allow it. It’s like, it’s just such a different thing. And I remember a friend of mine, she’s Japanese, she went back home a couple of years ago. She was swimming in the fast lane in a pool and there was a guy walking in that lane. And he basically, he physically grabbed her and stopped her and told her to stop swimming so fast. It’s like, wow, if you tried that in a pool here in Melbourne, like good luck to you. That’s just the pedals that you’d start doing butterfly with paddles. Yeah, yeah, just the complete opposite. So yeah, you learn a lot from seeing what it’s like in other countries. And I think we’re very lucky here in Australia

with the training environment that we’ve got, particularly the pools. Like there’s so many pools around that you’re hard pressed not to find one within 10 days. It’s part of, swimming’s part of our culture as Australians. And this is one of the things like they talk about sort of the barriers to entry of triathlon. And obviously financials are a big thing. But I would say I’ve said this many times on other podcasts or whatever that swimming’s almost an equal barrier of entry to triathlon as financially, I think pretty close. It’s the one thing that probably creates the most anxiety or scares the most people off that you’ve got to get through the swim. That means it’s I’ve got or worked with where they just want to get through the swim and then they can bike run. Because the reality is, without scaring too many people, if you stop pedaling on the bike, well, you just slow down. And if you stop running or you just stop, but if you stop swimming, you sink.

So like it’s kind of like that’s the reality. So it’s a big thing, you know, like getting past that barrier to entry of swimming. And that’s something that I think triathlon can do a much. I don’t have all the answers, but I think triathlon needs to always constantly work out trying to break down those barriers. And I think swimming’s definitely a big part of that. Yeah, I completely agree. And we have a lot of swimmers who come to our clinics who they’re either wanting to start triathlon and they don’t know how to swim or they can barely swim. Or they’ve done a triathlon, realized they just made it through and they might have had to hold on to the kayak of the lifesavers there for a while. But then and we’ve had so many swimmers who have then after, all right, they know what they need to do. And they’ve got the understanding of the fundamentals that will help them survive and then eventually enjoy it. And after

a couple of months, and sometimes it can take six to 12 months, when they start to enjoy it, it makes such a big difference in their their training and their swing and how they approach the swim when they’re racing. Because as you said, most people just want to get through it. But if you can enjoy the swim, it’s then and I mean, I want to I’d love to swim all day and not have to do the bike and run if that was triathlon. But it’s not the case. But boy, it can make a huge difference. And I think it just takes that level of confidence. And that only comes from experience and having a little bit of education, I think around it. And then just, you know, just just putting in the work as well, because most people don’t want to go to the pool and train. Yeah, it’s a funny one. Like you go to that culture thing, like I’ve got a I’ve got a four year old daughter who’s in the surf at the moment doing, you know, bodyboarding and just crunching through waves. And you think about

some people in most parts of the world who might be jumping in a pool for the first time in their 30s. It’s it’s a totally different and that’s that’s always sometimes a challenge. Even for me as a coach is is obviously swimming always came quite naturally to me because I was lucky. I was, you know, part of a squad and swam, you know, just because in Australia, you know, you just kind of swim and and sometimes you’ve got to be really careful as a coach to not make it sound like it should be all too easy because the reality is, it’s such a technical sport. But also then there’s those layers of how how you’d really want to try and simplify and spit like a golf swing. I use that analogy a little bit, you know, like you change one thing, it’s going to have a trickle down effect. And certainly when, you know, obviously we do some camps, but there is a challenge there of distance where I think certainly myself as a coach in the early days, I tried

to be the pool deck coach by correspondence. And it just really wasn’t working. I was pretty well overloading my athletes with with corrections. And the more and more I pulled back. So if someone sends me a swim video, probably just like you, you know, I could give them 10 red lines and 10 things to work on. But I kind of archive that and just give them literally one thing at a time. That’s what I found sort of works with one or two things. And then naturally as they correct those one or two things, it may inherently maybe create one other problem, or it may fix five or six others as well. So I found that as a coach, a really, really important step myself. So, you know, most of my athletes are certainly not able to with GoPros now and underwater cameras, they’re sending me videos all the time. So, but then it’s the doing, doing of it, you know, it’s all very well to have a have a glossy picture, but then you’ve got to go do it.

Yeah, that’s, and that’s what I’ve really come down to as well. Like when I first started doing the online coaching, I first wanted, is this will actually, will this actually work? And can I help someone improve their swimming if they’re in the US or somewhere else? And can I do that by, by being remote? And the thing, the thing I found about it, and I spoke to a guy, Baden, who, who runs the skillist app, which is what we use for analysis. And he does that with golf. And we kind of came to this golf swimming, right? Exactly. Like it’s so similar. And we sort of came to the same conclusion that like what we both found was, you can actually improve sometimes even more than face to face coaching, because if you keep it really simple, it’s like, all right, this one or two things, this is what you need to do. This is what this is the drill that might help. And this is what you might expect to experience or feel. And you might need to exaggerate the thing you’re

trying to change. But sometimes that can actually be better for them because they’ve got the time and the space to be able to just make that change. And I think that’s probably similar as well with coaching by correspondences, people can kind of think about the session, they’re not feeling pressured with maybe other people around or the coach. So it can actually work better in many instances, which is surprising. Yeah, as you would know, like I think as a triathlon coach and an endurance coach, you do have to wear a few hats as to Brenton. So like we have to understand not to downplay, obviously just focusing on one sport, but you have to kind of know a fair bit about the three disciplines. So what I also did is, you know, I’ve got quite a few athletes that consult with you, mate, you know, that I kind of there is, there is a I have a lower expert ceiling than you do, because you think and breathe it every single day swimming. So if I kind of get to a point where

I’m struggling to get through or potentially need a different voice, you obviously help quite a few of my athletes as well. So again, if you are a coach, don’t be afraid to say that you don’t actually have all the answers. It’s a it’s a hard thing to say because you think that the athlete may think less of you, but I would only stress that nine times out of 10, and I would I would actually hope 10 the athletes should appreciate that. And then, you know, in the end, it’s for their benefit. So, you know, certainly, there has to be a lot of a lot of trust there. But yeah, man, lots, lots of lessons, you’ve sort of got to learn the hard way and fall on your face from time to time. But that’s that’s life, right? Yeah, I say it all the time. I cringe looking at the stuff that I used to teach and coach 10 years ago when I was when I first started. But that’s that’s a good thing. It means that you’ve actually changed what you’ve

done and you’ve learned something. So it’s probably good not to look back at that too much, even some of the videos I used to do, even just on on YouTube from that long ago, it’s just what I can’t look back at them. It’s painful. I don’t look, I don’t know about you. But like for me, like, I always find it very, very common. The thing is, is that it usually starts with breathing in swimming. Is that’s where the kind of because people who are uncomfortable in the water or a swimming environment, they’re just they’re trying to find a way to get oxygen. Because when they’ve got their face down, there’s there’s no O2 down there that they can appropriately filter. So it’s like, they’re just always just trying to find O2 in whatever way that seems to work. And it’s kind of almost a survival mode. And so that for me, as a coach, is like my first go to is, okay, how are these people trying to get air? It’s trying to simplify

it, right? So that’s kind of that’s where I’ll start with, particularly with with regions that aren’t, you know, have a strong cultural swimming background, be it Asia or India or the Middle East, that that’s that, you know, they’re just not as adverse to swimming all the time. And typically, I see that it’s the breathing that that lies at the heart, you know, obviously the legs sinking those sorts of things. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to breathe before you can kick your legs. So get that right first, like get the breathing bit right first, and then that often will settle them into an environment that they are probably never fully comfortable in mate, like probably never it’s not a natural, but certainly enough to get through a 1.9 or a 3.8k open water swim. It’s tough, though. It’s hard. Like, I don’t get it because I’m a swimmer, but I get it. I get the scary bit. I get it. Like, nobody wants to die.

And I was sort of I was thinking about this the other day, like if I if I wasn’t a swimmer, and I was out in the surf, if I was surfing in a reasonable size, well, how comfortable would I actually be out there if I was a not a not a handy swimmer, if I was a fairly weak swimmer? And I was thinking that’d be really scary. If I felt like I was I might struggle to make 200 meters swimming, if you lost your surfboard, and you’re out there. And I thought, okay, I can kind of I can relate to that a bit because I imagine what it would be like if you brand you to the sport, you’re in a big pool, it might be deep. That that’s very, that’s going to create some anxiety. 100%. 100%. So I think that that’s, you know, if there’s anything that I can kind of, you know, is certainly that breathing aspect. And, you know, and there’s all sorts of fixes for all different issues. And then with the drills, but that’s, you know, always sort of comes through

for me as the sort of the primary thing when people are starting is, is getting that breathing right. And all the things associated with it. And with the some athletes that you’ve coached, let’s say ones that you’ve coached for a longer period of time, and the ones that have improved their swimming, what are some of those factors that you see making a difference in maybe some examples of athletes don’t need to give names or anything. But what’s what are some of those things that you see making a difference? Well, for the guys that I’ve coached for a long period of time, typically, I’d like to think they’ve improved. So they are they get to a level where they’re not so relatively competitive, but they’re comfortable in the environment in which that they race or belong in. So let’s say triathlon. I was one of a bit of a breakthrough thing. So just sort of park technique, but just sit in the helicopter of just swimming in general is

that, you know, swimming, swimming is often approached in the wrong way. I think for triathletes says that sometimes it can just be seen as a recovery session to the bike and the run. And they just don’t bring the intensity required to make improvements. So you think about bike or run, there’s got to be some intensity there to get faster or to get stronger. You’ve got to put in efforts, but people aren’t often willing to do the hard 100s and 200s in the pool. And this is past the point of, can I swim or not? This is just genuinely hard work. And so what a lot of athletes make the mistake or what they tend to do is they just increase volume. So like, you know, I’ve got a doing bus. Oh, I’ve got a long swim coming up. I’ll just chuck the paddles on for two Ks. You know, that’ll make me stronger. I’d much rather you go and do 10 100s to be frank and half the distance, but increase the intensity, because the reality is Brenton also, when they’re trying to balance swim by ground,

they can’t swim 20 Ks a week typically. Right. So we’re doing maybe three, maybe four swims for some of the guys going to Kona certainly, but three swims a week, three to four Ks. You and I both know that those high, high level swimmers are swimming 50, 60 Ks, right? So we’re trying to get kind of marginally improvement out of in reality in the pool in terms of time commitment, not all that much. If you have got a pie, a pie chart or a wedge swimming gets the smallest portion, right? So I think you’ve got to try and inject some intensity in there. And that’s really hard to do initially because typically that the notion is, Oh, I’ll just chuck the pool boy in or, you know, just kind of go through the motions. And when they get to understand, or they get on the clock, get on the clock, like start to use the clock at the pool, this thing that has a time thing on it rotates around 60, not just the garment, you know, you just stop, start your going like get on the

clock. That’s also a big thing that I find gets people to break through because you don’t win. It’s such a cliche. You’re not winning a triathlon with a swim. But goddamn, like you can set up such a great race, which having with having a good swim, or if you have a bad swim and you’re trying to do something in terms of qualifying or just, you know, move up the order in your age group, you’re just chasing tail all day. And yeah, it’s it’s a tricky one. So I think intensity is a big thing. I think that that is something that often is just kind of left on the on the side. Yeah. And I think along with that, and it kind of plays into it, it’s just that that change of pace and most and I get it too. I mean, I’m looking at the running that I’ve done over the last two months and I’ve started to run a bit more. Well, yeah, I’ve sort of tapered off now. I had a great decision. It’s on Strava had a 70k week,

but now I’m back to about 10 different things. But it’s kind of waned off now, and I’m probably doing like 15ks a week. So that’s back into it. But the like the pace has just been pretty consistent. Like I haven’t I haven’t done any hardly any efforts. It kind of likes I’m going to the pool and just swimming. But when I look back at the training I was doing for Ironman, I had a lot of varied pace and, you know, it might be one k on one k off. But and my speed was so much better when I’m looking at the times that I was doing in in races. And so I can see how it’s easy to just slip into sitting at one speed. But if you can just throw in some some efforts or variable pace work, that you you just get so much better at actually racing. 100% because races have a great very high level of variable pace, don’t they? You know, from the start to the to the finish of whatever distance the start is usually like well and truly over threshold, you know, and even trying to swim to get around people or

swim to have people go past you or people swimming over the top of you. There’s just it’s not like following a black line in the open water. So, you know, you’ve got to get used to that variance in heart rate or whatever mechanism that you’re using. But also, you know, if you are on limited time, I genuinely think that you’ve just got to bring bring the heat as they say in the pool and knowing what that sort of feels like, like, you know, for even myself who, you know, I’ve got, you know, not a bad swimmer in the context of triathlon, like when I’m, you know, at the end of the hard 200 or 10 by 200, like I’m over the lane ropes, like I’m in, I’m in not in pain, but I’m certainly looking for oxygen. And I very rarely see that at the pool. If I think about people sort of touching the wall and coming up to have a drink, they don’t I always kind of looking like I did not work and hard enough. And you know, I just stay to stay in my own little bubble. But some people might look at me

and go, Jesus, it pokes nuts. But that’s kind of what’s required, I think, not all the time. Obviously, you don’t have to do it every swim set. The coach will guide you. But if it says hard, or if it says sprint, that’s, that’s what it’s there to be, there to be done. But you’ve got to be underpinned by, by pretty good technique to be able to do it too. I think it becomes quite, it’s quite a fun and quite an addictive thing to, to do. Like I, when I’m leading up to summer, like when I’m with Peter Pub, which is a 1200 meter race, and hopefully some other events around that. But there’s usually, I’ll do some sets that might be some 400s or 200s looking to hit that same sort of pace that I want to do in the race. And it’s like, I look forward to that session every, every time I do it, might be one or two sessions a week. But it’s like, yeah, I want to, I want to get in there and have a go and see if I can go a little bit quicker this week and, and see that progression

over the course of eight to 12 weeks. And, and look, when you’re not fit and you’re not feeling good, it’s a grind. So you normally have to sit, I mean, I normally have to sit a couple of seconds slower than where I would ideally like to be. But when that’s the case, just suck it up and go, okay, today’s not my day, but I’ve still got to put in the, the effort. But I know the times won’t be there. I always find, even if you’ve got a big pedigree in swimming, it even shows like you take two weeks off swimming. Oh, yeah, out of the pool for an extended period. I really think that percentage wise, it feels the sting. It comes back relatively quick. But you know, if you take a couple of weeks off the bike or maybe even running, you can kind of claw it back. I found with swimming though, like it is, like it’s the audit kind of where you’re at. I was fine with swimming, like it’ll tell you, tell you where

you’re at. So yeah, it’s a funny one. But yeah, may absolutely love it. Like, you know, you’ve got to, got to enjoy getting in the water. And it’s a, yeah, it’s a good environment to be. I just love that there’s always something to, to work on. So in, in November, I had, I did a 12, 200 set and just that’s, it was the quickest I’ve ever done in training. And, and then the next, I think it was like the next day, I came off the mountain bike and I couldn’t move my arm above there for four weeks. So I just, I nearly, I just stuffed up my AC joint. And so I’m about 98% of the way. Do you know the issue? Do you know the issue? You’re on a mountain bike. Yeah, I know. I was, yeah. And it’s gotten two rides since and they’ve been pretty tame. So, um, yeah, I must have heard of this one. It doesn’t count.

No, it’s down to the cafe and you get your soy latte. Yeah, that’s right. I saw, I think, oh, well, all I’m going to do now is not go downhill at all. I was well beyond my, my ability, but it’s taking me, what is it now? It’s nearly four November, December. Okay. So it’s three and a half months and I’m, I’m about back to where I was then. And obviously that’s the sort of injury, but I was out for a few weeks and it just takes a while to get back. But the good thing about it is I’ve been able to work on my stroke while I couldn’t swim fast and while I couldn’t swim hard. And, um, and I feel like this sort of change in strokes that I’ve been able to work on will actually help me to go quicker again in probably the next four to four to six weeks time. So it’s, you know, there’s always something to improve even, even at a high level. And it’s, it’s a great thing that I love about the sport. I think, um, I’ll do, if I was listening, if I was listening to this right now,

I’d have one thing. What’s he swim for 12 by 200? Can you say at times?

Yeah. It’s short course. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t count. Long course would be different, but, uh, what’s your 200 time? It was, it was 10 to 12. How many was it? 12. Was it 12? No, sorry. I lie. It was 10, 10 twos on, um, on 230 coming in on 220. Oh yeah. That’s solid. Short course though. So long course probably add five seconds in overall. I think, but, um, yeah, that, that, but it killed me, but, uh, see that’s, um, that’s really interesting. Not to, like, not to turning into a, a, a, a weighing contest, but so when I’m coming right into my peak swimming into say an Ironman, I’ll do 10 twos, um, and I’ll try and touch under 230 and leave on the 245. That’s about for me. So if I get to that, it’s funny, just a yardstick. If I can, once I can do that for say a month, I know that I’m ready to swim an Ironman in around kind of under 55. And that’s typically, I was trying really hard for a long period of time as an athlete to try and

get my Ironman swim under 50 minutes. And I, at the end of the day, I was putting way too many eggs in that basket and just, I should be just happy with the 53, 54, but trying to put more time towards my bike. And that changed the game for me, Branson, in terms of just in a half context. That was a real game changer. So I think even when I was asking you a few things, I was trying to get my time under 50. And I kind of just, I gave up on that. It was just taking way too much time. I probably would have got there, but my bike was just suffering too much. And so I just am now content being a 54 and riding a lot better. So, and that’s, um, yeah, that’s definitely changed racing, racing for me for sure. But yeah, no, it’s interesting 10, 1032, I mean, 230, 220, holy moly, but yeah, that’s flying. Well, I say that. And then I speak to someone like Dan Smith, who, yeah. And I, oh man, some of the sets that he was doing, like he’s doing 400, no, 300s,

coming in on like, oh, what was it? He was descending. It was like 256, 254, 250 or something. This is short course again, but it’s like, oh my God. All right. That’s a whole nother level. Yeah, it is. But then triathletes will say, well, then you got to go run a 250 marathon, though. Try to do that, you know? So that’s like, that’s the battle though. Like where do you shift? So if you’ve got eight hours to train a week, where do you put? So as a coach or as an athlete, where do you allocate the time? And so if you’ve got eight hours, 10, 12, 15, whatever it may be, you kind of, and then you got strength as well. You really just project managing people’s time. A lot of the time and like a swim, you know, like a 60 minute swim set is actually a couple of hours by the time you get to the pool, get out of the pool, do all those things. It’s two hours. Whereas like, say an indoor trainer on the bike, two hours,

a one hour trainer sets about a 115 time commitment. So that’s genuinely like, you know, you’re trying to crunch people’s schedules so much these days as well. So that’s also, I think, where swimming suffers is that unless you’ve got a 50 meter lap pool in your house, which we don’t all do like you do in your mansion, but you know, it’s tricky to do. Yeah. I mean, I look back at when I was doing triathlon and next time I do a half Ironman or full distance Ironman, so much more time needs to go on to the bike. I was doing 250, 300 ks a week. It needs to be a lot more than that to actually do well because I look at that bike was just a huge chunk of my race and I put too much time into the swim. That was it.

Rewind two minutes, mate. That’s exactly like what I kind of discovered and yeah, real breakthrough. So if you’re looking for a coach, hit me up. Yeah, that’s right. And so in terms of getting in touch with you and you run a podcast as well, which we haven’t talked about. So do you want to maybe talk about where people can find you and your podcast and get in touch with you? Yeah. So our coaching business is called CoaSports. So we’re an online coaching business with, like I said, athletes around the world. So they can just go to CoaSports.com.au. We do do a podcast, which you’ll be coming on in May when I drag you up here as well. There’s a fancy there in person. So this is that. We’ve got a bit of a studio, but we do a lot of esports stuff as well in the Zwift world. So we do a lot of stuff, but I’ve got two other full-time coaches, Kent Cross and Greg McDermott. So we’re all full-time. That’s a really big thing for me that there’s plenty of coaching

businesses with a lot more coaches and a lot more athletes. But I really believe, as I kind of project myself as an athlete, sometimes I’d want my coach to be full-time, to be frank. I want them to be thinking not so much about me, but about the career or the discipline or the industry of coaching and all the different ways and the changes and the innovation and the different tools. And that’s really hard. I think if you’re an accountant Monday to Friday and you’re writing programs on a Friday night after a big week, that’s really difficult to do. And so that’s creating, you’ve got three full-time coaches here. That’s pretty unique because, like I said, coaching is still quite an immature thing. So very, very lucky. But yeah, hit us up on the website. My own Twitter got a blog and all sorts of stuff. So maybe you chuck it in the notes. But they’re always looking for new talent. And I think we’ve got about half a dozen or eight

going to Kona next year already. So it should be pretty, pretty son-tappo, 70.3 local, 70.3 world champs, which is going to be massive. And we’re up in Asia all the time, racing and doing some stuff up there as well. So yeah, love it, mate. Just full all in. Just absolutely love it. Very busy. That’s great. And it sounds like it’s really grown, especially with athletes in 30 countries as well. So it’s huge. And I’ll put all those links in the show notes. And you’ll be able, yeah, people listening will be able to find everything there. So mate, thanks for coming on the podcast and looking forward to being on yours in a couple of months time. No worries, mate. We’ll see you then. 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 Are You Swimming With Enough Intensity To Get Better? With Tim Ballintine appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Dan Smith joins us in this episode as he talks about his swimming, drug addiction,building character and his road to redemption.

01:28 Swimming Life As A Youngster
03:41 Burnt Out At The Age Of 14
04:46 It Was More Of An Escape For Me
05:44 What Would I Pass On To My Kids
08:38 I Am Not Defined What I Used To Be Or What I Should Be
09:53 2016 Rio Olympics
12:18 Dealing With Emotions After The Olympics
15:52 Rebuilding Your Stroke
20:11 You Got To Be Patient In Unlearning Bad Habits So That You Can Learn New Habits
26:21 Cues Used On Strokes
28:01 I Had To Go Backwards To Go Forwards
30:33 “I Am Not Worried About The Clock”
31:52 Be Realistic About The Bad Days
32:53 Tracking Your Training
34:54 Distractions Around Training

Dan’s Email Address:
[email protected]

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I think for me, you know, I definitely want to coach my kids in their character and that’s about actually making a difference in other people’s lives and not living life for yourself. 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 Dan, welcome to the podcast. We got introduced by Andrew Spoor, who I met probably two years ago, was doing some swimming filming with him and we sort of got introduced through Andrew. So it’s great to have you on the podcast and I think most people have probably seen you swimming before. You’ve been featured in probably the most popular video that we’ve had in the last couple of years, which was you swimming one minute ten, one minute ten hundred in what looks like two minute pace, just a really amazing, amazing swim. So welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having us, Brenton. Like it’s super exciting to be on here and you know, if there’s anything I can ever do to add value to people’s lives from my own life, life experiences, then, you know, I’ll always jump at the opportunity. I love what your business is about and your heart noted behind what you do. And you know, if there’s, if I’m here, if there’s anything I can ever do to add value to you or other people’s lives, you know, that’s, that’s what I believe I’m here for on this planet. So like I said, I’m super excited to be here and I look forward to, you know, sharing a bit about my life to other people out there. Well, I think you’ve got one of the most incredible stories that I’ve come across in the swimming world and your background as a young swimmer, you were touted as the next end thought, basically eight national eight gold medals at the National Age Championships, which is, I think, equivalent to what Thorpe had done

and just amazing swimmer from a very young age. And and then over the course of the next few years had gone through through drug addiction and then got yourself cleaned. And now you’re at the point where you’re looking to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics and just an incredible story. And so in terms of where should we start? I think, you know, what was swimming like for you as a youngster? And how did you get to such a high level at such an early age? Yeah, I think for me, you know, I grew up in a pretty functional family. I had a mom and a dad and a younger sister. And my dad was always grew up with boats. So he had a marine dealership. And when I was about five years old, my parents couldn’t keep me out of the water. So they wanted me to get swimming lessons. And before I knew it, I just naturally found my feel for the water and I had such a natural gift and talent for the water. And I naturally progressed really quickly.

Like before I knew it, I was starting to win gold medals at a young age. And for me, at about the age of great ten years old, was obviously the year of school nationals. And my dad was kind of probably like most parents out there. He was probably living his own life out through mine. And I was pushed probably a little bit too hard, too young. And before I knew it, I was at the national championships when I was 10 years old and I worked extremely hard to get there. I was probably doing eight sessions a week at 10 years old and doing gym and having creatine and protein shakes at that age. And I was fortunate enough to win a bronze medal at 10 years old and that’s where my swimming career really started to kick off. Before I knew it, when I was about 13 years old, I moved into Dennis Cotchall’s squad when I was swimming with. I was lucky enough to be able to swim with Grant Hackett and see what it actually took to be one of the best swimmers in the world.

And fortunately for me, I was able to at the national titles when I was 13 years old, I won six gold and two silver. And I also broke Ian Thorpe’s Australian 200 metre freestyle record. So you can imagine what life was like for me at a young age. The following year I won eight gold and two silver at the national titles. And still to today, that’s one of the most gold medals won in history. But for me, I was probably really burnt out in the sport at the age of 14 years old. And I probably didn’t realise that you know, what I was actually experiencing at that age, all the success and accolades that I was experiencing it. It wasn’t actually giving me any fulfilment and satisfaction. It was actually just leaving me empty and pretty broken on the inside. And that’s where I probably started to get involved in binge drinking at the age of 13 years old. I was in that in grade eight. I started binge drinking and partying pretty heavy

whilst also pursuing my swimming career. Is that where you found your fulfilment at that age? Was it through the through the friends or going out and partying and having the enjoyment that way? Is that where you found it or was was that not in your life at that time?

I think it was probably more of an escape for me. Like at the age of five years old, you’ve already formed about 80 per cent of your belief systems. That’s the way you see the world, your world view, the way you process things and your own feelings and emotions. And then by the age of 18, you’ve you’ve already fulfilled the last 20 per cent. So me being the age of 13, 14, I’m starting to process things. And probably I wasn’t coach real well through my own feelings and emotions. And, you know, what actually matters in life. And I started to probably get really empty and lost and broken. And I think for me, binge drunk, binge drinking, partying, girls, that kind of thing was just an escape for me. Hmm. And is there something that you’ve learned over the over that time where if or when you have kids, what would be the the lesson that you’d take from your life and want to pass on to your kids?

I think for me, you know, I definitely want to coach my kids in their character. And that’s about actually making a difference in other people’s lives and not living life for yourself. For me, then I was probably very self-centered and I was all about receiving accolades. And I think I was probably trying to win my parents’ love through achievement, which is a pretty fulfilling way to live. They say if love has to be earned, like medals can be earned. But if love has to be earned, it’s not love. And I think for me, I was trying to win my parents’ love through and the people around me through achievement because I was a very rebellious kid on the other side as well. And I guess for me, what I was doing, I guess I was probably running my life on an oily rag and I started to, you know, really become unfulfilled and unsatisfied. And swimming was probably the only thing I had because I gave so much to it from a young age.

I missed out on a lot of other things. My school life suffered a lot because I was so driven in the swimming world.

And yeah, like I said, at probably the age of 14, I started to become burnt out and I probably stopped giving it as much as what I could and probably relied purely on talent and not actually on, you know, taking my training to another level. And talent probably got me through the next four years of my swimming career. But I never was actually able to achieve my full potential.

And so do you feel like the the amount of sessions that you’re doing at a young age is primarily what led to the burnout? Or was it the the need to get that recognition through your swimming achievements that added to the pressure of it? Yeah, I think it was a mixture of both. Like I was like I said, I was pushed really young, pushed too far when I was really young. I probably would have liked to progress where I was at about 12, 13 years old at about 15, which would have given me a little bit more time to prepare for the pressure and have the bit more character and actually understand the reason why I swim. But like I said, I was I was burnt out at that age. And I probably didn’t realize that swimming, you know, you can you can be one of the best swimmers in the world. And like, I don’t know, swimming didn’t redeem my life. It didn’t take my problems away. If that makes sense, I still had the same internal issues that I had.

And for me, no matter what I did or tried, you know, I was always left feeling unfulfilled.

And we’ll come back to sort of what that that binge drinking and everything eventually led to. But in terms of your character development over the last, say, six, seven years, where’s that? Where’s that come come from? Who have you learned it from? And what are some of those things that you feel like has made you a different person now? My faith has obviously played a massive role in my life now. You know, the Bible believing Christian and I actually get most of my character and moral values out of out of the Bible, but also have great people in my life who love and care about me for my for who I am, not what I do. And that’s actually helped me to become a better person. I think too often, you know, our past mistakes and, you know, stuff that we’ve experienced to find our future. And for me, I’ve had to learn that I’m not defined by what I used to be or what I should be. I’m actually defiled by the person I’m becoming.

So that’s actually helped me focus more on me as a person and help allow the pressure of sport and me not achieving what I want to achieve, actually produce something in me that is far greater than probably what a result will ever give me. Hmm. And how did it has it been over the last six or seven years? Has it been a do you feel like you’re on this steady growth of of developing your character and do you feel like it’s become a lot clearer about where you want to go, what kind of person you want to be, or was there a moment where it just all sort of changed for you? I think I went I was fortunate enough to go to the 2016 Rio Olympics. And I guess even after experiencing the stuff that I’ve experienced. So that was when I came out of rehab and we can talk about that in a moment. You know, I probably came back out of rehab and there was still me wrapping my identity up in swimming. And so I guess for me, I was probably achieving

like achieve results really quickly when I got out of rehab and I’d had five years, four and a half years out of the water. And I guess for me, the results, like I said, never took away my own personal issues and swimming probably came more of a driver for me than my own personal well-being. And I actually went to the Olympic Games, you know,

with the hope of winning an Olympic medal. Like I was in the four by 200 meter freestyle relay. And, you know, for me going to the Olympic Games, all the other boys, I’ve only just started talking about this because it actually took me a long time to recover from the Olympics. But all the other boys in the relay team, they swam out of their skin in the final. They swum really well times, really good times. And I was unfortunately two seconds off my best time or what I was projected to swim in that relay team. And we were only we got fourth place and we were only one second off the silver. And for me, my I felt like my whole world had fallen apart. So that’s to be honest, I felt like the biggest failure ever. And when I got interviewed by the media on national or worldwide TV, they interviewed the other boys. And when they got to me, they asked me what happened. And I guess for me, I just felt pretty embarrassed and ashamed.

And for me, I’ve had to really work a lot on my identity. A lot changed for me in high performance sport. After that, I probably started to get treated differently

in the high performance world. And for me, I’ve had to spend a lot of time rebuilding my identity so I can hopefully be what I am in a lot healthier place going into the Olympics this year. And how long did it? Is it only now where you feel like you’ve been able to to look back at it and and not sort of wrap yourself up in those emotions of, as you said, sort of shame and all of that was it? Because I imagine that’d be a pretty long process and a really hard thing to to deal with, especially when you let yourself down in an individual swim. That’s one thing. And then a relay, as you know, especially with swimming relays, it’s you really feel the pressure from from everyone else. And you probably felt that from the whole swimming, swimming community.

Yeah, I think for me, after that, I probably tried to vary those feelings more and become more driven in the sport. So when I came back from Olympics, I was so afraid of that happening again that I just went back and trained even harder to be honest. And that that’s like you’re running on an oily rag, you know, like I’m swimming out of a pretty unhealthy place. And then before I knew it, I started to actually my swimming started to go more downhill because I guess I was running away from what was actually going on. And before I knew it, I was so far from where I wanted to be. I probably actually had to take a hard look at myself and really start to admit the way that I was feeling. And that took a probably a lot of good people in my life that I was able to be transparent with and open with. And before I knew it, I guess I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel and my swimming’s probably taken a turn in the last six months.

And I’ve really started to, you know, swim out of a lot healthier place and not have so much expectation and pressure on me and actually come back to the reason why I swim like I love the sport. I love what it’s produced in me. I love what it’s given me. It’s and I also love that, you know, through influence and, you know, being able to be successful in the sport that you’re able to actually make a difference in other people’s lives. So, you know, I feel like in the last six months, my perspective of the sport and in the sport has changed a lot. Yeah. And it’s really good to hear that. And, you know, we’ve spoken a bit over the last few months since we first met. And one of the things you mentioned was your coach, Paul, I think. I don’t know if he came up to you to swim meet and basically it sounds like he took you under his wing and said, look, this is what I think. I think you might need to do to get to where you want to go.

And over the course of maybe 12 months or so, you guys have been working together. And it seems like that’s a really good coach athlete relationship that you’ve got going there. Yeah, it definitely has. He actually coached me when I was in rehab. So it’s been a bit of a happy ending. He’s probably coached me towards the end of my career, which is cool. And he’s been a great coach. He’s always coach younger swimmers in he used to be in Harvey Bay. So he’s always coach younger swimmers and help them get good. And then if they do get good, then they move to Brisbane because that’s how, you know, the culture rolls. So he’s was very good at not having his own ego or the way he is wrapped up in performance. So he actually allowed me to not race for a period of time whilst him and I spent a lot of time rebuilding my identity and allowing me to just be uncomfortable for a little bit and not race. And that that process, he has helped me with my technique

and my the way that I swim and my approach to swimming. And, you know, him and I are both pretty excited for hopefully what this year can possibly bring. Yeah, it’s one of the funny things that you said to me when maybe the first time that we met was you’re talking about a few years ago, you said you said you had no catch. And I think it’s all it’s all relative. Like you look at look at you something and you’ve got an amazing stroke. But when you started to rebuild your stroke and I get I think it really became as a student of technique. You you’re looking at some of the things you could work on. And you felt like your your catch and what was happening out in front of you was something that you could could really work on. Can you talk a bit about what it was that you that you saw in your stroke and what sort of Paul helped you change and look at and how you’ve you’ve gone about changing your stroke now and having that as a big focus of getting to hopefully getting

to to where you want to get to over the next couple of months. Yeah, I think it’s like I probably always underestimate underestimated the power of technique. I came from a really high aerobic based program with Dennis Cottrell and I moved to another program, which is another high performance program. This was before I moved to Paul and he has more of a different approach, which is more of a quality based program and more slow swimming. And I remember Paul said to me once, my coach, now if you can’t swim slow, you can’t swim fast. And when I moved to this, the coach that I was with before, Paul in between Dennis, he I guess he was probably more of a trainer kind of coach. And I was never really sure on how to swim slow. So I guess I started swimming slow with really bad technique. And like I could still hold decent times in training, but I guess when I go to race day, my stroke would never feel like it used to.

And I think because I had such a high aerobic based program swimming with Dennis that it always forced me to rhythm, which would force you out of bad habits. And so I developed over the space of two years some really bad habits. And then when Paul obviously I wasn’t getting the results I wanted, Paul started to give me a little bit of technique work. And I started to drop a bit of time. I went from about a 148 down to a 147 for in the 200 freestyle and which was cool. And then I obviously moved over to Paul and he started to teach me more about technique. And when I swam the 147 for he gave me a three out of 10 for my skill level.

So that was kind of a little bit eye opening. And he started to teach me technique. And in that process, we’ve had a few other coaches come along and help us. And then we had we had you come along and help us and you had a dip. We had fresh eyes on my technique. And we’ve literally had to start again. I remember I was swimming OK at the start of last year. I mean, and I went to New South Wales States and I knew that my stroke wasn’t right. And then I moved into a quality based program and I was working way too hard for the times that I was pushing. And then Paul and I, that was just before World Champs. And it was I was honestly like I probably wasn’t

handling the pressure of trying to get a stroke change really well. And I was coming out a little bit sideways in training and Paul goes, well, let’s just pull out.

Let’s just stop. And that was hard for me because I was always been so result driven as we’re talking about before. And that’s when I guess I started to probably deal more with my identity stuff. And then that allowed me to work more on my technique and start again from scratch. We literally went from like being pretty fit,

probably like being pretty fit to doing skull.

And that’s where we started. You know, I literally started doing skull at the start of last year. And I had to fully rebuild my stroke. And it was honestly the most frustrating process I’ve probably ever felt. I’m sure you get that a lot from your, you know, your viewers and the people that get coached by you and the people on YouTube as well. Like it was honestly the most frustrating process, but I was just so thankful that I had a coach that could coach me through that frustration. And we came out the other side and I’m starting to swim a bit nice now, which is pretty nice. Well, it’s it’s good looking at like you show me some of those videos from maybe a year or two ago when you’re swimming to what you look like now. And it’s like it’s a really noticeable difference. And I want to talk about it would be good to go into a bit more detail about that that frustration that you felt, because I mean, we work with mostly

triathletes and open water swimmers, adults who might be around the two minute mark. Some are a bit slower, a bit faster. But that’s generally where the average sort of swimmer is. And I’ve often had people say to me, they feel like they’re pretty close to to their limit of what they can get to with their swim speed. And I think you’re a great example of that. Where, you know, if you’re swimming 147 and you’re at the very top, top end of athletes like and you can find improvements in your stroke and you know, you can get faster than someone who’s swimming two minutes. There is so much more opportunity to to get quicker. But get going through that frustration of changing your stroke and having it not feel good and having to put up with a few weeks or a few months of maybe slower swimming is a it’s a hard thing to do. And I completely understand that. And so for someone at your level to feel like you’re going back to square one,

what, how long was that process for you until it actually started to feel better and those habits started to to stick? And can you talk about like the timeline there? Because I think it’d be interesting to to hear that for someone who swam at such a high level for for so long. What was it like for you? Yeah, I think like for me, obviously, I’ve trained with a lot of

high level swimmers and probably one of the most technically sound swimmers I’ve ever seen was Emma McKinnon. And I guess like most swimmers know her and she was actually helping me a lot with my technique at one stage. And she is probably one of the most technically sound swimmers I’ve ever seen. And I remember she was telling me some of the cues. It’s pretty funny. I was only thinking about this the other day. She was telling me some of the cues that she uses to swim. And so then I would go back to training and try the cues because I wasn’t training with her. I’d go back to training and try some of the cues that she was telling me. And I probably wasn’t at that stage of my swimming yet, which I probably feel like. And then I’d go on YouTube and watch Alex pop off swim, which is another really technically sound swimmer. And then I’d try to swim the way that they would swim. And so I guess I probably wasn’t up to that stage yet on my swimming.

So I guess that’s a bit of a detriment for me. That probably made my process more frustrating because I was probably trying to do what they were doing. So if I look back on it now, I probably should have just stuck to the process I was at. So probably process at the start was just swimming a lot with a snorkel and not being able to breathe because breathing stops most swimmers up.

And so I had to start from like doing skull with the breathing. I did so much swimming with a snorkel that I actually forgot to breathe when I was breathing, which was another part of learning how to swim as well. He’s learning to breathe and adding breathing into the stroke. So we did a lot of drill work. Most of our warmups, even still to today, consist of a lot of drill work, which is a lot of single arm work with the snorkel, a lot of catch position kick and building a lot of a lot more strength into my core. And I guess I I’m starting to probably be able to apply the cues that say Emma was using now to my swimming because I’ve built a lot of foundation in my swimming. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, like you were, yeah. I was probably too premature to be to probably be aiming to their level. If that makes sense. So I look back on it now. I should have just probably stayed like this one day I came to training

and I was trying to swim like pop off and Paul’s like, Mike, what the what the hell are you doing? And he’s like, just stop doing that. Like, I’m pretty sure he made me get out and stop doing that because I was like, yeah, it was funny. I remember that pop off DVD because I think my dad bought it when or whatever it came out. I was probably 12 or 13 at the time and I did exactly the same thing. I watched that video and thought, all right, that’s how I’ve got to swim. And I did a 25 sprint and I think I got like an 11, eight or 11, nine, which was the best I ever did. And I was never able to replicate that. And and that pop off stroke was just that’s not the style that I should swim with. And like your strokes, more of that loping free starts much more like a felt sort of stroke and pop off stroke is much more even, much more balanced. And so it’s a very different stroke as well. So I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall watching Paul watch you swim.

It was pretty funny. Yeah. So now like now, like I’ve now I can hone in more on my strokes. So we’re building a lot more power through the back end of my stroke, which gives you more time at the front end of the stroke to catch the water. But if I was probably trying to do that side of the stroke to premature and I guess that probably made my process

delayed and I remember I watched this video once on a backwards bicycle and it was a grown man trying to ride a backwards bicycle. So if you turn left, the wheel goes right. And it took him like over six to nine months to learn to ride this bicycle. And he said to his son that was like, say, he was about 10 years old. He said, I’ll take you to Australia. He was American, I’ll take you to Australia if you can ride this bike. And the kid learned it in like two weeks. So like, I think like the older you are and probably the more you swarm, like you’ve got to just be a little bit more patient in unlearning bad habits so you can relearn new habits, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think that’s very true. And what are some of those cues that Emma gave you? I’m curious as to what she said they were, because I find cues can be some of the best things to change a stroke, because with the right cue, it just it keeps it really simple.

It gives you a good mantra to repeat in your head. And with the right cue, like you can just really focus on the big rock. So things that will make the biggest difference. Yeah, she used to like, she’s got more of a sprint timing stroke, which is a bit more like pop off. And so she has a lot more flat hips. So she would feel like she’s connecting her right hip to her left arm. But also like, she would actually feel like if you were to stand up and rotate your shoulders with your hips, like she would feel that feeling in the water, like the opposite hip, opposite shoulder to opposite hip, like that actual timing in the water.

And she would also feel like that she is not putting much water on her face when her head’s down, which would obviously reduce drag on your head position as well. And that’s what that’s what worked for her. And what about you? Have you got any cues that that you use for your type of stroke?

Mine is more at the moment, probably building power through the back end of my stroke. So that’s actually feeling like I’m actually propelling forward through the back end of my stroke. And obviously, the more you can relax the recovery, especially because I got more of a low stroke. So I’ve got to relax my right arm recovery more. It actually gives you more time to set up in the front of the stroke, which is the catch. So that’s probably my my cues at the moment. And when I know, maybe whatever it was, six months ago or so,

one of the things that you did work on changing was your was your entry, getting that the hand to enter earlier, because it was overreaching above the water. And then the other one was with your left arm that was coming out quite wide through the catch phase. And both of those things when I think I came and filmed you maybe a month ago,

like they look really, really good and really solid changes. And like, I was I was really, I was really surprised at how much you were able to change in those couple of months from when we did the first to the second filming. And I think it’s a real testament to how much focus you’ve put on it. And like it just looked it just looked really, really good. And I know there’s still there’s little changes that you’re still making there. But it just looks so much better. And like for you, what like how much of your your training are you thinking about your technique? Is it constant? Are you always thinking about it? Or is there times when you do just you just sort of let the let that go and you’re focused on the pacing and and the feeling of just getting the rating up?

It’s probably like I still focus on it a lot, especially in the warm up. But I think the biggest thing for me was accepting that I had to go backwards to go forwards and also getting rid of the clock. So I trusted that by building technique, building the good foundational of technique and obviously getting my reasoning behind why I’m swimming healthier, that the time would come. And that’s honestly what’s happened now. So in my training, I’m swimming a lot faster than what I used to. And it’s a lot smoother than what I used to. And that’s because the clock doesn’t control me anymore. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I’ve had to literally not worry about the clock. Like some days you might get in and do a pace 50 and you swim 25, five. But then another day you might get in and go 24, eight or something. But it’s the same the same effort. And that used to really rattle me, you know, before where now I’m

learned to just be like, no, as long as I’m focusing on technique and building technique and getting the good feel for the water that the time on race day and the time in training will look after itself. So that’s probably helped me a lot with my swimming now. Does that if that makes sense? Yeah, one of the things that I used to I used to I used to be a really good trainer and I’d try and like the training was really my race. I would try and do the best I could every single session and push it as hard as I could. And I was speaking to actually Harriet Brown about this on the podcast. And she said a very similar thing when she was growing up. She would try and she would basically be going hard every session. And you don’t you’re just basically hitting the same sort of level of training every single time. But what she’s learned to do now is she might have I think she does like 12 sessions a week of the different sports.

And she has two or three that she’s got in mind that she’s going to really push it. But the rest she’s going to actually hold back. She’s going to let some of those other girls that she’s training with. She doesn’t mind if they get ahead because it’s not about who wins that training session. It’s all about if you just follow the process and you stick to those right training zones, the end result will be you’ll race well. And that’s that is what you want as the end result. It’s not about the training session. And then they say for me, that’s something that I’ve had to learn over time. And especially now where you might be injured or tired or haven’t had a great great sleep like I’ll still try and go to the pool and train. But the clock, I’m not worried about that. I know if I just do the distance, do the set, focus on my stroke, that end result will be I will race well.

Yeah, I think too, like also being really stick about the bad days. Like I think sometimes is, you know, a high performance or an athlete or anyone trying to achieve their goal, like you either rate your good days at 10 and your bad days are one. And I think for me, you know, I’ve learnt to rate say my bad day is a seven.

It probably actually is a seven, but it’s easy to say it was a one. Yeah. So that actually helps me understand. All right. Well, why was it a seven? Was it because I didn’t sleep well last night? Is it because of my personal life? Is it because of, you know, I wasn’t as focused in training? So how do I get my sevens to an eight? You know what I mean? So being a little bit more realistic on your own expectations, otherwise you you rob yourself of joy. My bad days were either a one or my good days were either a 10 and I had no in between. So it also robbed me a lot of joy and I didn’t actually get to enjoy the process of becoming something in the water and out of the water. If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And is there something that you are you keeping a log book? You’re tracking your trainings there? A way that you are able to reflect on on the different sessions? Is there a way that you’re sort of doing that manually?

Or it’s just something that you think about each time? There’s probably more something I think about. I think like I said to you before, I probably had like a real perfectionist mentality. I was always logging everything I did. I’ve got log books in my room from years and years of swimming. And so for me, it was probably me trusting that I’m at training to give my all and my coaches, my coach now, he writes the sessions and he keeps track of it. And he knows that like that I’m obviously, I always show up and give my all and for me, I don’t need a log how I’m going. I just trust that what I’m doing is enough. But that’s what’s working for me at the moment. And I think that’s that’s good. Like as a as an athlete, it can be good to just like if you look at a lot of say on a professional tennis plays or whatever it might be, like there’s a lot of commitments that can go with the sport, whether it can be sponsor events that you need to do, media stuff.

Like all of that can be a big distraction from the from the actual training. So the more simple you can make it, if you can, if you just trust the process, you trust what your coach is doing. And you can just show up, train, do your thing. Then then that can make it so much simpler. And I think like the the economy Gregor fight last week or two weeks ago was he he didn’t really do any of the media that he had done in the past. And he focused just on training. And the end result was that he he had an amazing fight. And it’s just getting rid of those distractions and just focusing on the on the most important thing, which is is that training. So has it has it been different in the past where you’ve where you felt like there’s been a lot of distractions around your training?

Yeah, I think my probably biggest thing was probably the lies that I was believing to why I was swimming. I think like, you know, I realistically like I’ve got I’ve got nothing to prove. I always thought I had to prove myself, prove that I was a good person, you know, prove that I was lovable or prove, you know, that kind of stuff. So once I probably detached myself from those things like swimming, it’s pretty hard to get distracted, you know, because I have so much like I swim because I love it. You know, it’s it doesn’t really feel like work as much for me at the moment because I do love the sport. And for me, I’m constantly trying to add value to other people’s lives. So, you know, my life in my swimming is self-centered as swimming can be. I’m trying to have a bit more of a different approach by adding value to people’s lives, and it’s almost like you’re a kid again when you’re at the training, a training when you’re young

and you’re training and you’re dropping time, but there’s no tomorrow. You know, like that’s kind of my approach with the sport now. And hopefully I can start to bring back that mentality in high performance sport and hopefully, you know, people can start to actually be fulfilled and satisfied in their own achievements and not be so, you know, disappointed or hurt from their own individual career in high performance. And I’ve seen you’ve been speaking to some different groups just about your story and where you’re at now. What is it that you like most about doing that? And what do you see yourself doing in the next five, 10 years? What sort of area or what sort of thing do you reckon appeals to you? I actually really enjoy swimming. I would like to have a bit more of an impact in high performance culture, maybe with the well-being of athletes. A lot of people get missed in high performance sports. So hopefully I can explore a bit of that.

I also really love teaching, swimming, so maybe swim schools. I really enjoy and I guess for me

is sharing hope to our society, you know, and also that, you know, sometimes people can live a life way less than what they’re actually worth. Like their life is worth a lot less than what it actually is. So I think it’s about sharing that people’s lives matter, that there’s something inside of people that nobody else can do. And it’s also helping add value to other people’s dreams and visions that they have for their own lives. So I feel like that that’s probably an area that I want to go down as well. Yeah, and I think that it couldn’t come from a better person. So it’s been really enjoyable for me to be able to see your progress since we first met and just being able to film that progress as well. And we’re going to catch up in about a month’s time as well, and we’ll do some more filming. And I’m just really excited to watch you race over the next couple of months as you lead up to Olympic trials and just seeing how you go.

Because last time we caught up, you looked like a different swimmer. Like you’ve you’ve leaned up a lot. Obviously been doing a lot of training, strokes improving. And it’s just it’s just awesome to watch that process play out and and having met Paul as well, just a really great person and and very knowledgeable coach as well. So it’s myself and probably a lot of the people listening as well will be watching with with keen interest because, you know, I think everyone will be rooting for you. Yeah, thanks. And hopefully we can continue to help, you know, other people achieve their dreams and maybe we can get back on the podcast again another couple of months. And, you know, if any people have questions or whatever, we can help answer them and help add value to their swimming and their and their lives. Thanks for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you. And if anyone who is is listening, what’s the best place to to follow your your progress?

Is it Instagram or Facebook? What’s the actually not on social media at the moment? But yeah, I think like, you know, hopefully I can just be a bit more of an undog for a while and, you know, people, you know, whether they want to get in touch through email or whatever. But I’m sure if the people want to need to get in touch with me, they can get in touch through you or my email, which is Dan dot Smith dot twenty eight at live dot com dot are you and I always do my best to reply to everyone. Awesome. Thanks again, mate. I’ve enjoyed having you on the podcast and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks time. Thanks, brother. I’ll just stop the recording. 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 From Drug Addiction To Olympian (And Why Your Character Means More Than Your Results) With Dan Smith appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Joining us in this episode is Jason Cram who is a Commonwealth Gold Medalist, diving instructor, and superyacht crew member.

00:43 Jason’s Background
03:51 Dealing With Missing Out On Olympics
07:15 Being Comfortable With The New You
09:04 Without Swimming, I Wouldn’t Be Able To Grow Into The Person That I Am Now”
09:49 Planting A Seed
10:48 Performing Best When The Pressure Is On
16:01 Swimming Is A Sport Where You Operate With Calmness
18:09 Becoming More Of Yourself
19:15 Nervous Energy
20:27 Having A Little Bit Of Fun
22:47 Making It Personable
26:41 Simplifying Data
30:19 Learning From Being A Swimmer To Coaching
40:02 “It’s The Sense Of Achievement That Gives Us The Motivation To Continue”
41:50 Winning The Day Early On

Effortless Swimming Camps
Noosa
Hawaii Swim Camp
2020 Hell Week Camp (Thailand)

Online Membership
Freestyle Clinics Around Australia

Transcription:

Jason Cram: It was funny just scoping on Facebook as we do in this modern world. And I came across the Effortless Swimming Clinics and it was something that really resonated with me, with my background. I started at a very young age. I was a Wollongong boy on the coast, just South of Sydney and the water was kind of my life and was thrown into the pool at a very young age and kind of stuck it out and went through the kind of the club, the state, the national and international competition of swimming.

Jason Cram: And my discipline was freestyle. I tried many different things, whether it’d be the sprint, the 50, a hundred or into the 1,500, the 800. I don’t know why I did that for a while, but it was a good background. But mainly for me it was the 200 and the 400 freestyle were my main disciplines.

Jason Cram: At the age of 16 I was a pretty good age group swimmer with a gold medalist at the age championships. And then from there that kind of catapulted me into the stepping stones, so to speak, of getting into the international competition on the way for the dream of the Olympics. And it was one of those things that just kept them going through State Championships, National Age Championships and then went through the National Open Championships.

Jason Cram: And in 2002 I was the third place behind Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett in the 200 meter freestyle. And for me still to this date, I think that’s one of my greatest achievements to be behind those two guys who were the fastest at the time, world record holder in their own rights, in their own disciplines. But in the 200 freestyle was one of the highly competitive events on the Australian men’s program.

Jason Cram: From there that put me into the Australian Open Team, which took me on to the Commonwealth Games later that year in Manchester and I swam individually and was sixth in the final at the 200 freestyle. And then also too was a part of our 4 × 200 freestyle relay. And this was the one of the main events like the 4 × 100 for men and the middle real life of women. So that the 4 × 200 freestyle for men was one that we were dominating for so many years.

Jason Cram: And there’s a lot of pressure and a lot of prestige you put on yourself when you become a part of that team. But [inaudible 00:02:30] was a gold medalist at that. And then that kind of continued my progression into next year was on the Australian team again and from there was at the World Championships in Yokohama and also I competed, sorry later that year after Manchester in 2000 [inaudible 00:02:50] Pam Packs and competed there that were in Barcelona.

Jason Cram: And, no, sorry, so long ago that you get them mixed up. Pam Packs where Yokohama and World Champs with Barcelona. Yeah, for those, it was another stepping block onto the way to the Olympics and it was a gold medalist of both of those as a part of our 4 × 200 freestyle relay team. But then in 2004 the big year, which was Athens for the Olympics. It was all prepped, had a really good training, really good taper into that trials. And then unfortunately just by the click of the fingers, I missed out on making a spot for the 2004 Olympics, which yeah, it was a bit of a shock.

Brenton Ford: And what was that feeling like immediately afterwards and then say six to 12 months down the track? Was it something that you were able to come to terms with a reasonably quick amount of time or it was something that stuck with you for a while?

Jason Cram: Think of this. You know me, I’m the analogy queen. Think of this as a little child that wants something for Christmas and that’s all he wants. For a child, 12 months is a very long time and then all of a sudden they don’t get what they want or it comes in a different way and they’re unhappy with that. Well for me, that kind of stretched out for about a 10 year period because it was something that I’d been striving.

Jason Cram: You’ve got to think I was swimming from the age of three all the way up until I retired at the ripe age of 24 so it was my life pretty much for 20 odd years. I didn’t know anything different. Out every morning, to bed late at night. Six nights a week, training and, sorry six days a week, not six nights a week, but six days a week in this routine.

Jason Cram: But then following with school and then when I went through the HSC and finish school, you go into the workplace because you need to be able to support yourself as well. So, yeah, it was a big shock and a big change like what do you do with your life now? Like that’s the biggest thing because all of a sudden you’re building up to something and then that’s something doesn’t happen.

Jason Cram: And it’s another four years of pain, toil and a lot of achievable moments as well, which it’s kind of the highs and lows of the roller coaster I guess if you think of it like that. But it was just like, “Well, what am I doing now? I don’t really want to hang out for another four years.” And the guys I was training with at the time … we had a good core group with Tracy Menzies of six to eight athletes.

Jason Cram: And of those, there was four of those athletes that were actually a part of the Olympic team for 2004. So I was still going to training for six months after missing out on the team. And as I started to get later and later going to training, I realized that, you know what? It’s probably a good idea that I kind of call it and it was like breaking up with someone really. It’s a whole part of you.

Jason Cram: A whole part of your life that you’ve just gone, nah, this is not what I want anymore because it kind of hurts too bad to realize that this is something that I miss out on. This is something that I really wanted and I don’t really want to be going to training every day with people that are going to it and then all of a sudden I’m not a part of it. So it’s kind of that feeling of left out. But yeah, to answer the question, it was really about a 10 year journey to kind of be comfortable with who I was, this new version of me versus the version of me, which was Jason the swimmer.

Brenton Ford: What was it that allowed you to be comfortable with it after 10 years? Was there a moment or was there something that someone had said or what helps you kind of get to that place?

Jason Cram: I think it was at time of sitting back in that 10 years because after that period, I pretty much went straight into working for an event management company after leaving sport. And I was already doing a bit of part-time stuff with them already. And then when I went straight into the kind of full time with them and then just got distracted by the events and using the skills that I’ve learned, the challenge that thinking outside the box, the really kind of pushing yourself to the absolute max to get the job done. It was something that, you kind of took that on board.

Jason Cram: And then the next job was working on a cruise ship over in the Caribbean, working for Disney Cruise Lines, one of the largest corporations in the world. And then seeing a different facet to that and then learning new skills and applying the skills that you learnt from swimming to be able to put into the workplace and working with people and dealing with people.

Jason Cram: And then after that came back to Australia and then was working with Precision Driving Team, which was originally the Toyota Hilux Heroes. And then it turned into the D-max drivers, and we had an amazing group of drivers that we traveled the countryside with and I was doing the commentating side of things and these guys were doing amazing feats behind the wheel, driving to all these different country shows and big Royal shows, the Royal Easter show, it’d be up to 50,000 people that I’d be commentating in front of.

Jason Cram: It was about at that moment where I started to kind of look back on my life a little bit and you go, “You know what? Without swimming, without that kind of background, I wouldn’t be able to grow into the person that I am now and continue to challenge myself and to try and push myself that little bit harder.” So I guess that was kind of the point where I was able to then just take control of my life and say, “Hey, I can do whatever I to do.” And that’s kind of what I do right now. I kind of plant a seed as I call it and then I water it every now and then and eventually it sprouts into something and then it’ll either go into a massive tree or go into something that will lead me off into some complete other different tangent.

Brenton Ford: I like that approach of kind of planting the seed and putting it out there and then just seeing what comes of it, because I think I sort of have a similar thing where I look back at the last, particularly the last five to 10 years when I feel like I’m starting to get a little bit wiser and a little bit smarter with things. And some of those goals that I had set earlier on, they have started to come to fruition and they’ve started to play out. And it’s that planting of the seed. It’s the thought of, “This is where I want to be. This is what I want to be doing. These are the people I want to be around.” And then they just start to come and it doesn’t come from a place of really trying to force it.

Brenton Ford: It’s just letting it happen. And that’s what I’ve seen over the last five to 10 years. You’ve had some pretty interesting jobs, which can be sort of a high press pressure situation or could be very stressful. But by the sounds of it you perform best when the pressure’s on or there can be quite a lot at stake. You work well in that environment. So do you want to talk about maybe one or two situations or things that you’ve done with your work over the last 10 to 15 years where you’ve really had to be on point?

Jason Cram: I think there’s a lot of times where I’ve had to be on point and it comes down to that with the swimming background. You line up and I remember going to the Olympic trials, the Australian Open Championships and as you line up, you’re in the marshaling area and then you kind of come out and they’ve got the music playing, especially for final. They introduce you one by one so that precious building, the precious building and then you can have that pressure that just some people will just fall apart. Other people will rise to the game.

Jason Cram: And I guess that’s happened with everything we look at in life throughout history. But for me, people would know in the stands, especially my parents. If I was that guy, that was after my name was introduced, I kind of was yawning, looking like I’m about to fall asleep. Then I was actually going to perform really well because that yawning actually allowed me to stop without me even knowing something that I did just naturally, I would be able to yawn, be able to stop, be able to take that deep breath, relax, and then just getting to the moment and actually do what it needs to be done.

Jason Cram: And it’s kind of something that I’ve drawn on whether it was commentating front of 50,000 people, which you’ve got all these people in your hand, you’ve got a microphone, you’ve got people screaming and the drivers could be doing one of the slower maneuvers that’s not overly that exciting. But because you’re controlling it with microphone, you can actually get the crowd to abrupt and you can control them. To come into another moment as well where I worked on a private yacht, which I still do these days now, but the last year that I worked on was that a 90 meter X Arctic icebreaker and it was converted into a private yacht.

Jason Cram: We traveled the world with this yacht. I first joined it in French Polynesia and we took it down to Antarctica. And down in Antarctica, It’s the most remote place. Where we were was completely off the beaten track. Not many yachts or cruise ships had actually gone through to that area. And it was one of the … I do remember that was one of the places where it was a landing and I had a lot of experiences because I grew up with surf club as well. So driving the IRB and I was one of the zodiac drivers. And we had like a shore party who was a doctor and a ranger who went ashore and set up just in case the guests that were with us got trapped. And it was a really surgy surf and it was surging probably five to 10 meters up this kind of pebbly Rocky beach.

Jason Cram: The doctor in the Ranger are like, “Yeah, this is fine. We’ll be able to get this ashore. And you timed it. You’re able to time it perfectly. And then the boat would be pretty much beached on the shore until the next surge coming back through, pick the boat back up and you push it back out again. And I went back to the captain and I said, “Look, this is not safe for our guests. This is not a place that I would be taking any of my family members assuring. And it’s someplace that we shouldn’t be taking our people.” So he went back to the guests, the captain went to the guests and said, “Look, we’re not going to go ashore here.” I went back in, picked up thee shore party.

Jason Cram: They were pretty miffed with me. They weren’t very happy at all. But it was one of those things where you were able to sit back and take in the big picture. And the reason that I can relate to that is because when you’re swimming, I remember at the Commonwealth Games and as a part of the 4 × 200 freestyle relay, you were watching what was going on. Grant was first off, Leon Dunne was second, I was the third swimmer and Ian Thorpe was the fourth. And the first two swimmers are in the water and they’re doing their thing and you’re kind of watching, you’re getting up behind the blocks and there’s so much going on around you and then all of a sudden you just have to focus on what you need to do. And as soon as you touch the water, it was like autonomous.

Jason Cram: And It was kind of a similar a moment there where you’re taking everything down in Antarctica that was going on, the whales as well. The penguins, the seals and the shore party trying to get ashore and you just go back and go, “You know what? That’s not the right thing to do. Like we’ve got [inaudible 00:14:58].” There’s a couple of good moments, but there’s been so many where you’ve had to rise up and you’d be able to pull on that mental approach that you have with swimming, that calmness that you can have with it where you can actually look out and see a whole different perspective, a whole different range of things, but also too where you can just get the job done. And when it’s under pressure, it’s usually a lot better under pressure.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. I think swimming has got to be one of the best sports for being able to come and operate from a place of calmness because it’s got that meditation aspect to it where you’re in the water. There’s not much sound happening. You’re focused on your breathing and can really get in the zone. And that’s really the place where I think people can perform best. And I was watching the AFL Grand Final this year, and if you had a look at the two rooms, you had the Richmond Tigers. They’d been there before. They were having fun now laughing. They were really relaxed or as relaxed as you could be before a grand final. And then you look at GWS and they were really amped up and you could tell that they had a lot of nervous tension.

Brenton Ford: And not to say that you can’t win from that place, but you could really see the difference in the two camps. And I know that Richmond actually worked with two guys. One a guy called Nam Baldwin, who I’ve done some surf breathing course, and he’s actually been on this podcast. And one of the things that he teaches is how to use your breathing to come from that place of calm. And another guy, I’ve forgotten his name, it’s Ben Crown, I think.

Brenton Ford: I had a podcast with him and he teaches a very similar thing, but also teaches about vulnerability and just getting the place to gel that way and also to kind of just be open about what they’re feeling and the thoughts that they’re having. And so those two things I reckon are really, really valuable, especially from a team environment, but also personally because if you’re operating from that sort of position of calmness, of being open with things in truth and honesty, that’s a really good way to them be able to make the right decisions.

Brenton Ford: And with you in Antarctica, if you’re worried about what the guests or the captain or the shore party might think because of you caught me calling it off, then you may not have done it and something really bad could have gone wrong just because you didn’t want to rub people the wrong way. But when you come from that place, I think it really makes a difference.

Jason Cram: And I think a lot of that comes too with age as well. As I’m getting on, you start to realize that you’ve got to be able to focus on what is important and not necessarily what everybody else is thinking. And back to my on the team, I was pretty much five years on the Australian swim team. And I remember having with one of your other coaches, Mitch, we’re having a chat about it. And when you’re on the national team, you were yourself, but you were the best version of yourself in terms of what you thought how you should be, how you should act as an Australian world-class swimmer. And it wasn’t necessarily who you wanted to be. It was kind of like a bit of an act at the same time.

Jason Cram: And then as I’m getting older and in my life, I’m actually becoming a little bit more of myself, which can be really amped up but can be really quite analytical at the same time. So it’s an interesting thing that you get as you get older where you just learn to focus on what’s sort of important. But just to bring up what you said about with the nervous energy, it’s good to have the nervous energy because then you’re able to actually feel it and know that this is something that’s really important to you and then this is where you’re able to switch it off and actually can focus on what you need to do.

Jason Cram: I’ve got an example of that where I went from meeting with one of the seeds that I’ve planted and I planted these many years ago when I was swimming and I’ve always wanted to work in television and I had a meeting with a television producer and I was nervous I’ve ever been, even probably more nervous than when I was at Commonwealth Games because that was a bit of a blur and it was because of, I said to him, it was mainly because the nerves are mainly because this is something that I really want to do, but the reality is I have no control over whether it’s something I’m going to do or not. It’s just something that I really want to do.

Jason Cram: So I’m just trying to put my best face forward and this is who I am, this is how I am. And they’ll either like it or they won’t like it because there’s a lot of things that we don’t have control over. But the only thing that we have control over really is us and how we react to a situation.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. And that’s something that I can relate with. Even with coaching over the last, I started 11 years ago, I think it was coaching and when I … even the first five or six years, I was really serious about things. It was rare to sort of have a laugh and yeah, you want to make training enjoyable, but I was always coming at it from a very sort of serious perspective. And then especially the last couple of years, I’ve been able to … yes, it’s serious enough where you’re getting people results and you’re giving them the right sessions and all that.

Jason Cram: Of course, yeah.

Brenton Ford: But people really, they want to have fun, they want to enjoy it, they want to have a laugh. And that’s how they learn a lot better as well. And in terms of training in a squad, if your coach is going to be breathing down your neck every single session, you’re not going to enjoy it. You’re probably not going to stick around. So if you can still do the work and you can have a laugh while you’re doing it and enjoy that, well that’s a lot more fun for the coach and the swimmers. So I’ve tried to really take that into the clinics, but also really the camps that we run, like how week this year, it was so much fun. We had a couple of coaches over there who I’ve gotten to know really well now.

Brenton Ford: A lot of the swimmers are people who have been to three or four times to previous camps and it’s kind of like hanging out with friends and yeah, we still get people what they need and what they wanted, but we had a lot of fun with it and that’s so much more enjoyable for everyone. And I think if I was to coach a squad again, that’s the kind of approach I’d like to make. And I look at, I think it’s Dane Boxell. Swimming Australia put out a video that they’d miked up Dean Boxell and recorded a swimming session. I don’t know if you saw that.

Jason Cram: Actually I watched that not long ago.

Brenton Ford: So funny. He’s just cracking jokes left, right and center, kind of giving his swimmers a little bit of crap along the way. Using some good analogies to get them to be able to race well. Like he was talking to one of the swimmers is like, “When you’ve got your swimsuit on, you’re a Batwoman,” I think it is. He keeps drilling that into it. And I’m like that would be a really fun squad to train in if he’s like that every session. So I really liked that approach.

Jason Cram: And you know what? It’s that fine balance between the both, especially from a coaching squad. And it doesn’t have to be for the young guys. It can be for the adults as well. It has to be that fine balance between giving the athlete what they want, but also to making it personable as well. Because you can always be so technical all the times, but you’ve got to be able to have a laugh and have a joke because in the end, you know what? It doesn’t matter who you are in the world. And over my time, I’ve met some of the most famous people in this world. I don’t like to name drop, but you named it the celebrity, you name the politician. I probably met them in some way, shape or form or had an interaction with them. And you know what? They’re just people there.

Jason Cram: They’re all the same. And if you can have a chat with them and realize that they are just people. It just makes it so much easier. You can still get what you want out of them or they can still get what they want from you. But we still need that personable approach. And I think sometimes we lose that a little bit, especially in sports where everything’s so data orientated these days. I know that was something that we talked about earlier that we wanted to touch on like things that have changed over the years and when I help you guys out with it for me, I love doing it because the data’s right there, right in front of you. Most humans are visual people that need to be able to see it.

Jason Cram: And when you see yourself on the video straight away, people are like, “Oh wow, is that what I look like?” And I always put the analogy of there’s like you, when you go out, you spent a couple of hours getting ready. Before you go out, you look at yourself in the mirror. Yeah, that’s great. And then the next day you look at the photos online or you look at the photos a couple of days later and go, “Wow, is that what I look like?” It’s completely different because we have a different perceived idea of what we actually look like. But I love that kind of analogy of just piecing it all together because the technology that we have right now is phenomenal, where you can actually video it within a couple of minutes. You can actually see it straight back. And then with the program you guys use, we’re able to draw lines and work out different angles, degrees and can go into that technical side of things.

Jason Cram: But then at the same time you can kind of make it a little bit personable too because most people are shocked to see what they look like, especially for the first time. And it’s kind of that technology that we only started getting at the first Quantum in 99. I remember going to a swimming camp and we’re using the underwater videography, which was the diver, the scuba diver kitting out with all these gear and blowing bubbles in your face. It’s just moving past him and the massive camera under is almost like a television camera under the water that he was trying to film you on. It was still kind of a new technology they used to film from the outside and get your recovery and all that sort of stuff and your stroke rate.

Jason Cram: But these days where you’ve got all the underwater cameras, now you can actually break everything down with the high definition cameras as well. You can even slow it down to actually work out exactly what the muscles are doing at each point without the stroke. So from a technology point of view, that’s amazing. But you look at it from the other side with the kids these days with Facebook, and I don’t know how they handle that social media side of things because social media can make or break you pretty darn quickly, something that we never really had back in our time. We used to have the fan mail, which was sent from an Australia post and it was letters from the school kids that was sent across in a mail bag, which was really cute. I still got a few of them, but yeah, it was just like, I don’t know how the kids these days in this really hope because obviously mental illness is a big thing going on in this world right now.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. I think we were really lucky to grow up when we did like it. Sort of just missed that side of things. And even now that technology is so addictive and I just think of that with myself. Like I just actively turn the phone off at times because I’m like, geez, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole for 30 minutes, 60 minutes here and I’ve got nothing done and my brain’s kind of fried from it. And that’s from an adult …

Jason Cram: But you know the funniest bloopers though that have happened where people fall over or the latest thing that’s happened on television or whatever TV show, whatever reality TV show it is because that rabbit hole is just taking me there for 30. I love YouTube, but you start looking at one video, let’s say it’s a swimming video you’re looking at and then all of a sudden you end up watching something about whales and dolphins and [crosstalk 00:26:50] 30 minutes later like how do I get across to this?

Brenton Ford: That’s right. Yeah. I’m kind of going back to one of the things you mentioned earlier like you’ve got the data there but then bring it back into … or how do you use that data to then improve? I was talking to a friend who he’s worked for an NBA team and now he’s working for a team in the, what do you call it? Well, the baseball league over in the States that the-

Jason Cram: [inaudible 00:27:18].

Brenton Ford: I can’t think what the acronym is, but yeah, he’s working for a team there and he’s working with a pitcher and they basically every single pitch that anyone in the NBL, whatever it is, it gets recorded and there’s a hundred and like 30 games a season, like a massive amount of games. Every single pitch by every person is recorded in terms of where the release point was, where it landed, the speed of it, the spin.

Brenton Ford: There’s so much data there. And this pitcher came to him and he was having a really bad start to the season and he came to my friend and he said, “All right, can you help me just improve my pitch? I just don’t know what’s going on.” And so they look at all this data and basically as the season went on, his release point kept varying and varying. And so what they want is their release point to be exactly the same every single pitch because then it’s much harder for the batter to be able to read it. So if there are released at the same point, but they can throw different speeds, different curves and all of this, then.

Jason Cram: That’s interesting.

Brenton Ford: And so they looked at all this data and said, “Yeah, as the season went on he just kept getting wider and wider and more varied with his pitching release point.” And so that basically came down to fatigue and tightness through his hip. So of all this data, what it came down to was they just had the physios work on his hip flexibility throughout the season and then his release point just pretty much stayed exactly the same for the entire season. And I think he said he won pitcher of the entire league almost like the Brownlow Medal in AFL.

Brenton Ford: And all it came down to was just making sure he’s hip flexibility was all right throughout the entire season of the 130 odd games. And I like being able to take that data that the video that we get and then you’d kind of boil it down to two or three things, maybe cues, maybe things that they should think about, and being able to distill it that way, because there is so much to take in when you’re watching someone swim. I remember when I first started looking at video, it’s like, “Oh geez, where do you start and how do you break it down?” But the more you do it, the more you can just sort of look at it and then automatically you’ve got these couple of things that you go, all right, this is what we’ll talk about and this is how we’ll keep it really for that swimmer. What have you found going from being a swimmer to now coaching people at clinics? What have been some of the main things that you’ve learnt going from those two things?

Jason Cram: You know what? It kind of led into where I was thinking anyway, the question that you’ve just given me, because when I reached out to you, I love the fact about these clinics and then when I actually went to one and trialed it and went, “Wow this is absolutely amazing.” And it comes down to something that would happen because there’s always the story when you meet a new person or where did you come from? What have you done? That sort of thing. The general chit chat and then you talk about, Oh, I used to be a world-class swimmer. Oh, I’m a really good swimmer. You should watch me swim.” Okay, cool. So then you were at a pool or at the beach or whatever. I’ll watch them swim and straight away I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, that’s good.”

Jason Cram: But I’m thinking inside my head, “Oh, it’s less than ideal.” And what it is you watch most people who say that they can swim and 95 … I would go say 90 to 95% of them are actually just surviving. They might move through the water, not too bad, but they’re actually only surviving. And there’s probably only about 5% of people …. five to 10% of people I’d say in the world that can actually swim really good. And it comes down to one simple thing and it’s your breath. It’s how you breathe because water is not our natural environment. And the more that I did the clinics, the more I was able to kind of draw on the, all these different analogies. And that’s kind of one of them that I use. And you watch most of the athletes that are participating in the clinics and all of a sudden they just start … they kind of have a smoke on their face or they laugh or they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s me.” Because it kind of really clicks with them that …

Jason Cram: And then you’re not obviously trying to insult them, you’re trying just to say, “Look, this is what I see from an athlete perspective competing at the highest level. And you try to then put it into their terms and just say, “Look, it comes down to whether you can breathe or not. Whether you’re comfortable breathing or whether you’re reaching around pretty much laying aside and gasping for air.” That’s where yoga and meditation really comes into its own to actually bring together as a part of swimming because once you’re able to breathe properly, then all of a sudden you can swim pretty damn good as well. Because the rest of it’s just the technical and moving the arm a different way. And I think the other thing that I really found was that a lot of the key things we’re the same.

Jason Cram: With the athletes that I’ve worked with previously, I would watch the video and then I’d go through and give them the analysis. And it’d be like one, two and three. Then the next person would come into the hot seat as I call it to watch their video. And it’d be like one and two are exactly the same as one and two on the person before. And then the next person, there’s one and two things that are exactly the one those, so I didn’t have to make the joke. Well, it actually is pretty something that’s common that we’re trying to change here because most people would be just like, “Hang on, is this guy just taking the Mickey out of us?” By just saying, “Oh,” the same thing and everyone, but you watch them and then you identify with it and straight away you know those key things.

Jason Cram: And it’s pretty simple for an athlete or a coach who’s been in that business for so long. It’s like everything. You become very astute and alert to what’s kind of going on around you. And straight away I can see with so many different athletes different things. I can watch somebody in the pool. And I know my girlfriend really hates it when I go up and just, if I’m swimming in the pool now and I just go, “Oh, can I just give you a couple of tips? Like maybe lower your head or whatever else. I’m giving this for free.” And then she’s like, “Why do you go up and do that for?” And I’m like, “Well, if they don’t do that, they’re going to hurt themselves.” And that’s the thing. Sometimes you can actually go to someone straight away and go, “Do you have a lower back problem?”

Jason Cram: And they’re like, “Yeah, yeah I do.” And I’m like, “Well, if you just change this and your stroke, that might help it a little bit.” And then they try it a couple of hundred later that’d be like, “Oh wow, that makes a big difference. There’s not that much pressure on my lower back.” So I’m like, “Okay, cool.” But then my girlfriend’s like, “Why do you keep on doing that?” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t know. I just like to give.” And I think that’s the thing about it is that you’ve got 20 years of experience in something at the highest level to the highest degree and you just want to be able to give back and help out what you can. And for me that’s simplest thing where I can help out.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, that’s probably the difference between you and I is I’ll go to the pool and it’s automatically, you’re like looking at people swimming and you’re going, “Oh, if you only did this and this, that would make a huge difference.”

Jason Cram: But you’ve got a business to run.

Brenton Ford: I don’t know. I’ve said it a couple times. I’ve told people like, “Yeah, if you just did this and this,” but I think … I don’t know. Maybe not necessarily like a confidence thing or it’s just like different personalities I think. Like you’re much more outgoing. Whereas I’m a little bit less so, so I’m less inclined to just go up and speak to a stranger and tell him something. It can make a big difference. And as long as they’re … like if they’re receptive to it, then it can make a massive difference to them. So it’s funny.

Jason Cram: I remember working with a … I wasn’t even working, I was just at the pool, an outdoor pool just here in Sydney and just doing some laps. And there was a young kid and it was it a Sunday morning and there was a young kid working with a coach and the mum was there and I just went up to them at the end of the session. I sat and watched him for quite a bit and meant that I wasn’t swimming much, but that’s all right. I’ve got plenty of years of kilometers under my belt. But at the end of my little swim, when I was about to get out, I just went over and introduced myself and I said, “Is it all right if I just give a couple of pointers?” And I spent about 15, 20 minutes with young boy helping him by actual doing the turns.

Jason Cram: That’s what he was trying to practice, doing his turns and showed him a few little tricks and like elite tricks that we did just to get the most out of your streamline coming off the wall, head position, that sort of thing. How we actually use the momentum to get into the turn as well. And that costs me nothing but that little boy had a beaming smile on his face. Look, it does help when you follow it up with, “I’m Jason Cram. I was a world class swimmer. I trained with Aimee Thought for five years.” People will sit and take notice straight away and you’re like, “Okay, well maybe this guy knows what he’s on about.” And then you can actually show them what they were doing and show them why you think the improvements are actually better for you.

Jason Cram: And you can see the difference. And it might not be necessarily a speed thing and might not make them go any faster, but it might make them a little less fatigued, which is going to, in the long term actually make them go faster. So it’s not always straight away going to be 100% change. It sometimes takes time, like everything in life. But if you can start with the processes and change it piece by piece, then all of a sudden, it’ll all come together eventually using my analogy, you plant the seed and it doesn’t matter how many seeds you plant, but you keep watering them and eventually it’s going to grow into whatever it is and whether that’s your stroke catch, whether that’s your kick, whether that’s your head position, body position, whatever it is, you keep doing it, maybe once or twice a session or three or four times a session, build it up, build it up, and then all of a sudden it eventually it’ll click.

Jason Cram: And for that little boy, you can see he had a beaming looking at his face. And look, I’m not walking around with the medals around my neck and that sort of thing. But the good old day Google, “Look if you don’t believe me, you can Google. This is who I am, this is my face, this is what I look like.” And for me, I’ve just loved doing that because it’s a part of who I am. It was a big part of who I am and I love to be able to share the knowledge that I have with other people, if that might benefit them.

Brenton Ford: Letting people know that that’s your background, it gives you the credibility for them to then be open to making those changes. So it’s not like you’re going round and talking about how great you are. That’s what makes them open, but you also have that much experience in the sport and you figured out so much stuff as you’ve gone through it, that it’s a disservice to not share that stuff, especially with those young swimmers who may never have come across that sort of experience and knowledge before.

Brenton Ford: I find with kids, especially those ones that really want to learn and when you can actually help them, they really feel like, “Maybe I can really go somewhere, maybe I can really do something.” And it doesn’t matter whether they go on to make an Australian team or anything, but for that kid may be making a state time or a national time is a huge deal for them. I think back to my swimming, like my best was, I think it was fifth in the 400 IM at Age Nationals. And for me that was a massive deal and a massive thing. I look back at that and go, “Geez, that took a lot of hard work to get there.”

Jason Cram: Absolutely.

Brenton Ford: And so I look at someone who makes an Australian team, whatever, it’s all relative to the people you compare yourself to and what you feel is a good achievement. So it doesn’t really matter where people are at. Everyone’s kind of on their own journey with it.

Jason Cram: And you know what? You actually nailed it on the head because it doesn’t matter what the goal is. It doesn’t matter what your CV is. It doesn’t matter what your plan is, as long as you’ve got something and then you’re working towards it and then you achieve it. It’s that sense of achievement that gives us the motivation to continue on and doing the next level. And I go through every day because I’ve come from such a background in sport that to get motivated to get out there and do stuff, you know, you’ve got to do it, otherwise your body is going to fall apart. That’s the only thing that we kind of have to keep us going between that and diet, like exercise and diet, but just to get the motivation some mornings to actually either jump in the pool or jump on the bike or go for a walk, can be so overpowering to say, no, I don’t need to do that.

Jason Cram: No, I don’t want to do that. But just to get yourself out and actually do it is something that you’ve put yourself to, you’ve done it and then you’ve achieved it. And I go through that and the daily struggle. My life is my work that I do now working in a private yacht and working for a family, a wealthy family in Sydney, it’s very active but you still need to do something on top of that as well. And it’s mainly to kind of clear your head space to try and settle yourself back in. So it doesn’t matter what kind of background you’ve got, you’re still got a little goals that you need to be able to achieve.

Jason Cram: And it can be simple as making the bed in the morning, just trying to do that every single day of the week. Or it might be trying to get up at six o’clock in the morning, just trying to set little goals to training to achieve them. And that’s what the human spirit is about. Like sending little things and trying to achieve them. Having the obstacles to overcome the adversity that overcome and could keep pushing forward.

Brenton Ford: I’m happiest when I’ve got those targets set or I’ve got the routine that I want to be in and I’m doing that every day. And when we’re in Thailand for our holiday camps every morning, Mitch [Keavy 00:00:41:31], not Mitch Patterson, but another Mitch, we’d get up every morning at quarter to five and we’d run. And we did that for the two and a half weeks that we’re over in Thailand for, except for one day where we had a day off. But we did that every single morning. And regardless of how he felt, what time he went to bed, we’d just get up and do it. And I’ve managed to be able to do that nearly every day since I’ve been home. And when I do it, when I get out the door at five o’clock run for at least half an hour, that’s a really good start to the day.

Brenton Ford: And I think from having that background of swimming and early mornings and early starts …. If I’m not in an early morning routine of waking up early and doing some sort of exercise, I feel like I’ve lost the day. And I like having that win at the start. And so that’s what I’m trying to keep up is just doing some sort of exercise in the morning and just being in that routine because that is when I sort of feel like I’m in control of things a lot more. Whereas if I wake up late, I tend to eat worse, have more coffee and just not get as much done. So for me, it’s all about winning the day early on.

Jason Cram: I’m the other version of you where I sleep in, have too much coffee because [inaudible 00:42:45] in the afternoon. But you know what? We just got back from an amazing dive trip on the yacht that I work on and I’m the scuba diver on the boat and go down with the owners and make sure that they’re safe and do the underwater videography as well, which is something that I absolutely love. And every morning we’re up flying from five, 5:30 sort of thing or my watch if the boat was moving was from 4:00 AM in the morning till 8:00 AM and then 4:00 PM in the afternoon to 8:00 PM if the boat was moving. And so you’re up for the sunrises and the sunsets. And where we were in Indonesia with some of the best sunsets and sunrises I have seen anywhere in the world because we were pretty close to the equator and it just energized you, either for your day or was able to wind you down for the end of the night.

Jason Cram: It also helped in between that. There was a lot of diving, doing three to four dives a day and some of the most incredible animals you will see. Everything from eight meter whale sharks. We had five different whale sharks swimming around us at one point, one on two days at the dives and in the early couple of weeks, some of the most amazing brief life you’ll ever see or we even found like three different types of pygmy seahorses. Now look at, what am I looking at? I’m looking at like a USB cable and like a micro USB cable and look at the little plug at the end of that. If you’ve got a Samsung phone or one of those Android phones or headphones, look at that little plug and that’s the size of the creature that we’re looking at. And that’s a sea horse.

Jason Cram: And we found those in the middle of the ocean with the help of our diet guide. And for me being up in that morning, being in that routine is something that I do miss. What you have to do, when you have to do it, at what time you have to do. And of course, there’s always things that are thrown in different tangents, scuba equipment starts to fail, camera’s are tripping out or something else. So you’re always fixing something. But just to be in that routine is something that it does speak volumes and coming from 20 years of that routine, especially when I was into my early teenage years, all the way through to my early 20s, from four o’clock in the morning, I go training two and a half hours in the pool, two and a half hours at nighttime in the pool.

Jason Cram: And then you’ve got your gym that you put in there half an hour in the morning before the pool, an hour after you’ve done the morning session and then an hour and a half after the session in the afternoon and you’re doing that six days a week. That’s the routine. That’s what my body knows. So I guess I could have a few mornings off sleeping in. But it’s good to know that putting yourself back into that routine just makes everything so much simpler. And you look at kids as well. You’ve got a couple of kids and the moment that you put them out of their routine, everything just goes completely anarchy and it’s to quote the joke from Batman. And it’s one of those things we just have to have everything in place and just be consistent. And sometimes that’s the hardest thing is being consistent because there’s so many different options out there these days.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. I can completely agree. And it’s all about what suits you best as well. It sounds like you’re more of a night hour than an early morning.

Jason Cram: Well, I think I’ve just done too many damn early mornings that I don’t want it. But the funny thing is if I’m put into a routine when it’s early morning, I’m fine. I’m happy with that. But if I don’t have to be up, I won’t get up.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. Well, I guess for me now, especially like the kids are up at just after six and if I don’t get something done before that, then good luck trying to get much done for any part of the day. So I’ve got to get it done early. So I guess that’s the driving force at the moment. But I’ve really enjoyed chatting to you on the podcast and I know we’ve been out, I have a few good chats in person, but it’s always good to do this and I appreciate your sharing your experience and a lot of the lessons that you’ve learned over the last, I guess 20 plus years of your swimming and being an adult. So thanks very much mate. Is there any way that you’d like to … if someone wants to get in contact with you, what’s the best way to do so?

Jason Cram: Look, the best way is probably through you. That’d be the easiest way. Come through the athlete swimming background and if you want to do some clinics, come down and see us at the clinics. I don’t do a lot of them because my full time takes a lot of my time. But I try and do as many as I can. But if somebody wants to get in contact, get in contact with Brenton through Effortless Swimming, and I’m more than happy to answer questions, more than happy to chat, because sometimes in life that’s what we need. Sometimes we just need to chat.

There’s a couple of good moments, but there’s been so many where you’ve had to rise up and you’d be able to pull on that mental approach that you have with swimming, that calmness that you can have with it, where you can actually look out and see a whole different perspective, a whole different range of things, but also to where you can just get the job done and when it’s under pressure, it’s usually a lot better under pressure. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that helped swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. It was funny, you know, I was just scoping on Facebook as we do in this modern world and I came across the Effortless Swimming Clinics and it was something that really resonated with me and, you know, with my background, I started at a very young age. I was a woollen gong boy on the coast just south of Sydney and, you know, the

water was kind of my life and was thrown into the pool at a very young age and kind of stuck it out and went through the, kind of the club, the state, the national and international competition of swimming and my discipline was freestyle. I tried many different things, you know, whether it be the sprint, the 50, the 100 or into the 1500, the 800. I don’t know why I did that for a while, but it was a good background. But mainly for me, it was the 200 and the 400 freestyle were my main disciplines. And, you know, at the age of 16, I was a pretty good age group swimmer, was a gold medalist at the age championships. And then from there, that kind of catapulted me onto the stepping stone, so to speak, of getting into the international competition on the way for the dream of the Olympics.

And it was one of those things that, you know, just kept on going through state championships, national age championships, and then went through the national open championships. And in 2002, I was the third place behind Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett in the 200 meter freestyle. And for me, still to this day, I think that’s one of my greatest achievements to be behind those two guys who are the fastest at the time. You know, world record holder in their own rights, in their own disciplines. But in the 200 freestyle was one of the highly competitive events on the Australian, you know, men’s program. So from there, that put me into the Australian Open Team, which took me on to the Commonwealth Games later that year in Manchester. And I swam individually and was sixth in the final at the 200 freestyle. And then also to was a part of our four by 200 freestyle relay. And this was, you know, the one of the main events, like the four

by 100 for men and the medley relay for women. So the four by 200 freestyle for men was one that we will dominate in for so many years. And, you know, there’s a lot of pressure and a lot of prestige to that you put on yourself when you become a part of that team. But fortune left was a gold medalist at that. And then that kind of continued my progression into next year was on the Australian team again. And from there was at the World Championships in Yokohama. And also we competed, sorry, later that year in after Manchester in 2002 with Pampax and competed there that were in Barcelona. And no, sorry, it’s so long ago that you get them mixed up. Pampax were Yokohama and World Champs were Barcelona.

And yeah, it was for those it was another stepping block onto the way to the Olympics. And it was a gold medalist at both of those as part of our four by 200 freestyle relay team. But then in 2004, you know, the big year, which was Athens for the Olympics was all prepped, had a really good training, really good taper into that trials. And then unfortunately, just by the click of the fingers, I missed out on making a spot for the 2004 Olympics, which, yeah, it was a bit of a shock. And what was that? What was that that feeling like immediately afterwards? And then say six to 12 months down the track? Was it something that you were able to come to terms with, you know, a reasonably quick amount of time or did it something that it was something that stuck with you for a while?

Think of this, you know, me on the analogy, Queen, think of this as, you know, a little child that wants something for Christmas and that’s all he wants. And you know, for a child, like 12 months is a very long time. And then all of a sudden they don’t get what they want

or it comes in a different way and they’re unhappy with that. Well, for me, that kind of stretched out for about a 10 year period because it was something that I’d been striving. You know, you’ve got to think I was swimming from the age of three all the way up until I retired at the ripe age of 24.

So it was my life pretty much for 20 odd years. I didn’t know anything different up every morning

to bed late at night, six nights a week, you know, training and sorry, six days a week, not six nights a week, but six days a week in this routine. But then following in, you know, with school and then when I went through the HSC in finished school, you go into, you know, the workplace because you need to be able to support yourself as well. So, yeah, it was it was a big shock and a big change. And, you know, like, what do you do with your life now? Like, that’s the biggest thing because all of a sudden you’re building up to something and then that something doesn’t happen.

And, you know, it’s another four years of pain, toil and, you know, a lot of a lot of achievable moments as well, which, you know, it’s kind of the highs and lows of the roller coaster. I guess if you think of it like that. But it was just like, oh, what do I do now? I don’t really want to hang out for another four years. And the guys I was training with at the time, you know, we had a good core group with Tracey Menzies of six to eight athletes. And of those, you know, there was four of those athletes that were actually a part of the Olympic team for 2004. So I was still going to training for six months after missing out on the team. And, you know, as I started to get later and later going to training, I realized that, you know what? It’s probably a good idea that I kind of call it. And it was like breaking up with someone, really, you know, it’s a whole part of you, a whole part of your life that you’ve just gone,

no, this is not what I want anymore, because it kind of hurts too bad to to realize that, you know, this is this is something that I miss out on. This is something that I really wanted. And, you know, I don’t really want to be going to training every day with people that are going to it. And then all of a sudden I’m not a part of it. So it’s kind of that feeling of left out. But, yeah, to, you know, to answer the question, it was is really about a 10 year journey to kind of be comfortable with who I was, this new version of me versus the version of me, which was Jason, the swimmer.

And what was it that allowed you to be comfortable with it after 10 years? Was there a moment or was there something that someone had said or what helped you kind of get get to that place?

I think it was a time of sitting back in that 10 years, because after that period, I pretty much went straight into working for an event management company after leaving sport. And I was already doing a bit of part-time stuff with them already. And then when I went straight into, you know, the kind of full time with them and then just got distracted by the events and using the skills that I’ve learned, you know, the challenge, the thinking outside the box, the really kind of pushing yourself to the absolute max to get the job done. It was something that, you know, you kind of took that on board. And then the next job was working on a cruise ship over in the Caribbean, working for Disney Cruise Lines, one of the largest corporations in the world. And, you know, then seeing a different facet to that and then learning new skills and applying the skills that you learned from swimming to be able to put into, you know, the workplace and working

with people and dealing with people.

And then, you know, after that came back to Australia and then was working with a precision driving team, which was originally the Toyota Hilux Heroes and then it turned into the D-Max drivers. And, you know, we we had an amazing group of drivers that we traveled the countryside with. And, you know, we’re doing I was doing the commentating side of things. And these guys are doing amazing feats behind the wheel, driving at all these different country shows and big royal shows, you know, the Royal East to show to be up to 50,000 people that I’d be commentating in front of. So, you know, you kind of it was about at that moment where I started to kind of look back on my life a little bit and you go, you know what?

Without swimming, without, you know, that kind of background, I wouldn’t be able to grow into the person that I am now and continue challenge myself and to try and push myself that little bit harder. So I guess that was kind of the point where I, you know, was able to then just take control of my life and say, hey, I can do whatever I want to do and that’s kind of what I do right now. I kind of plant a seed as I call it and then I water it every now and then. And, you know, eventually it sprouts into something and then it’ll either grow into a massive tree or it’ll, you know, go into something that will lead me off into some complete other different tangent. I like that approach of of kind of putting that, putting this, planting the seed, putting it out there and then just seeing what comes of it because I think I sort of have a similar thing where I look back at the last, particularly the last five to 10 years

when I feel like I’m starting to get a little bit wiser and a little bit smarter with things and some of those goals that I had set earlier on, they have started to come to fruition and they’ve started to play out and it’s that planting of the seed. It’s the thought of, all right, this is where I want to be. This is what I want to be doing. These are the people I want to be around. And then they just start to come and it doesn’t come from a place of really trying to to force it, it’s just letting it, letting it happen. And and that’s what I’ve seen over the last five to 10, 10 years. And I mean, you you’ve had some very, some pretty interesting jobs which could, which can be sort of a high press pressure situation or could be very, very stressful. But by the sounds that you perform best when when the pressure is on or there can be quite a lot at stake or you work well in that environment. So do you want to talk about maybe one or two situations

or or things that you’ve done sort of with your work over the last 10 to 15 years where you’ve really had to be be on point?

I think there’s a lot of times where I’ve had to be on point and it’s it comes down to that, you know, with the swimming background you line up and I remember going to, you know, the Olympic trials the Australian Open Championships. And as you line up, you know, you’ve got you’re in the marshaling area and then you kind of come out and they’ve got the music playing, especially for a final, you know, they introduce you one by one. So that precious building, the precious building. And then, you know, you can have that pressure that just some people will just fall apart. Other people will rise to the game. And I guess that’s happened, you know, with everything we look at in what in life throughout history. But for me, you know, I kind of I would always people would know in the stands, especially my parents, if I was that guy that was after my name was introduced, I kind of was yawning, looking like I’m about to fall asleep.

Then I was actually going to perform really well because that yawning actually allowed me to stop without me even knowing something that I did, you know, just naturally I would be able to yawn, be able to stop, be able to take that deep breath, relax, and then just get into the moment and actually do what it needs to be done. And it’s kind of something that I’ve drawn on, you know, whether it was commentating in front of 50,000 people, which, you know, you’ve got all these people in your hand, you’ve got a microphone, you’ve got people screaming and the drivers could be doing, you know, one of the slower maneuvers that’s not overly that exciting. But because you’re controlling it with the microphone, you can actually get the crowd to erupt and you can control them to come into another moment as well, where I worked on a private yacht, which I still do these days now. But the last year that I worked on was a 90 meter ex Arctic icebreaker

and was converted into a private yacht. And, you know, we traveled the world with this yacht. I first joined it in French Polynesia and we took it down to Antarctica and down in Antarctica, it’s the most remote place where we were, was completely off the beaten track, you know, not many yachts or cruise ships had actually gone through to that area. And it was one of the, I do remember, there was one of the places where it was a landing and I had a lot of experience because I grew up with Surf Club as well. So driving the IRBs and I was one of the Zodiac drivers. And we had like a shore party, it was a doctor and a ranger who went ashore and, you know, set up just in case, you know, the guests that were with us got trapped. And it was a really surgey surf. And it was, you know, surging probably five to ten meters up this rocky, like kind of pebbly rocky beach. And, you know, the doctor and the ranger are like,

yeah, this is fine, this is fine, you know, we’ll be able to get this ashore. And you timed it, you were able to time it perfectly. And then, you know, the boat would be pretty much beached on the shore until the next surge coming back through, pick the boat back up and you push it back out again. And I went back to the captain and I said, look, you know, this is not safe for our guests. This is not a place that I would be taking any of my family members ashore in. And, you know, it’s someplace that

we shouldn’t be taking our people. So he went back to the guests, the captain went to the guests and said, look, we’re not going to go ashore here. So I went back in, picked up, you know, the shore party. And, you know, they were pretty miffed with me. They weren’t very happy at all. But it was one of those things where you were able to sit back and take in the big picture. And, you know, the reason that I can relate to that is because when you’re swimming, I remember the Commonwealth Games and as a part of the four by 200 freestyle relay, you were you were watching what was going on. You know, Grant was first off. Leon Dunn was second. I was the third summer and Ian Thorpe was the fourth. And the first two swimmers are in the water and, you know, they’re doing their thing. You’re kind of watching you getting up behind the blocks and there’s so much going on around you. And then all of a sudden, you just have to focus on what you need to do.

And as soon as you touch the water, it was like autonomous. And it was kind of a similar moment there where, you know, you’re taking everything down in Antarctica that was going on, the waves as well, the penguins, the seals.

And, you know, the shore party trying to get it get ashore and you just go back and go, you know what, no, that’s that’s not the right thing to do. Like we’ve got to call this. So, you know, there’s a there’s a couple of good moments, but there’s been so many where you’ve had to rise up and you’d be able to pull on that that mental approach that you have with swimming, the, you know, that calmness that you can have with it where you can actually look out and see a whole different perspective, a whole different range of things. But also to, you know, where you can just get the job done and when it’s under pressure, it’s usually a lot better under pressure. Yeah, I think swimming has got to be one of the best sports for being able to come and operate from a place of calmness because it’s it’s got that slight that meditation aspect to it where you’re in the water, there’s not much sound happening. There’s you’re focused on your breathing

and can really get in the zone. And that’s really the place where I think people can perform best. And I was watching the AFL Grand Final this year. And if you had a look at the two rooms, you had the Richmond Tigers. They’d been there before. They they were having fun now, laughing. They were really relaxed or as relaxed as you could be before a Grand Final. And then you look at GWS and they were they were really amped up and they were you could tell that they had a lot of nervous tension. And not to say that you can’t you can’t win from that that place. But you could really see the difference in the two camps. And I know that that Richmond actually worked with with two guys. One, a guy called Nam Baldwin, who I’ve done some a surf breathing course and he’s actually been on this podcast. And one of the things that he he teaches is how to use your breathing to to come from that place of calm. And another guy I’ve forgotten his name.

It’s Ben Ben Crown, I think I heard a podcast with with him. And he he teaches a very similar thing, but also teaches about coming from a about vulnerability and just getting the place to gel that way. And and also to kind of just be open about what they’re feeling and the thoughts that they’re having. And so those two two things I reckon are really, really valuable, especially from a team environment, but also personally, because if you’re operating from that sort of position of of calmness of of being open with things and truth and honesty, and that’s a that’s a really good way to to them be able to make the right decisions. And with you in Antarctica, like if you’re if you’re worried about what the guests or the captain or those the shore party might think because of, you know, because of you calling it off, then you may you may not have done it. And something something really bad could have gone wrong

just because you didn’t want to rub people the wrong way. But when you come from that place, I think it’s it really makes a difference. And I think a lot of that comes to with age as well, you know, as I’m getting on, you start to realize that you’ve got to be able to focus on what is important and not necessarily what everybody else is thinking. And, you know, back to my time on the on the team, I was pretty much five years on the Australian swim team. And I remember having, you know, with one of your other coaches, Mitch, we’re having a chat about it. And when you’re on the national team, it was, you know, you were yourself, but you were the best version of yourself in terms of what you thought you should how you should be, how you should act as an Australian, you know, world class swimmer. And it wasn’t necessarily who you wanted to be. It was kind of like a bit of an act at the same time. And then as I’m getting older and in my life, I’m actually becoming

a little bit more of myself, you know, which can be really amped up, but can be really quiet, analytical at the same time. So, you know, it’s an interesting thing that you get as you get older, where you just learn to focus on what’s sort of important. But just to bring up what you said about, you know, with the nervous energy, it’s good to have the nervous energy because then you’re able to actually feel it and know that this is something that’s really important to you.

And, you know, then you’re able to be able to this is where you’re able to switch it off and actually can focus on what you need to do. I’ve got an example of that where I went for a meeting with one of the seeds that I’ve planted and I planted this many years ago when I was swimming and I’ve always wanted to work in television. And I had a meeting with a television producer and I was the nervous I’ve ever, ever been, you know, even probably more nervous than I was at Commonwealth Games because that was a bit of a blur. And it was because of I said to him, it was mainly because the nerves are mainly because this is something that I really want to do. But the reality is I have no control over whether it’s something I’m going to do or not. It’s just something that I really want to do. So I’m just trying to put my best face forward and and this is who I am. This is how I am. And, you know, they’ll either like it or they won’t like it

because there’s a lot of things that we don’t have control over. But the only thing that we have control over really is us and how we react to a situation. Yeah. And that’s that’s something that I can relate with, even with coaching over the last I started 11 years ago. I think it was coaching and when I even the first five or six years, I was I was really serious about things like I was rare to sort of have a laugh and

like, yeah, you’d make you want to make training enjoyable. But I was always coming at it from a very sort of serious perspective. And then especially the last couple of years, it’s like I’ve just I’ve been able to yes, you have the serious it’s serious enough where you’re giving getting people results and you’re giving them the right sessions and all of that. But people really they want to have fun. They want to enjoy it. They want to have a laugh. And that’s how they learn a lot better as well. And in terms of like training in a squad, if you’re if your coach is going to be breathing down your neck every single session, you’re not going to enjoy. You’re probably not going to stick around. So if you can still do the do the work and you can have a laugh while you’re doing it and enjoy that. Well, that’s a lot more fun for the coach and the swimmers. So I’ve tried to really take that into the clinics, but but also really the camps that we run like at HALWIG this year.

It was it was so much fun. Like we had a couple of coaches over there who I’ve gotten to know really well now. A lot of the swimmers are people who have been two, three or four times to previous camps. And it’s kind of like hanging out with with friends. And yeah, we still still got people what they what they needed and what they wanted. But we had a lot of fun with it. And that’s so much more enjoyable for for everyone. And I think if I was to coach a squad again, that’s that’s the kind of approach I’d like to to make. And I look at I think it’s Dean Boxle. Soaring Australia put out a video that they’d marked up Dean Boxle and recorded a swimming session. I don’t know if you saw that. Watch that not long ago. So funny. Like he’s he’s just cracking jokes left, right and center, kind of giving giving his swimmers a little bit of crap along the way, using some good analogies to get them to be able to, you know, race well.

Like he’s talking to one of the swimmers is like, you know, when you’ve got your swimsuit on, you’re like your batwoman. I think it is. He’s just he keeps drilling that into it. And I’m like, that that would be a really fun squad to training if he’s if he’s like that every session. So I really like that approach. And you know what? It’s that fine balance between the both, especially from a coaching squad. And it doesn’t have to be, you know, for the young guys, it can be for the adults as well. It has to be that fine balance between giving the athlete what they want, but also to making it personable as well, because you can always be so technical at all the times, but you’ve got to be able to have a laugh and have a joke, because in the end, you know what? It doesn’t matter who you are in the world. And over my time, I’ve met some of the most famous people in this world.

I don’t like to name drop, but it’s, you know, you name the celebrity, you name the politician. I probably met them in some way, shape or form or had an interaction with them. And, you know what? They’re just people that they’re all the same. And if you can have a chat with them and, you know, realize that they are just people, it just makes it so much easier. You know, you can still get what you want out of them or they can still get what they want from you. But, you know, we still need that personable approach. And I think sometimes we lose that a little bit, especially in sports, where everything’s so data orientated these days. I know there was something that we talked about earlier that we wanted to touch on and, you know, like things that have changed over the years. And, you know, when I help you guys out with epilepsy, I mean, I love doing it because the data’s right there, right in front of you.

You know, most humans are visual people that need to be able to see it. And when you see yourself on the video straight away, people are like, oh, wow, is that what I look like? And I always put the analogy of, you know, there’s like you. When you go out, you know, if you spent a couple of hours getting ready before you go out, you look at yourself in the mirror. Yeah, that’s great. And then the next day you look at the photos online or you look at the photos a couple of days later and you go, wow, is that what I look like? You know, it’s completely different because we have a different perceived idea of what we actually look like.

But I love that kind of analogy of just piecing it all together because the technology that we have right now is phenomenal, where you can actually video it within a couple of minutes. You can actually see it straight back. And then, you know, with the program that you guys use, you know, we have to draw lines and work out, you know, different angles, degrees and can go into that technical side of things. But then at the same time, you can kind of, you know, make it a little repersonable, too, because people, most people are shocked to see what they look like, especially for the first time. And it’s kind of that technology that we only started getting at the first, you know, in 1999, I remember going to a swimming camp and, you know, we’re using the underwater videography, which was the the diver, the scuba diver, kidding up with all these gear and blowing bubbles in your face. He’s just swimming past him.

And the massive camera is almost like a television camera under the water that he was trying to film you on. And, you know, it was it was still it was still kind of a new technology that used to film, you know, from the outside and get your recovery and all that sort of stuff in your stroke rate. But these days, where you’ve got all the underwater cameras now, you can actually break everything down with the high definition cameras as well. You can even slow it down to actually work out exactly what the muscles are doing at each point, you know, without the stroke. So from a technology point of view, that’s amazing. But you look at it from the other side with the kids these days with Facebook. And I don’t know how they handle that social media side of things because, you know, social media can make or break you pretty done quickly, which, you know, something that we never really had back in our time. We used to have the fan mail, which was sent from Australia Post.

And it was, you know, letters from the school kids that were sent across in a mail bag, which is really cute. You know, I still got a few of them. But yeah, it’s just like, I don’t know how the kids these days. And this, you know, really helped because obviously mental illness is a big thing going on in this world right now. Yeah, I think we were really lucky to grow up when we did like it sort of just missed just missed that side of things. And I mean, even now that technology is so addictive. And I just think of that with myself. Like I I just actively turn the phone off at times because I’m like, geez, I’ve been I’ve gone down the rabbit hole for 30 minutes, 60 minutes here. And I’ve got nothing done and my brain’s kind of fried from it. So it’s just and that’s from from an adult. You know, the funniest bloopers, though, that have happened, you know, where people fall over or the latest thing that’s happened on television

or, you know, whatever TV show, whatever reality TV show it is, because that rabbit hole is just taking you there for 30 minutes. I love it like YouTube, but you start looking at one video that say to something video you’re looking at and then all of a sudden you end up watching something about whales and dolphins. And you know, how do they get across to this? That’s right. Yeah. Well, one of the kind going back to one of the things you mentioned earlier with like you’ve got the you’ve got the the data there, but then bring it back into well, how do you use that data to then improve? I was talking to a friend who he’s work in the for an NBA team and now he’s working for the for a team in the what do you call it? Well, the baseball league over in the States that the I can’t think what the acronym is, but yeah, he’s working for a team there and he’s working with a pitcher and they basically every single pitch

that anyone in the MBL, whatever it is, they get recorded and there’s a hundred and like 30 games a season, like a massive amount of games. Every single pitch by every person is recorded in terms of where where the release point was, where it landed, the speed of it, the spin, there’s so much data there. And this pitcher came to him, he’s like he was having a really bad start to the season and he came to my friend and he said, all right, what? Like, can you help me just improve my pitch? I just don’t know what’s going on. And so they look at all this data and basically as the season went on, his release point kept kept varying and varying. And so what they what they want is the release point to be exactly the same every single pitch because then it’s much harder for the batter to be able to read it. So if they release it at the same point, but they can throw different speeds, different curves and all of this, then that’s that’s how they that’s

what it makes a good picture. And so they looked at all this data and said, yeah, as the season went on, he just kept getting wider and wider and more varied with his pitching release point. And so they that basically came down to fatigue and tightness through his hip. So of all this data, what it came down to was they just had the physios work on his hip flexibility throughout the season. And then his release point just pretty much stayed exactly the same for the entire season. And I think he said he like he won picture of the entire league, like kind of like like almost like the Brownlow medal in AFL. And and all it came down to was just making sure his hip flexibility was all right throughout the entire season of the 130 odd games. And like I like being able to take that data, the video that we get, and then you kind of boil it down to two or three things, maybe cues, maybe things that they should think about and and being able to distill it

that way, because there is so much to take in when you’re watching someone swim. And I remember when I first started looking at videos like, oh, geez, where do you where do you start and how do you break it down? But the more you do it, the more you can just sort of look at it and then automatically you’ve got these couple of things that you go, all right, this is what we’ll talk about. And this is how we’ll keep it really simple for that swimmer. And what like what have you found going from being a swimmer to now coaching people at clinics? What’s what have been some of the main things that you’ve learned going from from those two things? You know what, it’s it’s kind of led into where I was thinking. Anyway, the question that you’ve just given me because, you know, when I reached out to you, I loved the fact about these clinics. And then when I actually went to one and trialed it and I went, wow, this is this is absolutely amazing.

And it comes down to something that would happen, you know, because there’s always the story when you meet a new person, where did you come from? What have you done? That sort of thing, you know, in the general chit chat. And then you talk about I used to be like a, you know, world-class swimmer. Oh, I’m a really good swimmer. You know, you should watch me swim. OK, cool. So then, you know, you throw at a pool or at the beach or whatever, I’ll watch them swim and straight away I’ll be like, oh, yeah, that’s good. But I’m thinking inside my head, oh, it’s less than ideal. And what it is is, you know, you watch most people who say that they can swim and 95, I would say 90 to 95 percent of them are actually just surviving. They might move through the water, you know, not too bad, but they’re actually only surviving. And there’s probably only about five percent of people, five to 10 percent of people I’d say in the world that can actually swim

really good. And it comes down to one simple thing and it’s your breath. It’s how you breathe, you know, because water is not our natural environment. And the more that I did the clinics, the more I was able to kind of draw on the all these different analogies. And that’s kind of one of them that I use. And you watch, you know, most of the athletes that are participating in the clinics, and all of a sudden they just start like they kind of have a smoke on their face or they laugh or they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s me because it kind of really clicks with them that, you know. And then you’re not obviously trying to insult them. You’re trying to just to say, look, this is what I see from a from an athlete perspective, you know, competing at the highest level. And you try to then put it into their terms and just say, look, it comes down to whether you can breathe or not, you know, whether you’re comfortable breathing or whether you’re reaching around,

pretty much laying your side and gasping for air. And, you know, that’s where yoga and meditation really comes into its own to actually bring together as a part of swimming because once you’re able to breathe properly, you know, then all of a sudden you can swim pretty damn good as well because the rest of it’s just the technical and moving the arms a different way. And I think the other thing that I really found was that a lot of a lot of the key things were the same. So, you know, with the athletes that I’ve worked with previously, I would, you know, watch the video and then I’d go through and give them the analysis and it’d be like one, two and three. Then the next person would come into the hot seat, as I call it, to watch their video and it’d be like one and two are exactly the same as one and two on the person before. And then the next person, you know, there’s one and two things that are exactly the same on those.

So, you know, I didn’t have to make the joke. Well, it actually is pretty something that’s common that we’re trying to change here because most people would be just like, hang on, is this guy just, you know, taking the mickey out of us by just saying the same thing in every one, but you watch them and then you identify with it and straight away the, you know, those key things and it’s pretty simple for, you know, someone who, an athlete or a coach who’s been in that business for so long, it’s like everything you become very astute and alert to what’s kind of going on around you. And straight away, I can see with so many different athletes, you know, different things. I can watch somebody in the pool and I know my girlfriend really hates it when I go up and just, you know, if I’m swimming in the pool now and I just go, can I kind of give you like a couple of tips? Like maybe, you know, lower your head or whatever else,

you know, I’m giving this for free. And then she’s like, well, why do you go up and do that for? And I’m like, well, if they don’t do that, they’re going to hurt themselves. And that’s the thing, you know, sometimes you can actually go to someone straight away and go, do you have a lower back problem? And they’re like, yeah, I do. And I’m like, well, if you just change this in your stroke, you know, that might help it a little bit. And then they try it and, you know, a couple of hundred later, they’ll be like, oh, wow, that makes a big difference. There’s not much pressure on my lower back. So I’m like, oh, okay, cool. But then my girlfriend’s like, why do you keep on doing that? And I’m like, well, I don’t know, I just like to give. And I think that’s the thing about it is that, you know, you’ve got 20 years of experience in something at the highest level to the highest degree. And you just want to be able to give back, you know,

and help out where you can. And for me, that’s the simplest thing where I can help out. Yeah, that’s that’s probably the difference between you and I is I’ll go to the pool and you know, it’s automatically you’re like looking at people swimming. And you’re going, if you only did this and this, like that would make a huge difference. But you got a business to run.

I was like, I just, I don’t know, just like I’ve said, I’ve said it like a couple of times, like I’ve told people like, yeah, if you just did this and this. But I think I don’t know, maybe not necessarily like a confidence thing, or it’s just like different personalities, I think, like, I think you’re like, you’re much more outgoing. Whereas I’m a little bit less so, so I’m less inclined to just go up and speak to a stranger and and tell him something. But no, that’s, I mean, it’s, it can make a big difference. And as long as they’re open, like if they’re receptive to it, then it can make a massive, massive difference to them. And you know, I remember working with them, I wasn’t even working. It was, I was just at the pool, an outdoor pool just here in Sydney, and just doing some laps. And there was a young kid, and it was a Sunday morning. And it was a young kid working with a coach and the mum was there. And I just

went up to them at the end of the session, I sat and watched him for quite a bit, and meant that I wasn’t swimming much, but that’s all right, you know, I’ve got plenty of years of kilometers under my belt. So, but at the end of my little summer, I was about to get out, I just went over and introduced myself. And I said, you know, is it all right if I just give a couple of pointers? And I spent about 15, 20 minutes with the young boy, helping him by actually doing the turns, he was trying to practice doing his turns and you know, show them a few little tricks and like elite tricks that we did, just to get the most out of your streamline coming off the wall, head position, that sort of thing, you know, how we actually use the momentum to get into the turn as well. And, you know, that cost me nothing. But that little boy had a beaming smile on his face. And look, it does help, you know, when you follow it up

with, I’m Jason Graham, you know, I was a world class email, I trained with him thought for, you know, five years, people sit and take notice straight away, you’re like, okay, well, maybe this guy knows what he’s on about. And then you can actually show them what they were doing, and show them why you think the improvements are actually better for you. And you can see the difference. And it might be, you know, necessarily a speed thing, and might make them go any faster, but it might make them a little less fatigued, which is going to in the long term actually make them go faster. So you know, it’s not always straight away going to be 100% a change. It sometimes takes time like everything in life. But if you can start with the processes and you know, change it piece by piece, then all of a sudden, you know, it’ll all come together eventually. And you know, using my analogy, you plant the seed and it doesn’t matter how

many seeds you plant, but you know, you keep watering them and eventually it’s going to grow into whatever it is. And whether that’s, you know, you stroke catch, whether that’s your kick, whether that’s your head position, body position, whatever it is, you keep doing it, you know, maybe once or twice a session or three or four times, you know, a session, build it up, build it up. And then all of a sudden, you know, it eventually it’ll click. And for that little boy, you know, you can see how to beaming beaming look on his face. And look, I’m not walking around with the metals around my neck and that sort of thing. But the good old day of Google, you know, look, if you don’t believe me, you can Google, this is who I am. This is my face. This is what I look like. And for me, I just love doing that because, you know, it’s, it’s a part of who I am. It was a big part of who I am. And I love to be able to share, you know, the knowledge that

I have with other people, if that might benefit them. Letting people know that you’re, yeah, that that’s your, that that’s your background. It’s just, it gives you the credibility for them to them be open to making those changes. So it’s not like you’re going around and, you know, talking about how great you are. It’s, it’s, it’s that is what makes them open. But you also have that much experience in the sport and you’ve figured out so much stuff as you’ve gone through it that it’s, you know, they’re, it’s a disservice to not share that that stuff, especially with those young swimmers who may never have come across that sort of experience and knowledge before. And I find with kids, especially like those ones that really want to learn and when you can actually help them, they really feel like, oh, this is like, you know, maybe I can really go somewhere, maybe I can really do something. And it doesn’t matter whether they go on to make an Australian

team or anything. But for that kid, maybe making a state time or a national time is, is like, is, is a huge deal for them. And I mean, I think back to my swimming, like my best was a, I think it was fifth in the 400 I am at, at age nationals. And like for me, that was a, that was a massive deal and a massive thing. And I look back at that and go, geez, that took a lot of hard work to get there. But the you know, and, and so I look at someone who makes you know, Australian team, whatever, it’s probably, you know, you kind of, it’s all relative to the people you can pay yourself to. And what you feel is a, is a good achievement. So it doesn’t really matter where people are at, they, everyone’s kind of on their own, own journey with it. And you know what, it’s, you actually nailed it on the head, because it doesn’t matter what the goal is, it doesn’t matter what your CD is, it doesn’t matter what your plan is, as long as you’ve got

something and then you’re working towards it and then you achieve it, it’s that sense of achievement that gives us the motivation to continue on and doing, doing the next level. And you know, like I go through every day because, you know, I’ve come from such a background in sport that to get motivated, to get out there and do stuff, you know, you got to do it, you know, otherwise your body’s going to fall apart. It’s the only thing that we kind of had to keep us going between that and diet, exercise and diet. And but just to get the motivation some mornings to actually jump in the pool or jump on the bike or go for a walk, you know, can be so overpowering to say, no, I don’t need to do that. No, I don’t want to do that. But just to get yourself out and actually do it is, you know, something that you’ve put yourself to, you’ve done it and then you’ve achieved it. And, you know, I go through that and under daily struggle,

my life is my, my work that I do now working in a private working for a family, a wealthy family in Sydney, you know, it’s very active, but you still need to do something on top of that as well. And it’s mainly to kind of clear your headspace to try and settle yourself back in. So, you know, it doesn’t matter what kind of background you’ve got, you still got little goals that you need to be able to achieve. And it can be simple as, you know, making the bed in the morning, just trying to do that every single day of the week or it might be trying to get up at six o’clock in the morning, just trying to set little goals or trying to achieve them. And, you know, that’s what the human spirit is about, like setting little things and trying to achieve them, having the obstacles to overcome the adversity that overcome and can keep pushing forward. And I think I’m happiest, well, I know I’m happiest when I’m when I’ve got those targets set

or I’ve got like the, the, the routine that I want to be in. And I’m, and I’m doing that every day. And when we’re in Thailand for our whole week camps every morning, Mitch Kibby, who’s not Mitch Paterson, but the other Mitch, he, we’d get up every morning at quarter to five and we’d, and we’d run. And we did that for the two and a half weeks that we were over in Thailand for, except for one day where we had a day off. But we did that every single morning. And regardless of how we felt, what time we went to bed, we just get up and do it. And I managed to be able to do that nearly every day since I’ve been home. And when I do it, when I get out the door at five o’clock, run for at least half an hour, that’s a, that’s a really good start to the day. And I think from having that background of swimming and early mornings and early starts, it’s that if I’m not in an early morning routine of, of waking up, waking up early and doing some sort of

exercise, I feel like I’ve lost the day. And like, I like having that win at the start. And so that’s what I’m trying. I’m trying to keep up is just doing some sort of exercise in the morning and just being in that routine, because that is when I sort of feel like I’m in control of things a lot more. Whereas if I wake up late, I tend to eat worse, have more coffee and, and just not get as much done. So for me, it’s all about winning the day early on. I’m the other version of you where I sleep in and have too much coffee because I exercise in the afternoon.

But you know what, we just got back from an amazing dive trip on the yacht that I work on. You know, I’m the scuba diver on the boat and go down with the owners and make sure that they’re safe and do the underwater videography as well, which is something that I absolutely love.

And, you know, every morning we’re up from five, five thirty sort of thing or my watch if the boat was moving was from four a.m. in the morning till eight a.m. And then four p.m. in the afternoon till eight p.m. If the boat was moving and so you’re up for the for the sunrises and the sunsets. And where we were in Indonesia were some of the best sunsets and sunrises I have seen anywhere in the world because we were pretty close to the equator and it just energised you, you know, either for your day or was able to wind you down for the end of your night. It also helped in between that there was a lot of diving doing three to four dives a day and some of the most incredible animals you will see anything everything from a, you know, eight meter whale sharks. We had five different whale sharks swimming around us at one point on two days of the dives and then the other couple of weeks, you know, some of the most amazing brief life you’ll

ever see or we even found like three different types of pygmy seahorses. Now look at, you know, what am I looking at? Looking at like a USB cable and like a micro USB cable and look at the little plug at the end of that. If you’ve got a Samsung phone or one of those, you know, Android phones or headphones, look at that little plug and that’s the size of the creature that we’re looking at and that’s the seahorse and like we found those in the middle of the ocean with the help of our dive guide. And for me, you know, being up in that morning, being that routine is something that I do, I do miss, you know, what you have to do, when you have to do it, what time you have to do. And of course, there’s always things that are thrown in different tangents, you know, scoop equipment starts to fail, cameras are tripping out or something else. So you’re always fixing something. But just to be in that routine is something that, you know, it

does speak volumes and coming from 20 years of that routine, especially when I was into my early teenage years all the way through to my, you know, early 20s, up from four o’clock in the morning, go training two and a half hours in the pool, two and a half hours at nighttime in the pool. And then, you know, you got your gym that you put in there half an hour in the morning before the pool, hour after you’ve done the morning session, and then an hour and a half after the session in the afternoon. And you’re doing that, you know, six days a week. That’s the routine. That’s what my body knows. So I guess I could have a few mornings off sleeping in, but it’s good to know that putting yourself back into that routine just makes everything so much simpler. And you look at kids as well, you know, you’ve got a couple of kids and, you know, so the moment that you put them out of their routine, everything just goes completely anarchy. And it’s to

quote, you know, the Joker from Batman. And, you know, it’s one of those things we just have to have everything in place and just be consistent. And sometimes that’s the hardest thing is being consistent, because there’s so many different options out there these days. Yeah, yeah, I can completely agree. And I mean, it’s all about what suits you best as well. Like it, it sounds like you’re more of a more of a night out than an early morning.

I think I’ve just done too many damn early mornings that I don’t want to let. But the funny thing is, if I’m putting to a routine when it’s early morning, I’m fine. I’m happy with that. But if I don’t have to be up, I won’t get up. Yeah, yeah, I guess for me now, especially like the kids are up just after six. And it’s like if I don’t get something done before that, then good luck trying to get much done for any part of the day. So it’s like I’ve got to get it done early. So I guess that’s the the driving force at the moment. But I’ve really enjoyed chatting to you on the podcast and I know we’ve been able to have a few good chats in person. But it’s always good to do this. And I appreciate your sharing your experience and a lot of the lessons you’ve learned over the last, I guess, 20 plus years of

your swimming and and being an adult. So thanks thanks very much, mate. And is there anyone that any way that you’d like to, if someone wants to get in contact with you, what’s the best way to do so?

Look, the best way is probably through you. That to be the easiest way. Come through the effort swimming you know, background and if you want to do, you know, some clinics come down and see us at the clinics. I don’t do a lot of them, you know, because my full time takes that takes a lot of my time, but I try and do as many as I can. But if someone wants to get in contact getting contact with Branson through effort swimming and look more than happy to answer questions more than happy to chat. Because sometimes in life, that’s all we need. Sometimes we just need to chat. 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 Develop Your Character Through Swimming (And What It’s Like Being Ian Thorpe’s Training Partner) with Jason Cram appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

We sit down with Wayne Goldsmith as he talks about putting emphasis on soft skills when coaching.

01:50 Working On Soft Skills
02:44 It Comes Down To The Way They Do What They Do
03:58 Vibe And Connection Among People
05:23 Building A Team Culture
07:10 What Does Your Values Look Like?
09:00 Identifying The Actual Behaviors That Will Say “This Is Who We Are”
10:05 Responsibility Is About Me, Accountability Is About Me
12:26 Love, Care, And Consideration Are Important Words Too
17:35 What Can You Do Better?
20:42 Problem Solving Is An Incredible Learning Tool
26:23 Asking The Right Questions
27:54 Stop Being So Obsessed With The Physiology
31:38 Training Is From The Neck Down But Coaching Is From The Neck Up
32:41 It’s All Mental At The Top Level
38:33 You Don’t Want To Burn All Your Matches Straight Away
41:05 Watching People Grow
41:45 Developing The ” I Can” Attitude
46:41 Online Course For Coaching

As a subscriber to EFFORTLESS SWIMMING, Wayne is offering a 20% discount on the full retail price of the course. Use the coupon code: wg20effswim at checkout and receive full access to the course for 20% under the recommended retail price.

This is the perfect gift for your favorite coach or for anyone who wants to learn the art of swimming coaching.

Hope you enjoy the Soft Skills – High Impact: An Holistic Approach to Coaching Swimmers course.

Effortless Swimming Camps
Noosa
Hawaii Swim Camp
2020 Hell Week Camp (Thailand)

Online Membership
Freestyle Clinics Around Australia

Transcription:

Brenton: Well, thanks very much for being on the podcast, you’re probably a regular guest at least once a year. I like to have you on because there’s always so much that I learn, and I know that the people listening get so much out of it as well, especially those that are coaching, but even if you’re not a coach, I think the stuff that you teach is great as an athlete, especially if you’re training as a squad or with a club, there’s a lot that people can get from the stuff that you teach. We were talking just earlier that it’s not necessarily the technical stuff that you like to focus on, it’s the stuff around that, the soft skills and what have you been working with athletes and squads on lately over the last three to six months since we last spoke?

Wayne: Well, so it’s always great to be on the show, and congratulations on the great work you continue to do on technique. Whenever I see your stuff, it’s just so practical and applied, and works universally with swimmers everywhere. Like anyone in any business, you’re looking for a point of difference, and when I look at people like you, there’s so many brilliant technicians in swimming, and there’s a lot of people talking about technique and skill development and so on. I’ve got some background in swimming, and I’ve got some ideas around technique and skill, but the more I was out there I think, “Well, what can I actually do that’s going to add value to what great technicians like yourself and other coaches are doing,” and increasingly I thought, “Well, once we get swimmers understanding the what of technique and they understand about pressure on the water, and feel, and the importance of rhythm and balance, and all that, once they’ve got an understanding of that, what do we do to build on that?”

Wayne: Increasingly, when I talk to coaches and swimmers around the world and athletes in a lot of sports, it comes down to the way they do what they do in training day to day. The most exciting thing I’ve been doing in the last few months since we last chatted, is really around talking to coaches and directly to swimmers, about what words like excellence actually look like in the pool, and what does it look like to have a winning workout, or what does it look like to have a team focused swimming program? That’s where I think the breakthrough for me is coming. I’m really enjoying talking to people about those things.

Brenton: You’ve worked with so many different clubs, and across so many different sports as well, and I’m assuming that those things really stand out with the successful clubs and teams that you work with. Is that something that you feel and that you notice when you go into those organizations?

Wayne: Yeah, you do. It’s funny, the word you’ve just used there is right, it’s feel. You walk in, and I think within five or 10 minutes, it’s almost an energy. It’s almost a passion, or an enthusiasm. You feel a connection between the people. There is something there that is almost tangible, and even earlier this year I was in the UK and I got to spend a little bit of time with Eddie Jones, with English Rugby, I did a little work of workout with Irish Rugby, and with some swimming teams in different countries. You get a vibe. You get something that actually says, “Look, there’s an energy going on here. There’s something special about this environment,” and then when you try to pinpoint it, what keeps coming out is things like they’re encouraging each other, the communication between each other, doing the little things right. Training’s supposed to start at 8:00 AM, and you see them arrive at 7:15, and not just getting ready themselves, but helping other teammates to get ready. You can feel that. It’s almost electric and yet applies to every sport, and absolutely in swimming.

Brenton: I guess the question there is how does someone go about creating that sort of atmosphere, and that feel in environment, in a team that doesn’t have that at all? Is it something that can be turned around, and if it can be turned around, what sort of timeframe are people looking at?

Wayne: Yeah, two excellent questions and the process that I use, and it’s on my website and I’m happy to share it with you and the listeners, but basically when I start, I sit down with the coach and say, obviously, “What are you trying to do,” and there could be a coach who says, “Well, I just want to have more kids coming, and swimming, and having a great time.” Well, then what they’re saying is I want to create a culture. I want to build an environment based on fun, friendships, family enjoyment, engagement, and that’s a really valid culture, because I think quite often, when we start talking about the culture of a team, immediately assume, “Well, that’s about excellence, and winning, and drive, and determination and glory.”

Wayne: It doesn’t have to be, you could be a coach who says, “I want my culture of my team to be based on friendships, family, team development, connection between people, positivity,” all those great things, and you’ll set out to build that, or of course, if you decide that you’re about excellence, and exceptional performance, and being the best that you can be, that’s also very valid as well.

Wayne: So, I ask the coach, “What is it you’re actually trying to come up with,” then bringing the athletes in, sometimes all the athletes, but if it’s a football team, always all the players come in, but it might only just be the leaders, or the older athletes if you’re talking about a swim team, an athletics team, or something. We start talking about that concept, about either passion, performance, winning, success, or whatever it might be, and we try to nail it down to some clear values, and most commonly you’ll hear words like, “We want to be known by our trademark should be. We want other people to think about these words or these things when they see us words like professional, or hardworking, or committed, or dedicated, or honest, or respectful,” or whatever, but the words are not that critically important, and everybody goes through that. I’m sure a lot of people listening in the corporate world have even had to go in and do those days where they come up with mission statements and all those things, but the critical thing is, Brendan, is whatever the values are, is inside coaches.

Wayne: All right, what does your values look like? What do they look like when you’re training in the pool, when you’re doing drilling and training, on meet day, and then what I group as self management and social situation. So, what do your values, what does it actually look like? What are the behaviors that bring those values to life around diet, and sleep, and recovery? It’s critical to do this step, and it’s because so much of what we do is measurable. So, we measure heart rate, we measure laps, we measure strokes, we measure speed, and it’s easy then to say, “Guys, we’re going to go faster,” or, “We’re going to change the time cycle,” or, “We’re going to do another workout,” and what gets measured gets done, because you can see it and the swimmers go, “Yes, I understand. Stroke count needs to be 42, strokes for this lap, I get it. I get it. I get it.”

Wayne: The biggest challenge for us when we’re doing this stuff is to say, “I need to bring a theme like honesty into the real world,” so that the behaviors that bring honesty to life are so real and so tangible that it’s as real as speed, and power, and endurance, and sets, and reps, and so on. So, what we do is the team they’ve come up with the values, and we’ve come up, we’ve said, “All right. One of your values might be the word team. We’re about team and working together. All right. What are the behaviors that would show me that you’re a team when you’re in the pool? What are the behaviors that you will live? What are the sort of behaviors that you will live when you’re in the gym that would say to me, we are a team?” So, I get the athletes to identify the actual behaviors that to them will say, “This is who we are, this is what we’re about.”

Wayne: The two reasons I do that is, first of all, if you can feel, you can do it. So, if it becomes real, individual swimmers can then take responsibility for their own living of those behaviors, and the other swimmers in the team can keep them accountable for those behaviors. That responsibilities about me. Accountability is about we and by bringing those seemingly unmeasurable, intangible things to life so they can be seen, and they can be lived, and swimmers take responsibility for their own behaviors, and the team keep them accountable to those behaviors, then the culture turns around.

Brenton: I think I was very lucky to grow up, and swim in a squad where we had a lot of these things in place. So, as you know, my dad was my coach and he was really, really good at developing a great team culture, and just some of those, I guess tangible values, or the way that you apply those values, he did very well. So, some of those things was, just in a main set, encouraging the swimmers in your lane, or the swimmers next you, and working together as a team, that way it’s not just about the times that you’re doing, you want to encourage your teammates to do well on that set.

Brenton: Other ones are at different meets, like country championships, everyone was encouraged to go and watch everyone else swimming when you’re not racing, and if you’re not warming up or cooling down, be there in the stands cheering for everyone else, and that created a really good environment because if you’re there racing, you’re behind the blocks, they announce your name, and you’ve got 30 of your teammates there cheering you on, you really want to do well. That’s so much better than if there’s 30 months who aren’t there, they don’t care that you’re competing, it just means a whole lot more. So, even those things that might not necessarily be all about performance, team building and good culture, they lead to good performance.

Brenton: You can be an Andre Agassi, you can completely hate the sport, and hate what you’re doing, and still do well, but that’s not going to keep people around in the sport, and that’s not going to have those swimmers who might be B or C level swimmers, that’s not going to make them rise up through the ranks, because they don’t want to be a part of it. So, I think all these things that you’re talking about, they do lead to better performance, and I’m sure that’s something that you see day in, day out.

Wayne: I mean, that’s a great point about being in a culture where people care about each other. I was talking to a high performance team earlier in the year, and the coach asked me to a professional rugby team, and they asked me to talk to the players about some of the key themes of success in high performance, and I said, “Well guys, words like determination, will to win, all those things, yeah, sure, we’re familiar with that, ruthless execution, hard work, I mean all those things that routinely people will talk about, the cornerstones of high performance and dedication, commitment, perseverance, resilience, there all important words. Just as important, are words like love, and care, and consideration.”

Wayne: Honestly, I’ll tell you what, they go together. So, that if I say for example, “We’re going to be the greatest swimming team, triathlon team, that’s ever walked the earth, and we have all these values, these hard values, if you like, around commitment, and dedication, and all those things. When we’re actually swimming, when we’re running, riding, when we’re training as a team, we need to back that up with not just saying, Well done, high five, hey man, keep it up, great work. I need to be able to look at my teammate in the eyes and say, man, that’s not good enough. You need to do that again because I’m not letting you fail,” and to have a conversation about performance, but based on caring, respectful, but still a compromising an honest way. Doing things.

Wayne: The teams, Brendan, that I see are exceptional, are able to do that, because normally if I came up to you and say, “Brendan, it’s no good. Do it again,” and we have no relationship, you go, “Well, who they bloody hell are you to tell me that. I’m not going to listen to you. How dare you say those things to me.” If you’re in a team though where there’s a genuine spirit of caring for each other, where I desperately want you to succeed as much as you do, and you feel the same about me, then I can say, “Man, you didn’t finish on the wall. That’s not good enough. We’re going to national champs. We need to do every lap as if it’s a perfect lap. Now you and I are going to stay back.”

Wayne: So, that’s the accountability thing, “You and I going to stay back, and we’re going to do 20 finishes perfectly, because man, I will not let you fail because I need to see you succeed. I want to see you succeed because man, you’re a friend to me.” Once teams have broken down the barriers to real honesty, then their leading the standard of the workout from the water. If you’re a couch, and you’re still walking around a group of swimmers who say, “Yes coach, I want to get a state champs. I want to go to nationals. I want to finish an Iron Man,” whatever it is, if you’re still walking around the pool and saying, “Finish on the wall. Don’t breathe inside the flags. Don’t breathe first stroke. Kick your legs under water,” if you’re still walking around saying things, hundreds and thousands of times a year, you have to rethink, because all of those things in a functioning team need to be driven from the water by the swimmers.

Wayne: I think there’s a bit of a misprint in that we’ve handed over ownership of swimming to the swimmers and it’s somehow where we’re giving them permission, or we’re allowing them the right, well, that’s not right. What’s actually happening in the swimming teams that are making a huge difference is the swimmers get this importance of culture, and they get this importance of the integration of commitment and honesty, and their combination of relentless desperation to win with caring, and love, and kindness to each other, and they’re getting it, and all they’re doing is leading the standards from the water. They’re saying, “This is the standard that we expect if you want to be part of this team.”

Wayne: If coaches can build that, they become unstoppable. They combine the stuff that you do so well, the technical feel of the water, connection with the water, understanding how to move through water, if they combine that technical and skill side with this ownership, this responsibility model, of how the swimmers live that in the water, the team becomes unstoppable. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t just be brilliant technically, but have a terrible culture, and awful standards, and a team that’s constantly fighting, and being selfish. You just can’t have a culture without the technique and the technical side. You’re still going to work, and you’re still going to train, and you’ve got to do kick work, you’ve still got to do the technical, tactical, strategic stuff. It’s critically important, but if you can combine what I call those hard elements of swimming with those soft skills, you become an unstoppable force.

Brenton: One of the articles that I think you said to me that you’d written, it was probably a year ago, 18 months ago, was about Bill Sweetenham. Bill Sweetenham is still the same coach that he was 20 years ago, and you went and attended a workout, or maybe a couple of workouts, with Bill when he was coaching recently, and you wrote this article about your experience, and what Bill was doing, and for those listening, Bill Sweetenham’s just basically a legendary coach over the last, I don’t know how many years. 20, 30 years? I attended… What’s that, sorry?

Wayne: A hundred years.

Brenton: A hundred years, that’s probably closer to it. I’ve probably done two or three sessions with him when I was, I don’t know, 9, 12, and then maybe 15? He came in and coached our group back when I was younger, and this article that you had written, really changed the way that I coached.

Brenton: The biggest thing I got out of it, was that to be a good coach, yes, you’ve got to direct the sessions, all of that, but if you’re just there yelling at the swimmers, drilling them the whole time, that’s not having them take responsibility, and ownership, and learning what they actually need to do, and getting them to think for themselves. So, what you wrote really well and described really well in this article was that Bill’s asking them the questions to get them to come up with the answers for how they can get better. For example, in a set, let’s say the swimmer goes a second slower than where they need to be for a 50, and he’s not saying, “You need to go faster. Get it under 32 seconds.”

Brenton: No, he’s saying, “What can you do to take a second off this time? What can you do better? What can you change,” and just putting the ownership on them and having them need to think about what it is that they can change. All these series of questions, asking better questions to the athlete, gets them to take that on. I think that’s something that I’ve seen a huge difference in my coaching, and I’ve sort of done that a little bit in the past, but that really just showed it in a way that made it really clear. The reason for that too, was that it was told in a story, you were basically just explaining what Bill was doing. It wasn’t you saying, “This is what you need to do as a coach.” Brenton: Brendan: No, he’s saying, “What can you do to take a second off this time? What can you do better? What can you change,” and just putting the ownership on them and having them need to think about what it is that they can change. All these series of questions, asking better questions to the athlete, gets them to take that on. I think that’s something that I’ve seen a huge difference in my coaching, and I’ve sort of done that a little bit in the past, but that really just showed it in a way that made it really clear. The reason for that too, was that it was told in a story, you were basically just explaining what Bill was doing. It wasn’t you saying, “This is what you need to do as a coach.”

Brenton: No, you showed it in a story, and that’s a really good way for people to take on lessons. I think the same goes as a coach, if you can just share examples, or share stories of other swimmers, other people, maybe someone who did a great breakout in their last turn in a 200 butterfly at the Olympics and that won them race, that’s how someone’s going to go be going through a training session and they’re going to go, “Yeah, maybe if I can do that last turn in my 200 butterfly really well, that might get me up there towards the front.” So, I learned a lot from that just one article and it was really well written. So, I want thank you for writing that article, and with that article, or spending time with Bill, what was it for you that that sort of stood out, and what had changed for Bill over the last say, 20 or 30 years, with his coaching?

Wayne: Well, Bill’s been a mentor of mine for, I don’t know, 30 years or so and just always challenges me. Just when I think I’ve got him nailed and I understand him, he’ll throw a curve ball because he’s been working with motor racing, or something, and he’s learned something and he’s a phenomenal learner, Brendan, but a couple of things that I’ve got from Bill, and one is that problem solving is an incredibly powerful learning tool. So, even if you’re learning something simple like maths, is you can go, “Two plus two is four. Four plus four is eight. Eight plus eight is 16,” and you can learn it by [inaudible 00:20:22], which is basically what we’ve tried to do in swimming for a long time. We just do more, and more, and more, and more and the swimmers sooner or later will pick it up.

Wayne: If you look at what happened to you after you learn basic arithmetic, the teacher said, “All right. If you had two apples and someone bought you another two apples, how many apples would you,” so this thing of getting your brain to go from just data, two pictures of apples, “Oh, okay, I can see that now,” and then the teacher evolves further and says, “All right, if you had a bag of apples and you wanted four, how could you get them out of the bag?” So, you start going, “Oh, how would I actually do that?” You start that inquiring mindset, and what I noticed a lot with Sweetenham, he’s moved to that, and I’ve thought about it when I’m doing my clinics and things, I talk about you want to have swimmers not asking what but what if, so not saying, “What are we doing next, coach? What’s next? What’s the next session, coach? What’s the next set, coach?” You want them saying, “What if,” and it’s a subtle difference.

Wayne: So, what I mean is that you present that instead of saying, “Okay guys, today we’re going to do a fifteen 100s on 215, and I want everybody to hold 10 seconds off their best time,” well that’s a what. What you want the swimmers doing, is going, “What if I count my strikes down by two per lap? What if I breathe every four? What if I didn’t breathe on my first three strokes? What if I didn’t breathe the last five? What about if I finished left hand forward, ear on shoulder, looking at the bottom of the pool? What if, as I get to the last 25, I start building my kick and kick to the wall?”

Wayne: You want that to happen, Brendan, because as they evolve, whatever set they do, you can shift them from a, “What,” as in, “What do I do? Just tell me I don’t care. I’m just going to do it,” to being a thinking swimmer. A thinking athletic going, “What if I only breathed on my right side? What if I?” If they get to that stage where they’re almost setting workouts within workouts, their setting their own run little workout standards within your coaching environment, where they’re asking more of themself than you asked of them. If they get that, mate, it’s so powerful, and that’s the lesson I got from Bill, is that you got to the end of a set of hundreds near the old Bill, what I used to call the walrus, Bill would stand up and say, “Is that what you call swimming? If you want to be any bloody good, you’ll do this. I can’t believe. Get out and do another five,” and that was Bill probably 1970s, 1980s even, and even to the 1990s to a degree, but you could start to see some subtle changes.

Wayne: He was doing a lot of reading, had spent time in Hong Kong, he was exposed to a lot of confusion, no confusion as well, but Confucius philosophy, and Sun Tzu philosophy, and his mind had broadened from just this relentless commitment to hard work, to understanding human beings. I know he was a different guy after that period, but he continues to evolve. He was in this situation where he walked to the side of the pool and a young athlete, a talented young athlete, had done a great job, but then instead of Bill giving them the fight and die for the flag routine, which was what I call old Bill, Bill said, “I’ve got a question for you. Rate your workout.”

Wayne: Katie Ledecky we know who does this regularly, certainly with a previous coach, is that they would just talk about, “If you had the rate your workout now, or rate your training set right now, what would you do?” The athletes said, “Oh, it’s about a seven out of 10,” and then Bill would say, “Well, if you wanted the workout to be eight or nine out of 10 what do you think you’d do differently?” She said, “Oh, well, what I would have done, I would’ve gone a little bit faster. I would’ve done this,” and Bill said, “Great idea. Why don’t you give that a try?”

Wayne: So, the coach and the swimmer become partners in the performance and through their relationship, they become a pair of people trying [inaudible 00:24:41]. It’s a different kinship. I’m going to tell you there’s a lot of swimming coaches don’t make the jump and maybe can’t make the jump, because it’s easier just to say, “Do another five and a faster time cycle,” than it is to go up and spend a minute with a swimmer [inaudible 00:24:59] and say, “What do you think you can do? How do you think you could do that? If you would change anything, what would you?” It’s hard to do that, mate, and it takes more time, but it’s a much, much more powerful coaching tool.

Brenton: Having sort of changed the way I coached over the last 18 months or so, after reading that it, it takes a bit of time to get your head around what are the right questions to ask, and also, obviously, you’re going to work differently with different swimmers, but once I started to get a better sense of what questions I could ask them to get them to think differently about the way they’re training, and get them to come up with those answers on their own, it’s a much more enjoyable way to coach, because you’re not going there and operating at a nine out of 10 in terms of your aggression and being a hard ass coach.

Brenton: No, I feel that when I’m coaching, and this is probably more just my personality, but I can be calm the whole session, and just be in kind of a good place working with the swimmers, trying to get them to get the most out of themselves. It’s not just yell, yell, yell, go, go, go, because that’s not for me. I don’t enjoy that type of coaching. I bring it on when we need to, and I think there’s a time and place for it, but if you’re doing that 10 sessions a week, for two hours every time, you’re going to burn out as a coach and you’re probably going to come to resent the work that you’re doing, whereas when you’re operating from this place of you’re partners with the swimmer, I find that so much more enjoyable as a coach and then it’s a much better environment overall.

Wayne: It’s a wonderful progression in your coaching because it is a [inaudible 00:26:54] coaching is an energy sapping experience, if you do it the old way. If you do it this way, you’re walking off there going, “Well, Julie got that tonight. She understood that, and not only that, she did something that completely and surprised me.” You end up getting energy from the session, because you’ve walked away and going, “Well, I’ve made a difference today. I’ve actually made an impact on those swimmers,” and it takes time, but what I’m trying to talk to the coaches about more and more is to say, “Physiology is important. Sure. You’ve got to do the work. Would never debate that, but stop being so obsessed with the physiology,” is a great line.

Wayne: I actually got this from Laurie Lawrence, years and years ago, “Never put heart before heart rate.” It’s a great line, and the concept is that it’s easy to become slaves to the physiology and say, “Right guys, it’s twenty 100s, 145. Heart rate monitors on. Make sure your heart rate is between a range of 150 and 175,” and it’s easy to become slaves and blinded by the numbers, because it’s easy to see. I’m saying to coaches now, “Look, if you see an opportunity and a moment to change your heart, not heart rate. You see a coachable moment, an opportunity in the middle of a set, feel very comfortable pulling a swimmer out on deck for one minute, and having a quiet questioning conversation. Say man, how’s the working going? Yeah, great, coach.” What’s that, three seconds, to ask that question and get the answer?

Wayne: Say, “I’ve just been watching the way you’re coming off the wall the first 25 meters, what does that feel like? Oh, it doesn’t feel too bad. I’m looking at your kick, you’re taking about eight to 10 kicks under water, how do you think it would feel if you did eight kicks in three seconds? Well, do you think that’s worth having a crack at? What do you think? Yeah, that’d be good. I might try that on the next one, coach. Great idea. Get back in.” 30 seconds.

Wayne: In that time their heart rates dropped a little bit. Who cares, Brendan? Who cares? If you’re really that obsessed with the physiology, ask them to do another two at the end. We’ve been blindsided, and I’m a physiologist by training originally, so I can talk about my people, that we’ve become so obsessed with the numbers that the greatest crime you can commit as a swimming coach, is to allow their heart rate to drop below that zone, because once it’s there, there’s no training effect.

Wayne: What about training their heart, and their spirit, and their emotion, and their attitude, and their values, and their character? There’s so much more to training a human being, than just worrying that their heart rate stays in a particular zone. It’s not that accurate anyway. So, I implore coaches, if you see a moment, even if you’re doing an aerobics set, it doesn’t matter. If you see a critical coaching moment where you could make a difference to a human being, blow the heart rate. Who cares? Get them out, touch their heart, connect with them, listen to them, share with them, challenge them, get them to go, “Bang, what if I did this? What if it did that?” Then put them back in the pool. A little less than a minute, to maybe change the way they train for the rest of their life, over making sure they stay in a heart rate zone for another couple of minutes.

Wayne: There’s no comparison. It’s so different. One of the lines I’ve stolen from Bill, and I’m quite happy to credit Bill, he says, “Training is from the neck down, that’s arms, legs, body, but coaching is from the neck up.” If you’re just standing at the end of the pool, yelling time cycles, riding out workouts, giving them feedback on speed to the wall, or whatever it is, if you’re a trainer, you’ll go a long way as a coach, but you’ll get to a point where, because you’re not making that connection with them as human beings, you’re not understanding who they are, you’re not building those relationships, you’ll go no further. Once you understand that real coaching is from the neck up, training is neck down. Once you get that coaching is from the neck up, and your focus is connecting with them as people, everything changes for you, and it makes the training more effective in any case.

Brenton: I had two guests on from Surf Life Saving, Harriet Brown and Josh [inaudible 00:31:38]. They’re both competing at the highest level of Surf Life Saving, and both of them mentioned similar things, which was basically, at the very top level, it’s pretty much all mental. They’re all pretty much just fit one another, and so much of it is the mental side of things, and how you approach a race, and what you think about yourself. Especially when it comes down to crunch time, those decisions, like Harriet for example, she does the Molokai to Oahu paddle, which I think it’s a 40, 42 or 52 kilometer paddle, from island to island, and said with about two hours to go, her shoulder was hurting. She just wanted to give up, wanted to get back in the boat, and her mind was telling her, “No one will mind if you quit, if you give up. My shoulder’s hurting. It’s probably just going to do more damage and no one will care if I jump out.” That’s what my mind was telling her.

Brenton: It’s at that critical point where you can either get out, or you can keep pushing. Eventually, she kept pushing and she went on to win the event. I think that’s the accumulation of years, and years, and years of training your mind, making the right decisions, and having good coaches who can help steer you in that direction, because had she not had the right mental fortitude to be able to make that decision, and ignore what that little voice was saying, then she wouldn’t have kept going. Josh was the same thing and he’d had a lot of years and years of being successful, but never quite at the top.

Brenton: It was about seven years from when he first started to when he actually got a win in Surf Iron Man. It’s just that ability to sort of push through, and I think that it really just comes down to training the mind, and teaching people how to be better people and better to others, because as you said, the physical aspect of things, that’s going to come, but it’s ignoring, I think, the biggest and the most important part of it, which is the mental side of things.

Wayne: Isn’t it funny? What you say, I agree with completely, but I find it fascinating that for the majority of coaches they split the training of the mind and the training of the body. So, they’ll get the kids in the pool. They’ll do the physical work, and the skills, and drills, and so on, but then they’ll the mental stuff to, maybe team meetings, or to seminars, or getting someone in who’s been an athlete, or a sports psych, and they separate it. The reality is, everything physical has to have a mental component. Everything. What I’ve started saying to coaches is, “When you write your workout on the board,” say you’re going to go twenty 50s of fly on 130, you’ve got the volume, which is twenty 50s, you’ve got the intensity, which whatever speed you set, and you’ve got the frequency of the session, so we’re constantly looking at these physiological variables. Volume, intensity, frequency, next to that, you’ve seriously got to write the letter M about, “What’s the mental lesson I’m trying to teach here? Am I trying to teach relaxation? Am I trying to teach confidence? Am I trying to teach visualization? What am I trying?”

Wayne: Every time you’re write anything physical, in the next column you’ve really got a say, “I have this volume, intensity, frequency and relaxation. Volume, intensity, frequency and confidence. Volume, intensity, frequency and mental toughness.” Everything you do has got to have some sort of mental component. I know you and I did a recording a couple of years ago on speed, and I still use the same technique, that when I talk to people about speed, I say, “Guys, as fast as you can, but very smooth and relaxed. Guys, maximum speed. This needs to be race pace but easy, relaxed, comfortable, and effortless.” So, what you’re saying is I have to marry the physiology with the mental, emotional, psychological effects in everything we do.

Wayne: Say, “Guys, we’re going to do four, 400s. It’s aerobic work. Smooth, relaxed and flowing. Concentrating on deep, easy, relaxed. Inhale and exhale. Nice, soft hands. Guys, as smooth and easy.” So again, you’re saying physiologically, what is it, 60 65, 70% intensity. Volume is 400 meters, rest cycle, that’s critical, but then I’m saying, “Guys, but mentally and emotionally, the way to connect to the set, I want you to be thinking about and feeling smooth, breathing, and relaxing, or practicing some mindfulness techniques,” or whatever it is. I think if coaches do something as simple as that, everything physical I write down, the next column, write down what is the mental thing. Volume, intensity, frequency, mind. What am I going to do mentally with this? At all ages. Start as young as you can to break this physiology-only thinking cycle that we’re so locked into.

Brenton: Yeah. I’ve noticed a big difference with that when I’ve introduced it to sessions. So, two examples. There’s this two local kids that I’ve been coaching once or twice a week, and we were doing some 25s at 100 meter pace. First set was 16 25s, I think they’re say 35 seconds, and the aim is to hit 100 meter pace with each of them. At the start of that set, I said, “Look, after eight, nine 25s, you’re going to start to feel a bit heavy. You’re going to start to feel the burn a bit, but your challenge is, what we want to do here is, try and make every single lap, every single 25, exactly the same. Same amount of kicks off the wall. Same amount of strokes. Same time. Do that when you start to fatigue, because that’s what you’re going to experience, that’s what you’re probably going to feel when you’re racing. If you can keep your technique, and that stroke count, if you can keep it all the same in the last six, seven 25s, then that’s the purpose of this workout. That’s what’s going to help you when it comes to the race.”

Brenton: So, explaining that when they got to that point, when they started to feel like, “Oh, all right, I’m starting to get heavy and I don’t know if I can hold it.” they knew that coming, and then they know what the purpose of what we’re doing is. So, they held those 25s really well. Another example was when we were at Hell Week over in Thailand, the last set that we do on the last day is, it’s a Dennis Cotterell set, it’s forty 50s, where we go 16 every fourth fast, 12 every third, eight every second, and then the last four are all fast. Those of us who hadn’t done it before, every time when someone does that, the first time they go too fast at the start. So, those easy 50s, they tend to just put too much into it, and the fast ones they go too fast.

Brenton: So, what we preface those workouts with is, “Make sure that those easy ones are just steady. You’re relaxed. You’re meant to be getting your rest there, and then those initial fast 50s, you don’t want to burn all of your matches straightaway. You’ll still find you can go fast, by still sitting at an eight out of 10, instead of a 10 out of 10.” So, just letting them know upfront how it will feel early on, and then that’s going to help you just maintain that speed. That was probably the best set of that, that we’ve done, over the course of the last five years. I think a big part of that was just prefacing what to expect and then having them know the mental side of things, or the mental outcome that we’re looking to achieve there.

Brenton: I’ve always loved coaching, but I love learning the stuff that you teach, because it really gives me something else to think about, rather than just the workout, rather than just the set, because yes, that’s important, and it’s fun, it’s enjoyable to come up with good and interesting sets and different ways to train them, but really the most enjoyable thing is watching people grow and become more confident and to become better people as a result of hopefully what they can learn in a workout, or what they can learn from training.

Wayne: Yeah, mate, that’s so critical, and listen, like you said Brendan, it’s rewarding. I think we have an opportunity in those moments where they then walk away from the pool, I strongly believe then there is a carry on to other parts of their life. An athlete that can do that forty, fifty set in the way that that’s really intended, and they buy into it, and they show the discipline, and the commitment, and the ability to deal with pain and discomfort, what is there in their life that’s going to be an obstacle to them? If they’re a student, they’re going to study a little bit longer, or there’s nothing else that they’ve got to face that they didn’t know before. It’s like people who climb mountains, or achieve anything in life, is that I think that then builds.

Wayne: So, they go, “Yeah. Okay, what did I learn? Well, I sure learned how to swim a bit, but I learned that I can do anything I set my mind to, that I can overcome adversity, that I can deal with pain, that I can overcome discomfort” They start developing, what I call that core of developing confidence, which is like, “Can I? Can I? Can I? I can.” I often say to swimmers, we talk a lot about confidence in the work that I do, I say, “Confidence comes from can’s. I can. I can. I can. I can,” that like everybody, we’ve all got those two voices going on in our heads all the time. You’ve got the voice saying, “I can. I can. I can, and I can,” and the other voice saying, “No, you can’t. This is national champs. You’ve never done a half Iron Man before,” whatever it might be.

Wayne: Those two voices are battling in their head and it’s exactly the same way, “Yes, I can do this exam. No, it can’t be this exam. Yes, I can achieve this dollar amount,” and every one in the planet has got those little voices competing, and it’s the sum of the experiences where you go, “I can. I can. I can,” this little voice over here says, “I can. I can,” and this other side says, “Well, hang on a minute. I was in Hell Week. I did forty 50s, and I did that, and I go to the gym every day, and I watch my diet, and I get a bit early. I can. I can. I can.” This voice over here the, “I can’t,” voice becomes very soft. It becomes a whisper, because through your behaviors, and through your actions, and the things that you’ve learnt, you become effectively bulletproof. You become someone, that every time you face what’s seemingly a difficult obstacle the, “I can,” voice is shouting, while the, “I can’t,” voice is just whispering. You start to believe that anything is possible.

Wayne: A lot of work I do now with swimmers, and swim teams, is around things like how do you coach confidence? Well, you can coach confidence by giving swimmers experiences in and out of the water that build on that, “Yes I can. Yes I can. Yes I can.” So, they go to their first meet. Well, they’ve got a big target, mate, and the other voice starts to creeping, “No you can’t. No you can’t. No you can’t,” but the overwhelming can of evidence, success comes in cans, “I can,” that the overwhelming can of evidence is full of those experiences that have just reinforced to the athlete that there’s nothing they can’t do. Again, that comes back to giving ostensibly a physical set of physiological challenge of forty 50s, but what is the mental and emotional purpose behind me doing that? How does that then help the swimmer take some giant strides forward?

Brenton: Yeah, I had a parent contact me a couple of weeks ago of a girl who I’ve done a little bit of coaching with, and she basically said every time this girl goes behind the blocks, she just starts to doubt herself, and it’s that, “I can’t. I can’t,” voice gets in the way and it’s impacting her racing. She said, “Look, can we do a session, or could you have a talk to her?” There’s nothing that I could say that’s going to get her to have that, “I can,” behind the blocks. It’s that accumulation of experiences, and those little successes built up in the water, out of the water, that’s going to have her feel that confidence behind the blocks. So, it’s not like I could say the magic word and she’s going to have that confidence.

Brenton: You need to get that experience and that belief through all these different sessions, and all these different times, so it’s good to hear you say that, because that was my thinking behind it. As much as I’d love to be able to say the magic words and she would immediately just be confident and know that she could do it as she’s standing there behind the blocks, it’s just not how those things work. So, what I said to the parent was, “Look, come along to these sessions and we’ll work on that with her. We’ll work on that in training, because that’s where she’s going to go and get it.”

Brenton: Now, for anyone who’s a coach who’s listening to this, you’ve got a course that’s online. I think, it’s probably your first course that you’ve put online, that I’d recommend to any coach that wants to learn more about this stuff. So, it’s called Soft Skills: High Impact and A Holistic Approach to Coaching Swimmers. Can you talk a bit about that course? What people will learn in that course, and who it’s designed for?

Wayne: Yeah, thanks Brendan. This is something I’ve been, obviously, thinking about for a long time and see it as a critically important set of skills for coaches to have, because it’s interesting that like you, I get emails and texts and people will say, “How do I change this,” or, “I’m coaching age group squad in Rockhampton, how do I help them build confidence,” or, “I’m coaching a team in Western Australia. They would all like to go to state championships, but I don’t think they understand what commitment looks like,” or, “I’ve got a really talented 15 year old going to his first national championships. How do I help him with mental toughness and resilience to deal with the challenges?” I thought, I get so many of those questions in seminars and on the phone, laptop, so instead of just writing an article about it, I want to actually do something more. I want to get in front of people and say, “Confidence, commitment, mental toughness, leadership, team development, you can coach all those things.”

Wayne: You go online to the course, and so there’s actually an intro. The first lesson is around confidence, for example. They go on and the video shows me at a pool talking with some swimmers, working with some swimmers, and talking about how to build confidence. Even in the theme of confidence, I have a very simple model for coaches to follow, which is this, “Confidence is belief, how the athlete feels about themselves, the way they love, value, and accept themselves as human beings, times evidence.” Confidence is belief times evidence. The evidence is what we’ve just spoken about, all the things they do in training, their diet, their flexibility, work, their drive, their trainings, their previous competitions. That’s accumulating in that, “I can” and that they can. The other side is how they look at themselves as human beings, and largely that comes from the way mom and dad love them, and accept them, up to about ages eight to ten years of age.

Wayne: So, then I talk to the coaches in the video and I say, “This is why it’s critically important when you’re trying to build the confidence of the young swimmer, that you’re doing a great job in the pool with outstanding coaching, building relationships, inspiring the athletes to do the training to the full extent of their potential, but you’ve got a relationship with the parents to talk to them about their role in reinforcing love, value, and acceptance of their child, and how they react after win and loss,” and some of those things and the coaches work through the videos. Each video goes for about five minutes, then there’s an article, which will cover this confidence is belief times evidence with a downloadable chart on the same content, and then there’s some self reflection questions about how they can then apply that learning to their own team.

Wayne: I really write a list down, Brendan, of what are the key soft skills that coaches are always asking me about, or are working on. Definitely confidence. Certainly commitment is one. I remember having a talk to David Marsh, the great US coach about if you could recruit swimmers on any one non-physical quality, what would it be? Say you couldn’t recruit on solid strength, swimming speed, what would you recruit on, and he said commitment. I said, “That’s a great, great line, mate, but the issue, again, we’ll have is can I measure commitment? Can I see commitment and can I coach commitment?” Marsh’s line was fantastic and I still use it. He said, “If a swimmer is committed, when you give them a choice between doing things the easy way or the hard way, they choose to do it the hard way, and of course the hard way is really the right way.”

Wayne: So, his example was looking at someone like Ryan Lochte, he said, “He has a choice approaching a wall. Do I breathe at the flags? Do I breathe two minutes past the flags? Do I breathe before I turn? If he’s a committed swimmer, he will choose, not me enforcing, or making, or insisting, but he as a committed athlete, he will choose to do things the hard way, the difficult way. He will deliberately choose a higher standard and training because that’s where he wants to go.” So, we watched Lochte and watched him go in the pool and he made that decision and not surprisingly, the best underwater, and probably best wall swimmer we’ve seen for a long, long time.

Wayne: So, from that I say to coaches, “All right. Well, if that’s what commitment looks like, easy way, hard way, you coach commitment by showing swimmers the power of choice. You say choice, easy, choice [inaudible 00:50:53] they get better, is the to take four breaths inside the flags. The choice that’s going to make you exceptional and the choice that will help you become the swimmer you want to be, is this one: don’t breathe inside the flags.” Then I say to the swimmer something that’s simple, Brendan, “What choice will you make? What’s your choice? You make the choice about the swimmer that you want to be,” and you show them the power of their choices. Once I get that, and I sort of talk about in the commitment video to the coaches, “If you can show them the power of choice, show them what those choices look like, then you’ve coached commitment, because you’ve shown them what commitment actually looks like in a day to day workout.” So, the course is all about that, showing coaches what it looks like to coach the soft skills of swimming that makes such a powerful impact on the program.

Brenton: Every coach has had a swimmer, at least a swimmer, like that, that’s committed, chooses the hard option, and it is just such a joy to coach those swimmers, because you look at what they’re doing, you look at them making those decisions, and it’s a real joy to coach those athletes compared to swimmers who always take the easy option, push off the wall, they breathe first stroke, and they’re not doing the things that you know will make them a better swimmer. That can be very frustrating if you’re doing that day in day out, so by being able to have more swimmers make that commitment and make those tough choices, and they do it on their own without having to yell at the kids, or to be telling them no. They make those choices.

Brenton: I think it is so important. So, that soft skills course, it’s on your website at wjcoaching.com, and I’ll put a link in our show notes as well, for any coaches who would like to get their hands on it. I think it’s so worthwhile, and I’ll make sure that it’s on our website. So, Wayne, thanks again for being on the podcast. I really enjoyed chatting to you and I always learn so much, and it makes me want to go out there and get coaching every time that I speak to you. So, mate, I appreciate you being on the podcast again.

Wayne: It’s an absolute pleasure and I’ll make sure I’ll send you a special discount coupon code just for your listeners, and really to say thank you to you and to your listeners for your ongoing support over many years. I’ll send that through to you. You can put that up on your website and that’ll give all your listeners a discount on the course if they’d like to try, but I thank you and I wish you a Merry Christmas, and mate, keep up the outstanding work. I don’t think even you realize the difference you making of the sport and the impact you’re having to the sport around the world.

Brenton: I appreciate it very much, mate. I’m very lucky that I get to learn from people like yourself, and speak with great coaches, and great athletes. I’ve learned so much over the last 12 years of coaching, but probably more so in the last six years since I started the podcast. So, get to speak to a lot of very smart people, a lot smarter than me, and it makes a big difference. So, I appreciate that very much.

Stop being so obsessed with the physiology. There’s a great line, and I actually got this from Laurie Lawrence years and years ago. Never put heart before heart rate. That’s a great line. And the concept is that it’s easy to become slaves to the physiology and say, right guys, it’s 2100s, 145, heart rate born to design, make sure your heart rate is between a range of 150 and 175. It’s easy to become slaves and blinded by the numbers because it’s easy to see. But I’m saying to coaches now, look, if you see an opportunity and a moment to change a heart, not a heart rate, about a heart, you see a coachable moment and opportunity in the middle of a set, feel very comfortable pulling a swimmer out on deck for one minute and having a quiet questioning conversation. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Wayne, thanks so much for being on the podcast. You’re probably a regular guest at least once a year. I like to have you on because there’s always so much that I learn, and I know that the people listening get so much out of it as well, especially those that are coaching. But even if you’re not a coach, I think the stuff that you teach is great as an athlete, especially if you’re training in a squad or with a club, there’s a lot that people can get from the stuff that you teach. And we were talking just earlier that it’s not necessarily the technical stuff that you like to focus on. It’s the stuff around that, the soft skills. And what have you been working with athletes and squads on lately over the last three to six months since we last spoke?

Well, I think it’s always great to be on the show and I congratulations on the great work you continue to do on technique. Whenever I see your stuff, it’s just so practical and applied and works universally with swimmers everywhere. And like anyone in any business, you’re looking for a point of difference. And when I look at people like you and there’s so many brilliant technicians in swimming and there’s a lot of people talking about technique and skill development and so on. And I’ve got some background in swimming and I’ve got some ideas around technique and skill. But the more I was out there, I think, well, what can I actually do that’s gonna add value to what great technicians like yourself and other coaches are doing? And increasingly, once we get swimmers understanding the what of technique and they understand about pressure on the water and feel and the importance of rhythm and balance and all that, once they’ve got an understanding of that,

all right, so what do we do to build on that? And increasingly, when I talk to coaches and swimmers around the world and athletes and a lot of sports, it comes down to the way they do what they do in training day to day. And the most exciting thing I think I’ve been doing in the last few months since we last chatted is really around talking to coaches and directly to swimmers about what words like excellence actually look like in the pool and what does it look like to have a winning workout or what does it look like to have a team-focused swimming program that’s where I think the breakthrough for me is coming. I’m really enjoying talking to people about those things. And you’ve worked with so many different clubs and across so many different sports as well and I’m assuming that those things really stand out with the successful clubs and teams that you work with. Is that something that you feel and that you notice when you go into those organizations?

Yeah, you do. It’s funny, the word you’ve just used there is right, it’s feel. You walk in and I think within five or 10 minutes there’s a, it’s almost an energy. It’s almost a passion or an enthusiasm or you feel a connection between people, there’s something there that is almost tangible. And even earlier this year I was in the UK and I got to go and spend a little bit of time with Eddie Jones, with English rugby I always did a little bit of work up with Irish rugby and with some swimming teams in different countries and you get a vibe, you get something that actually says, look, there’s an energy going on here. There’s something special about this environment. And then when you try to pinpoint it, what keeps coming out is things like they’re encouraging each other, sure, the communication between each other, doing the little things right, the training supposed to start at 8 a.m. And you see them arrive at 7.15

and not just getting ready themselves but helping other teammates to get ready and you can feel that it’s almost electric. And it applies to every sport and absolutely in swimming. Is it, and I guess the question there is, well, how does someone go about creating that sort of atmosphere and that feeling environment in their team, if they’re in a team that doesn’t have that at all? Is it something that can be turned around and if it can be turned around, what sort of timeframe are people looking at? Yeah, my two excellent questions and the process that I use, and it’s on my websites and I’m happy to share it with you and the listeners, but basically when I start out, I sit down with the coach and say, obviously, what are you trying to do? And that could be a coach who said, look, I just want to have more kids coming and swimming and having a great time. Well, then what they’re saying is I want to create a culture,

I want to build an environment based on fun, friendships, family, enjoyment, engagement. And that’s a really valid culture because I think I quite often, Brendan, when we start talking about the culture of a team, immediately assume, well, that’s about excellence and winning and drive and determination and glory. It doesn’t have to be, you could be a coach who says, I want my culture of my team to be based on friendships, family, team development, connection between people, positivity, all those great things and you were set out to build that. Or of course, if you decide that you’re about excellence and exceptional performance and being the best that you can be, that’s also very valid as well. And so I asked the coach, what is it you’re actually trying to come up with? Then bring the athletes in, sometimes all the athletes, but if it’s a football team, always all the players come in, but it might only just be the leaders

or the older athletes, if you’re talking about a swim team or an athletics team or so on. And we start talking about that concept about either passion, performance, winning success or whatever it might be. And we try to nail it down to some clear values. And most commonly, you’ll hear words like, we want to be known by our trademark should be. We want other people to think about these words or these things when they see us words like professional or hardworking or committed or dedicated or honest or respectful or whatever. The words are not that critically important. And everybody goes through that. And I’m sure a lot of people listening in the corporate world have even had to go in and do those days where they come up with mission statements and all those things. But the critical thing is Brenton is, whatever the values are, is I then say coaches, all right, what does your values look like? What do they look like when you’re training in the pool,

when you’re doing dry land training on meat day? And then what I group as self-management and social situation. So what do your values, what does it actually look like? What are the behaviors that bring those values to life around diet and sleep and recovery? This is really, it’s critical to do this step. And it’s because so much of what we do is measurable. So we measure heart rate, we measure laps, we measure strokes, we measure speed. And it’s easy then to say, guys, we’re gonna go faster. Or we’re gonna change the time cycle. Or we’re gonna do another workout. And what gets measured gets done because you can see it and the swimmer’s going, yes, I understand stroke count needs to be 42 strokes for this lap, I get it, I get it, I get it. The biggest challenge for us when we’re doing this stuff is to say I need to bring a theme like honesty into the real world so that the behaviors that bring honesty to life are so real and so tangible

that it’s as real as speed and power and endurance and sets and reps and so on. So what we do is the team that come up with the values and we’ve come up with said, all right, one of your values might be the word team. We’re about team and working together. All right, what are the behaviors that would show me that you’re a team when you’re in the pool? What are behaviors that you will live? What are the sort of behaviors that you will live when you’re in the gym? That would say to me, we are a team. So I get the athletes to identify the actual behaviors that to them will say, this is who we are. This is what we’re about. And the two reasons I do that is first of all, if you can sit, you can fell, you can do it. So if it becomes real, individual swimmers can then take responsibility for their own living of those behaviors. And the other swimmers in the team can keep them accountable for those behaviors. So responsibility is about me, accountability is about we.

And by bringing those seemingly unmeasurable, intangible things to life, so they can be seen and they can be lived. And swimmers take responsibility for their own behaviors. And the team keep them accountable to those behaviors, then the culture turns around.

I think I was very lucky to grow up and swim in a squad where we had a lot of these things in place. So as you know, my dad was my coach and he was really, really good at developing a great team culture. And so just some of those, I guess, tangible values or the way that you apply those values he did very well. So like some of those things was like just in a main set encouraging the swimmers in your lane or the swimmers next year and working together as a team that way. It’s not just about the times that you’re doing. You wanna encourage your teammates to do well in that set. Other ones are at different meets like country championships. Everyone was encouraged to go and watch everyone else swimming when you’re not racing. And if you’re not warming up or cooling down be there in the stands cheering for everyone else. And that created a really good environment. Cause if you’re there racing, you’re behind the blocks

they announced your name and you’ve got 30 of your teammates there cheering you on you really wanna do well. That’s so much better than if there’s 30 swimmers who aren’t there they don’t care that you’re competing. Yeah, it just means a whole lot more. So even those skit, those things that might not necessarily be all about performance you know the team building and good culture they lead to good performance. And I think it’s like you can be in Andre Agassi you can completely hate the sport and hate what you’re doing and still do well but that’s not gonna keep people around in the sport and that’s not going to have those swimmers who might be B or C level swimmers that’s not gonna make them rise up through the ranks cause they don’t wanna be a part of it. So I think all these things that you’re talking about they do lead to better performance and I’m sure that’s something that you see day in day out. Well, that’s a great point about being in a culture

where people care about each other. I was talking to a high performance team earlier in the year and the coach asked me to a professional rugby team and they asked me to talk to the players about some of the key themes of success in high performance. And I said, well, guys, words like determination, will to win, all those things. Yeah, sure, we’re familiar with that. Ruthless execution, hard work, I mean, all those things. If you, that routinely people will talk about the cornerstones of high performance and dedication, commitment, perseverance, resilience they’re all important words. Just as important are words like love and care and consideration and I’ll tell you why and they go together so that if I say, for example, we’re gonna be the greatest swimming team, triathlon team that’s ever walked the earth and we have all these values, these hard values if you like around commitment and dedication and all those things.

When we’re actually swimming, when we’re running, when we’re training, as a team, we need to back that up. We’re not just saying, well done, high five, hey man, keep it up, great work. I need to be able to look at my teammate in the eyes and say, man, that’s not good enough. You need to do that again because I don’t want you to fail and you have a conversation about performance but based on caring, respectful, but still a compromising and honest way of doing things and the teams, Brendan and I see are exceptional, are able to do that because normally if I come up to you and say, Brendan’s no good, do it again and we have no relationship. You go, well, who the hell are you to tell me that? I’m not gonna listen to you. How dare you say those things to me? If you’re in a team where there’s a genuine spirit of caring for each other, where I desperately want you to succeed as much as you do and you feel the same about me,

then I can say, man, you didn’t finish on the wall. That’s not good enough. We’re going to national champs. We need to do every lap as if it’s a perfect lap. Now you and I are gonna stay back. So that’s the accountability thing. I’m gonna, you and I are gonna stay back and we’re gonna do 20 finishes perfectly because, man, I will not let you fail because I need to see you succeed. I want to see you succeed because, man, you’re a friend of me. Once teams have broken down the barriers to real honesty, then they’re leading the standard of the workout from the water. If it’s still, if you’re a coach and you’re still walking around a group of swimmers who say, yes, coach, I want to go to state champs. I want to go to nationals. I want to finish an Ironman, whatever it is. If you’re still walking around the pool and saying, finish on the wall, don’t breathe inside the flags. Don’t breathe first stroke. Kick your legs on the water.

If you’re still walking around saying those things hundreds and thousands of times a year, you have to rethink because all of those things in a functioning team need to be driven from the water by the swimmers. And I think there’s a bit of a misprint in there that we’ve handed over ownership of swimming to the swimmers and it’s somehow we’re giving them permission or we’re allowing them to write. That’s not right. What’s actually happening in the swimming teams that are making a huge difference is the swimmers get this importance culture and they get this importance of that integration of commitment and honesty and their combination of relentless desperation to win with caring and love and kindness to each other and they’re getting it and all they’re doing is leading the standards from the water. They’re saying this is the standard that we expect if you want to be part of this team. And if coaches can build that,

they become unstoppable. They combine the stuff that you do so well, that the technical feel of the water, connection with the water, understanding how to move through water. If they combine that technical and skill side with this ownership, this responsibility model of how the swimmers live that in the water, the team becomes unstoppable. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t just be brilliant technically but have a terrible culture and an awful standards and a team that’s constantly fighting and being selfish. And you just can’t have the culture without the technique and the technical side. You’ve still got to work and you’ve still got to train and you’ve got to do kick work. You’ve still got to do the technical, tactical, strategic stuff. That’s critically important. But if you can combine what I call that as hard elements of something with these soft skills, you become an unstoppable force. And one of the articles that I think you sent to me

that you’d written, this was probably a year ago, 18 months ago, was about Bill Sweetenham and is Bill Sweetenham still the same coach that he was 20 years ago. And you went and attended a workout or maybe a couple of workouts with Bill when he was coaching recently. And you wrote this article about your experience and what Bill was doing. And for those listening, Bill Sweetenham was just basically a legendary coach over the last, I don’t know how many years, 20, 30 years. And I’d attended, what’s that, sorry? 100 years. 100 years, yeah, that’s probably closer to it. But he, like I’ve probably done two or three sessions with him when I was like, I don’t know, nine, 12 and then maybe 15. Like he came in and coached our group back when I was younger and this article that you had written really changed the way that I coached. And the biggest thing I got out of it was that to be a good coach, you’re not there to, like, yes, you’ve got to direct the sessions, all of that.

But if you’re just there yelling at the swimmers, drilling them the whole time, that’s not having them take responsibility for and ownership and learning what they actually need to do and getting them to think for themselves. So what you wrote really well and described really well in this article was that Bill’s asking them the questions to get them to come up with the answers for how they can get better. For example, in a set, let’s say the swimmer goes a second slower than where they need to be for a 50. And he’s not saying, you need to go faster. Get it under 32 seconds. No, he’s saying, what can you do to take a second off this time? What can you do better? What can you change? And just putting the ownership on them and having them need to think about what it is that they can change. And just all these series of questions, asking better questions to the athlete gets them to take that on. And I think that’s something

that I’ve seen a huge difference in my coaching. And I’ve sort of done that a little bit in the past, but that really just showed it in a way that made it really clear. And I think the reason for that too was that it was told in a story, like you’re basically just explaining what Bill was doing. It wasn’t you saying, this is what you need to do as a coach. No, you showed it in a story. And that’s a really good way for people to take on lessons. And I think the same goes for as a coach, if you can just share examples or share stories of other swimmers, other people, maybe someone who did a great breakout in their last turn in a 200 butterfly at the Olympics, and that won them the race. That’s how someone’s going to be going through a training session. And they’re going to go, yeah, maybe if I can do that last turn in my 200 butterfly really well, that might get me up there towards the front. So I learned a lot from that just one article

and it was really well written. So I want to thank you for writing that article. And with that article, or spending time with Bill, what was it for you that sort of stood out and what had changed for Bill over the last, say 20 or 30 years with his coaching? Well, Bill’s been a mentor of mine for, I don’t know, 30 years or so. And just to always challenge me, just when I think I’ve got him nailed and I understand him, he’ll throw a curveball because he’s been working with motor racing or something and he’s learned something. And just, he’s a phenomenal learner, Brenton. But a couple of things that I got from Bill and one is that problem solving is an incredibly powerful learning tool. So even if you’re learning something simple like maths, is you can go two plus two is four, four plus four is eight, eight plus eight is 16. And you can learn it by rate, which is basically what we’ve tried to do in swimming for a long time.

We just do more and more and more and more and the swimmer’s sooner or later will pick it up. But then if you look at what happened to you after you learned basic arithmetic, the teacher said, all right, if you had two apples and someone bought you another two apples, how many apples would you have? So, this thing of getting your brain to go from just data to pictures of apples. I was like, okay, I can see that now. And then the teacher revolves further and says, all right, if you had a bag of apples and you wanted four, how could you get them out of the bag and look? So you start getting people, oh, how would I actually do that? And you start that inquiring mindset. And what I noticed a lot with Sweden, and he’s moved to that. And I talk about when I’m doing my clinics and things I talk about, you wanna have swimmers not asking what, but what if. So I’m not saying, what do we do next, coach? You know, what’s next?

What’s the next session go? What’s the next set, coach? You want them saying what if. And it’s a subtle difference. So what I mean is that you present it instead of saying, okay, guys, today we’re gonna do 15, 100s on 215. And I want everybody to hold 10 seconds off their best time. That’s a what. What you want the swimmers doing is going, what if I cut my strokes down by two per lap? What if I breathed every four? What if I didn’t breathe on my first three strokes? What if I didn’t breathe last five? What about if I finished left hand forward, ear on shoulder, looking at the bottom of the pill? What if, as I get to the last 25, I start building my kick and kick to the wall? That you want that to happen, Brenna, because as they evolve, whatever set they do, if they, you can shift them from a what, as in what do I do, just tell me I don’t care, I’m just gonna do it, to being a thinking swimmer, a thinking athlete going, you know,

what if I only breathed on my right side? What if I, if they get to that stage where they’re, if you’re like, they’re almost setting workouts within workouts, they’re setting, they’re own little workout standards within your coaching environment, where they’re asking more of themselves than you asked of them. If they get that, mate, it’s so powerful. And that’s the lesson I got from Bill, is that, you know, he got to the end of a set of hundreds. Now the old Bill, what I used to call the wars, Bill would stand up and say, is that what you call swing? If you wanna be any bloody good, you’ll do this. I can’t believe, get out and do another five, you know, and that was Bill, probably 1970s, 1980s even, and even to the 1990s to a degree, but you could start to see some subtle changes. He was doing a lot of reading, had spent time in Hong Kong, he was exposed to a lot of confusion, no, confusion as well, but Confucius philosophy

and Sun Tzu philosophy, and he’s minded broaden from just this relentless commitment to hard work to understanding human beings. And I know he was a different, he was a different guy after that period, but, you know, he continues to evolve. And so, you know, he was in this situation where he walked to the side of the pool and a young athlete, a talented young athlete had done a great job, but then instead of Bill giving them the fight and die for the flag routine, which was what I call old Bill, Bill said, I got a question for you, rate your work out. This is, I think Katie Ledeca we know does this regularly with certainly with a previous coach, is that they would just talk about, if you had to rate your work out now or rate your training set right now, what would you do? And the athlete said, oh, it’s about a seven out of 10. And then Bill would say,

well, if you wanted the work out to be eight or nine out of 10, what do you think you’d do differently? And she said, well, what I would have done, I was a little bit faster, I would have done this. And Bill said, great idea, why don’t you give that a try? And so the coach and the swimmer become partners in the performance and they become, through their relationship, they become a pair of people trying to help the athlete, it’d be all right. And it’s a different relationship. I’m not gonna tell you, there’s a lot of swimming coaches don’t make the jump and maybe can’t make the jump, because it’s easier just to say, do another five on a faster time cycle than it is to go up and spend a minute with a swimmer right all the way and say, what do you think you can do? How do you think you could do that? If you would change it, I think, what would you, it’s hard to do that, mate. And it takes more time, but it’s a much, much more powerful coaching tool.

And having sort of changed my, the way I coached over the last 18 months or so, after reading that, it takes a bit of time to get your head around what are the right questions to ask and also you’re obviously gonna work differently with different swimmers, but once I start to get a better sense of what questions I could ask them to get them to think differently about the way they’re training and getting to come up with those answers on their own, it’s a much more enjoyable way to coach because then you’re not going there and like you’re not operating at a nine out of 10 in terms of like your aggression and being a hard-ass coach. Like I feel that when I’m coaching and this is probably more just my personality but I can sit at like a, just a,

I can become the whole session and just being a kind of a good place working with the swimmers, trying to get them to get the most out of themselves and it’s not like it’s just yo, yo, yo, go, go, go. Cause that’s not, for me, I don’t enjoy that type of coaching. I bring it on when we need to and I think there’s a time and place for it but if you’re doing that 10 sessions a week for two hours every time, you’re going to burn out as a coach and you’re probably going to come to resent the work that you’re doing. Whereas when you’re operating from this place of your partners with the swimmer, I find that so much more enjoyable as a coach and then it’s a much better environment overall. Yeah, it’s a wonderful progression in your coaching because it is a stance of coaching as an energy sapping experience if you do it the old way, if you do it this way, you’re walking off there going, you know, wow, Julie got that tonight.

She understood that and not only that, she did something completely surprised me. You end up getting energy from the session because she walked away and going, well, I’ve made a difference today. I’ve actually made an impact on that, on those swimmers and it takes time but what I’m trying to talk to the coaches about more and more is to say physiology is important. Sure, you got to do the work, we’ll have a debate that, but stop being so obsessed with the physiology. There’s a great line, and I actually got this from Laurie Lawrence years and years ago, never put heart before heart rate. It’s a great line. And the concept is that it’s easy to become slaves to the physiology and say, right guys, it’s 2100s, 145, heart rate monitor’s on, make sure your heart rate is between a range of 150 and 175 and it’s easy to become slaves and blinded by the numbers because it’s easy to see. But I’m saying to coaches now, look, if you see an opportunity

and a moment to change your heart, not a heart rate, about a heart, you see a coachable moment, an opportunity in the middle of a set feel very comfortable pulling a swimmer out on deck for one minute and having a quiet questioning conversation. So man, how’s the workout going? Yeah, great coach, what’s that? Three seconds to ask that question and get the answer. So I’ve just been watching the way you’re coming off the wall at first 25 meters. What does that feel like? Oh, you haven’t felt too bad. I’m looking at your kick. You’re taking about eight to 10 kicks underwater. How do you think it’d feel if you did eight kicks in three seconds? Well, do you think that’s worth having a cracker? What do you think? Yeah, that’d be good. I might try that on the X1 coach. Great idea to get back in. 30 seconds, in that time, their heart rate stopped a little bit. Who cares, Brenton? Who cares? If you’re really that obsessed with the physiology,

ask them to do another two at the end, dude. But, you know, we’ve been blindsided and I’m a physiologist by training originally so I can talk ill of my people that we’ve become so obsessed with the numbers that all the criminal, the greatest crime you can commit as a swimming coach is to allow their heart rate to drop below that zone. Because once it’s there, there’s no training effect. What about training their heart and their spirit and their emotion and their attitude and their values and their character? And there’s so much more to training a human being than just worrying that their heart rate stays in a particular zone. And it’s not that accurate anyway. And so I look like implore coaches. If you see a moment, even if you’re doing an aerobic set of there, it doesn’t matter. If you see a critical coaching moment where you could make a difference to a human being, blow the heart rate, who cares? Get them out, touch their heart,

connect with them, listen to them, share with them, challenge them, get them to go, bam! What if I did this, what if I did that? And then put them back in the pool. And those little, less than a minute to maybe change the way they train for the rest of their life over making sure they stay in a heart rate zone for another couple of minutes, no comparison. It’s so different. One of the lines I’ve stolen from Bill, and I’m quite happy to credit Bill, he says, training is from the neck down. Training is, that’s arms, legs, body. That’s, but coaching is from the neck up. If you’re a trainer, if you’re just standing at the end of the pool, yelling, time cycles, writing out workouts, giving them feedback on speed to the wall or whatever it is, if you’re a trainer, you’ll go a long way as a coach fit. You’ll get to a point where because you’re not making that connection with them as human beings, you’re not understanding who they are.

You’re not building those relationships. You’ll go no further. Once you understand that real coaching is from the neck up, training is neck down. Once you get the coaching is from the neck up and your focus is connecting with them as people, everything changes for you and it makes the training more effective in any case.

Yeah, it’s, I had two guests on from Surf Lifesaving, had Harriet Brown and Josh Mnogh. They’re both competing at the highest level of Surf Lifesaving and both of them mentioned similar things which was basically, at the very top level, it’s pretty much all mental. They’re all pretty much as fit as one another and so much of it is the mental side of things and how you approach a race and what you think about yourself and especially when it comes down to crunch time, those decisions like Harriet, for example, she does the Molokai to Oahu paddle which is like, I think it’s a 42 or 52 kilometer paddle from Ireland to Ireland and she said with about two hours to go, her shoulder was hurting, she just wanted to give up, wanted to get back in the boat and then my mom was telling her, it doesn’t, no one will care, no one will mind if you quit, if you give up, my shoulder’s hurting, it’s probably just gonna do more damage

and no one will care if I jump out and that’s what her mind was telling her but it’s at that critical point where you can either get out or you can keep pushing and she eventually, she kept pushing and she went on to win the event but it’s, and I think that’s the accumulation of years and years and years of training your mind, making the right decisions and having good coaches who can help steer you in that direction because had she not had the right mental, I guess mental fortitude to be able to make that decision and ignore what that little voice was saying, then she wouldn’t have kept going and Josh was the same thing and he was, he’d had a lot of sort of years and years of being successful but never quite at the top in it. It was about seven years from when he first started to when he actually got a win in Surf Ironman and it’s just that ability to sort of push through and I think that really just comes down

to training the mind and training them as teaching people how to be better people and better to others because as you said, like the physical aspect of things, look, that’s going to come but it’s ignoring, I think really the biggest and the most important part of it which is the mental side of things.

It’s isn’t funny, I, what you say I agree with completely but I find it fascinating that for the majority of coaches that they split the training of the mind and the training of the body. So they’ll get the kids in the pool, I’ll do the physical work and the skills and drills and so on, but then they’ll leave the stuff to maybe team meetings or to seminars or getting someone in who’s been an athlete or a sports site and they separate it and they separate it, but the reality is everything physical has to have a mental component, everything and what I’ve started saying to coaches is when you write your workout on the board, so you’re gonna go, 2050 is a fly on 130. So you’ve got the volume, which is 2050, so you’ve got the intensity, whatever speed you set and you’ve got the frequency, the session or a frequency to set, so we’re constantly looking at these physiological variables, volume, intensity, frequency.

Next to that, you’ve seriously got to write the letter M about what’s the mental lesson I’m trying to teach here? Am I trying to teach relaxation? Am I trying to teach confidence? Am I trying to teach visualization? What am I trying, every time you write anything physical in the next column, you’ve really got to say and mental, there’s volume, intensity, frequency and relaxation, volume, intensity, frequency and confidence, volume, intensity, frequency and mental toughness, that everything you do has got to have some sort of mental component and I know you and I, we did a recording a couple of years ago on speed and I still use the same technique that when I talk to people about speed, I say, guys, as fast as you can, but very smooth and relaxed. Guys, maximum speed, this needs to be race-paced but easy, relaxed, comfortable, I know you use effortless, but you know, so what you’re saying is I have to marry the physiology

with the mental, emotional, psychological effects in everything we do. Well, you know, so guys, we’re gonna do 4400s, it’s aerobic work, smooth, relaxed and flowing, concentrating on deep, easy, relaxed, inhale and exhale, nice, soft hands, guys are smooth and as easy. You know, so again, you’re saying physiologically, what is it, 60, 65, 70% intensity, volume is 400 meters, rest cycle, that’s critical, but then I’m saying guys, but mentally and emotionally, a way to connect to this set, I want you to be thinking about and feeling smooth and breathing and relaxing or practicing some mindfulness techniques or whatever it is, I think if coaches do something as simple as that, everything physical, I write down the next column, write down what is the mental thing, volume, intensity, frequency, mind, what am I going to do mentally with this and at all ages, and they could start as young as you can to break this physiology-only thinking cycle

that we’re so locked into. Yeah, I’ve noticed a big difference with that when I’ve introduced it to sessions, so two examples there, there’s these two kids, local kids that I’ve been coaching once or twice a week and we were doing some 25s at 100 meter pace and the first set was 16, 25s, I think they’re on, say, 35 seconds and the aim is to hit 100 meter pace with each of them and what I said to them at the start of that set, I said look after maybe eight, nine, 25s, you’re going to start to feel a bit heavy, you’re going to start to feel the burn a bit, but your challenge is what we wanna do here is try and make every single lap, every single 25 exactly the same, same amount of kicks off the wall, same amount of strokes, same time and do that when you start to fatigue because that’s what you’re going to experience, that’s what you’re probably gonna feel when you’re racing, but if you can keep your technique and that stroke count,

if you can keep it all the same in the last six, seven, 25s, then that’s the purpose of this workout, that’s what’s gonna help you when it comes to the race, so explaining that, when they got to that point, when they started to feel like all right, I’m starting to get heavy and I don’t know if I can hold it, they knew that was coming and then they know what the purpose of what we’re doing is and so they held those 25s really well and another example was when we were at Hell Week over in Thailand, the last set that we do on the last days, it’s a Dennis Cottrell sets, 40, 50s, where we go 16, every fourth fast, 12, every third, eight every second and then the last four are all fast and most, those from us who hadn’t done it before, every time when someone does that the first time, they go too fast at the start, so those easy 50s, they tend to just put too much into it and the fast ones, they go too fast, so what we preface those workouts with is

that make sure that those easy ones are just steady, you’re relaxed, you’re meant to be getting your rest there and then those initial fast 50s, you don’t wanna burn all of your matches straight away, you’ll still find you can go fast by still sitting at like an eight out of 10 instead of a 10 out of 10, so just letting them know upfront how it will feel early on and then that’s gonna help you just maintain that speed and there’s probably the best set of that that we’ve done over the course of the last five years and I think a big part of that was just preversing what to expect and then having them know the, yeah, I guess the mental side of things or the mental outcome that we’re looking to achieve there and that’s why I really enjoy,

I’ve always loved coaching, but I love learning the stuff that you teach because it really gives me something else to think about rather than just the workout rather than just the set because yes, that’s important and it’s fun, it’s enjoyable to come up with good and interesting sets and different ways to train them, but really the most enjoyable thing is watching people grow and become more confident and to become better people as a result of hopefully what they can learn in a workout or what they can learn from training. Yeah, that’s such a critical lesson and like you say, Brent, it’s rewarding and you could, I think we have an opportunity in those moments where they then walk away from the pool, I’ve strongly believed in there’s a carry-on to other parts of their life, an athlete that can do that 40, 50 set in the way that that’s really intended and they buy into it and they show the discipline and the commitment

and the ability to deal with pain and discomfort. What is there in their life that’s gonna be an obstacle to them? If they’re a student, they’re gonna study a little bit longer or there’s nothing else that they’re gonna face that they’ve been not before. I say, well, actually, yeah, it’s just like people who climb mountains or achieve anything in life is that I think that then builds that they get as well, yeah, okay, what did I learn? We’re sure I learned how to swim a bit, but I learned that I can do anything I set my mind to that I can overcome adversity, that I can deal with pain, that I can overcome discomfort, that they start developing what I call that core of developing confidence, which is, I can, I can, I can, I can. I often say to swimmers, we talk a lot about confidence in the work that I do on, I say confidence comes from cans, I can, I can, I can, I can and that like everybody, we’ve all got those two voices going on in our heads

all the time that you’ve got the voice saying, I can, I can, I can, I can and the other voice saying, no, you can’t, this is national champs. You’ve never done a half Ironman before, whatever it might be and those two voices are battling in their head and it’s exactly the same whereas, yes, I can do this exam, no, I can’t do this exam, yes, I can achieve this goal and every one on the planet has got those little voices competing and it’s the sum of the experiences where you go, I can, I can, I can this little voice over here says, I can, I can and this other side says, well, hang on a minute, I was in hell week, I did 40, 50s and I did that and I go to the gym every day and I watch my diet and I get the bed early, I can, I can, I can and this voice over here becomes the I can’t voice, become very soft, it becomes a whisper because through your behaviors and through your actions and the things that you’ve learned,

you become effectively bulletproof, you become someone that every time you face what’s seemingly a difficult obstacle, the I can voice is shouting while the I can’t voice is just whispering and you start to believe that anything is possible and a lot of work I do now with swimmers and swim teams is around things like how do you coach confidence where you can coach confidence by giving swimmers experiences in and out of the water that build on that yes, I can, yes, I can, yes, I can so they go to their first meet or they go to a big target meet and the other voice starts to creep in no, you can’t, no, you can’t, no, you can’t but the overwhelming can of evidence success comes in cans, I can that the overwhelming can of evidence is full of those experiences that have just reinforced to the athlete that there’s nothing they can’t do and again, that comes back to I’m giving ostensibly a physical set of physiological challenge of 40, 50s

but what is the mental and emotional purpose behind me doing that and how does that then help the swimmer take some giant strides forward? Yeah, I had a parent contact me a couple weeks ago of a girl who I’ve done a little bit of coaching with and she said, she basically said every time this girl goes behind the blocks she just starts to doubt herself and it’s that I can’t, I can’t voice gets in the way and it’s impacting her racing and she said, look, can we do a session or could you have a talk to her? But there’s nothing that I could say that’s going to get her to have that I can behind the blocks. It’s that accumulation of experiences and those little successes built up in the water, out of the water that’s going to have her feel that confidence behind the blocks. So it’s not like I could say the magic word and she’s going to have that confidence. It is, you need to get that experience and that belief through all these different sessions

and all these different times. So it’s good to hear you say that because that was my thinking behind it. As much as I’d love to be able to say the magic words and she would immediately just be confident and know that she could do it as she’s standing there behind the blocks. It’s just not how those things work. And so what I said to the parent was, I’ll come along to these sessions and then we’ll work on that with her. We’ll work on that in training because that’s where she’s going to get it. Now for anyone who’s a coach who’s listening to this, you’ve got a course that’s online. I think it’s probably your first course that you’ve put online that I’d recommend to any coach that wants to learn more about this stuff. So it’s called soft skills, high impact and a holistic approach to coaching swimmers. Can you talk a bit about that course, what people would learn or what people will learn in that course and who it’s designed for?

Yeah, I think it’s just something that I’ve been obviously thinking about for a long time and see it as a critically important set of skills for coaches to have because it’s interesting that like you, I get emails and texts and people will say, how do I change this? Or I’m coaching an age group squad in Rockhampton. How do I help them build confidence? Or I’m coaching a team in Western Australia. They would all like to get a state championships, but I don’t think they understand what commitment looks like. Or I’ve got a really talented 15 year old going to his first national championships. How do I help him with mental toughness and resilience to deal with the challenges and I thought, well, I get so many of those questions in seminars and on the phone and laptop.

Instead of just writing an article about it, I want to actually do something more. I want to get in front of people and say, okay, confidence, commitment, mental toughness, leadership, team development, you can coach all those things. And you go online to the course and say there’s actually an intro then, the first lesson is around confidence, for example. And going on the video shows me out of pool, talking to some swimmers, working with some swimmers and talking about how to build confidence. And so even in the theme of confidence, I have a very simple model for coaches to follow, which is this, confidence is belief, how the athlete feels about themselves, the way they love value and accept themselves as German beings, times evidence, confidence in belief, times evidence. The evidence is what we’ve just spoken about, all the things they do on training, their diet, their flexibility work, their drier, their trainings,

their previous competitions, that’s accumulating in that, I can, in that big can. The other side is the ball, belief is how they feel about themselves as human being and largely that comes from the way mum and dad love value and accept them up to about ages, eight to 10 years of age. So then I talked to the coaches in the video about saying, guys, so this is why it’s critically important when you’re trying to build the confidence of the young that you’re doing a great job in the pool with outstanding coaching, building relationships, inspiring the athlete to do the training to the full extent of the potential, but you’ve got a relationship with the parents to talk to them about their role in reinforcing love value and acceptance of their child and how they react after win and loss and some of those things. And the coaches work through the video, it goes through the video, it goes for about five minutes. Then there’s an article which will cover this,

Confidence is Belief Times Evidence, with a downloadable chart on the same content and then there’s some self-reflection questions about how they can then apply that learning to their own team. And look, I really write a list, I’ve read it of the, you know, what are the key soft skills that coaches are always asking me about when we’re working on, definitely confidence. Certainly commitment is one. I remember having a talk to David Maas, a great US coach, about if you could recruit swimmers on any one non-physical quality, what would it be? So you couldn’t recruit on size, strength, swimming speed, what would you recruit on? And he said, commitment. I said, that’s a great, great line, mate. But the issue, again, we all have is, can I measure commitment? Can I see commitment? Can I coach commitment? And Maas’s line was fantastic and I still use it. He said, sure. He said, if a swimmer is committed, when you give them a choice between doing things

the easy way or the hard way, they choose to do it the hard way. And of course, the hard way is really the right way. So his example was looking at someone like Ryan Lochte, he said, he has a choice approaching a wall. Do I breathe the flags? Do I breathe two meters past the flags? Do I breach before I turn? If he’s a committed swimmer, he will choose not me enforcing or making or insisting, but he has a committed athlete. He will choose to do things the hard way, the difficult way. He will deliberately choose a higher standard of training because that’s where he wants to go. And so we watched Lochte and watching go in the pool and he made that decision and not surprisingly the best underwater and probably best wall swimmer we’ve seen for a long, long time. And so from that, I say to coaches, all right, well, if that’s what commitment looks like easy way, hard way. You coach commitment by showing swimmers the power of choice.

You say, choice easy, choice to get better is to take four breaths inside the flags. The choice that’s gonna make you exceptional and the choice that will help you become the swimmer you wanna be is this one, don’t breathe inside the flags. Then I say to the swimmer, something is simple, Brennan, what choice will you make? What’s your choice, you make the choice about the swimmer that you want to be and you show them the power of their choices. And once I get that and I just wanna talk about in the commitment video to the coaches, if you can show them the power of choice, show them what those choices look like, then you’ve coached commitment because you’ve shown them what commitment actually looks like in a day-to-day workout. So the course is all about that, showing coaches what it looks like to coach the soft skills of swimming that makes such a powerful impact on their program.

And every coach has had a swimmer, at least a swimmer like that that’s committed makes the hard or chooses the hard option and it is just such a joy to coach those swimmers because you look at what they’re doing, you look at them making those decisions and it’s just a real joy to coach those athletes. Compared to swimmers who always take the easy option, you know, they push off the wall, they breathe first stroke and they’re not doing the things that you know make them a better swimmer and that can be very frustrating if you’re doing that day in, day out. So by being able to have more swimmers make that commitment and make those tough choices and they do it on their own without having to yell at the kids or to be telling them, no, they make those choices. I think it is, it’s so, so important. So that soft skills course, it’s on your website at wgcoaching.com and I’ll put a link in our show notes as well for any coaches who would like to,

would like to get their hands on it. I think it’s so worthwhile and I’ll make sure that, yeah, it’s on our website. So Wayne, thanks again for being on the podcast. I really enjoy chatting to you and I always learn so much and it makes me wanna go out there and get coaching every time that I speak to you. So, Wayne, I appreciate you being on the podcast again. But it’s an absolute pleasure and I’ll make sure I’ll send through a special discount coupon code just for your listeners and really to say thank you to you and to your listeners for your ongoing support over many years. I’ll send that through to you. You can put that up on your website and I’ll get all your listeners a discount on the course if they’d like to try. But thank you and I wish you a Merry Christmas and I keep up the outstanding work. I don’t think even you realize the difference you’re making to the sport and the impact you’re having to the sport around the world.

I appreciate it very much, mate. And I’m very lucky that I get to learn from people like yourself and speak with great coaches and great athletes. I’ve learned so much over the last 12 years of coaching but probably more so in the last six years since I started the podcast. So, get to speak to a lot of very smart people, a lot smarter than me and it makes a big difference. So, I appreciate that very much. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post Don’t Put Heart Rate Before Heart with Wayne Goldsmith appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

My guest on today’s podcast is Stephen Jackson who first attended a clinic in 2017. At the time he was a 2:20/100m swimmer, and over the course of the last few years
he’s been able to move into the 1:40/100m range. In this episode, you’ll learn what to expect as you progress in your swimming journey and how you can find continual improvement in your technique and speed.

1:09 Athletic Background
1:54 I Swim Like A Rock
3:14 Before And After The Clinic
3:54 What Got Me In
5:00 Making It Simple
7:25 Don’t Limit Yourself
8:19 Implementing The Changes Of The Stroke In A Race
10:00 “It’s Motivating If You Know What Can Make You Faster”
11:00 The Difference In Training
12:37 It Starts With The Posture
14:10 Target Pace

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Brenton Ford: Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Steven Jackson and Steven is a swimmer who I met in Bathurst in the start of 2017 and Steve, you came along to a swim clinic there. And then over the last two, two and a half years, we’ve worked together to refine your technique and hopefully make you a faster swimmer and in which you’ve been able to do so and really just sort of pick up your swim. So today I want to talk about what you’ve changed in the last two and a half years to go from around that 2-10 mark down to the 1-40s and for you what’s really made the difference and share that because I think it could certainly help other people. So Steve, first of all, welcome to the podcast.

Stephen Jackson: Thank you Brenton, I really appreciate being here.

Brenton Ford: So what was your background as an athlete? You didn’t start out as a swimmer?

Stephen Jackson: No, I’ve gotten many, many years and the height to admit how many years of running that was my world and totally my background. Which doesn’t lend itself to switching to swimming because there’s no body fat and no buoyancy. But with a decent amount on runner, had a reasonable times there. And then about three or four, four years ago now, knee problems, not running related, I got crushed, tackled, playing touch football. The surgeon said not, can’t do anything take my C and buy push bikes. I bought a pushbike started cycling three, four years ago. And the natural progression was to go swimming and that’s where we met.

Brenton Ford: And so now you’re doing triathlon and we’re talking before you’re targeting the world spot, hopefully for, for next during the 70.3 and so that running background’s obviously got a, make a huge difference for you and doing that little bit of cycling, is going to help as well. And so what made you make the decision to come along to, a clinic two and half years ago?

Stephen Jackson: It was the 3rd of June, 2017 and I actually went back and had a look at my Strava and it was very generous of you to say two tens I’m assuming two twenties at that stage if anything, cause I just decided to start doing some club tries and I was a on a park run that morning. I’m a regular park runner to keep the running going. And somebody mentioned that there was a clinic on over at the pool, which is a hundred meters away.

Stephen Jackson: So, I thought oh well might as well can’t lose anything and just sort of tagged along to see what happened with the view that I swim like a rock, you know, kind of useless in that space that otherwise viewed my triathlon. And sit on the last end of the water they have her on the bike and best on the runs they spend the whole time passing people, which is great. So it was very much luck of the draw. You were doing clinics in the country. I happened to be in a town where you were and I thought I had nothing to lose to see if I could do something to improve my rock likes swimming.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. And I had actually had a look back at some of that footage from, from back then and I’m actually, I’m going to do a video for YouTube and just kind of do a before and after just to show some of those differences. And it’s a great thing to see because that original video as you said, like the legs were quite low, quite probably short with your stroke and not, in terms of rhythm and flow with the stroke, it’s no way near what it is now. And now the stroke flows really nicely. The legs and the hips are really coming up a lot more. And I mean that’s quite evident with, with where you’re at now with your time. So what, thinking back over the last two and a half years, what are some of those things that have helped make the difference for you in that time?

Stephen Jackson: It might be a little unusual, but I think a key difference is you introduced me to the technique, the concept of technique and that there was so much science behind swimming and that really got me in. Because a little bit of swimming I’ve been doing was are you going to do a tie lapse and get out of the form of where you go, but learning that it’s at the other end of the spectrum running, you run more, you go faster cycling somewhere in between swimming, it’s all about technique.

Stephen Jackson: Sure that you’ve got to get fit for it, but the it is technique and your introduction and the way you explain what the technique was, various bits of it and gently you were easily into it really made the difference and that that hooked me into wanting to find out more and to start to implement some of that stuff and bit by bit consistency of getting into the pool regularly and just wanting to work on a bit more technique and it as we exchange videos and talk further about it, it was just, it continues to absorb me that whole trying to understand the whole technique of swimming.

Brenton Ford: That’s really interesting and I can completely understand. I mean if you’re brand new, going to the pool you’ve got, all you do is just try and survive and turn the arms around and keep the legs going just to stay afloat and move back and forth. But as you said, there’s so much to it and one of the things I really enjoy is being able to simplify it as much as possible and make it seem really sort of simple, but they’re giving you some step-by-step ways to progress through the stroke. And that’s something you’ve done really, really well is, so we’re kind of at that point where we’re, we’re continuing to refine some of the aspects of the stroke and thinking back over the last couple of months. We’re working on a little bit less rotation through the upper body to be able to improve the catch.

Brenton Ford: And we’ve spent time working on being a little more patient in the catch and getting a bit more rich in the stroke and that length in the stroke. And it’s an ongoing process and you’re never done. But the good thing about what you’ve been able to do is you’re like, you send videos regularly and we continually kind of going back and forth. It’s like, all right, this thing is improved. This thing might’ve sort of come back to the old way of doing it. So we want to get back on on top of it and just continuing to refine it that way. And your, it seems like you enjoy the, the process of, of refining the stroke.

Stephen Jackson: It’s funny, before that faithful work out with you as a faithful session, my only interest in swimming was Fanya a set of earphones. I could listen to music or a podcast as I planned, but almost immediately my partner commented that you’re looking at pedals, you’re looking at a pool boy, you’re looking at different goggles, you’ve got into the, the tick disease, the equipment, the toys of swimming. And it continues to fascinate me. But yeah, it’s a combination of that technique. Having someone who picks up little things, cause I would look at the video before I send it to you and then you come back to something totally different. How did I miss that? Which is brilliant, but also having the programs, you know that okay, I’ve got to [inaudible] how do I break it up? What goes in there? And that makes a difference is that consistency of doing that. I’m only two or three times a week thought boy, really the two and a half years to go from two twenties down to one forties is just something which is as it stands, the, and I’ve now got so far, so much further to go.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, there’s, I had actually someone emailed me the other day saying he’s at the two minute mark and he feels like his limit will be one fifty because of his, his height and his stature. And I’m thinking that’s there’s no way that one fifty is your limit. Like you’re thinking much too small and when you, when you actually see what can be done, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be looking at one forties and one thirties and on from there with the right focus and obviously doing the work as well and are speaking to the biomechanics who works with Kate Campbell and he’s working with her and he said, even in Kate Campbell stroke there’s so much that she can still improve and he’s really excited to work on. It’s like socially, if Kate cam has got something to work on, there’s no excuse for anyone else to say.

Brenton Ford: I think I’m done. I think I’m as good as I can possibly get. And over that time, when it comes to racing and implementing these changes in your stroke into a race, what’s your approach now or how do you find you’re able to do that when there’s obviously so much to think about and you’re concentrating on a lot when you’re training, what’s your approach now when it comes to racing? You’re still thinking about a lot of that stuff or you’re able to just get into race mode?

Stephen Jackson: No, I don’t. I’m still thinking about every little bit of it. And there’s on, I’ve just did the Western Sydney half on man, and that’s the 2K swim and from the get-go it’s okay looking at where my hands going little sneaking about McColl, you know, lifting the pot up a bit. I’m not too much and it just, he had brought a typing I and having one google in, it’s an ongoing problem talking to myself, the whole way, which is great because the next thing you know at the end of the swim, but it’s the run, I kind of get into rhythmic mode as my partner tells me, you know the clay goes, I just take off. Cycling is hitting that way and the running carries over well, but none of that. Now the fitness the general aerobic fitness, nothing carries over to the swim. So it’s all an education and an ongoing education. And I travel a fair bit for work, which is probably the biggest pain in the proverbial because I miss my swimming, which is, if you’d asked me that three years ago, that wasn’t me. I’m not, it’s just weird. Some weird things there. Brenton its all your fault.

Brenton Ford: Oh, well that’s what I’m happy to, to take responsibility for and it, but it’s good that, wait, as soon as you look forward to getting in the pool and you look forward to your swims,it makes such a world of difference. And I can completely understand for any athletes out there who do, who aren’t looking forward to the swim. If you don’t know what’s going to make you faster in terms of your stroke and your technique, you kind of get to the pool and you might bang out a good workout, but really there’s nothing else to concentrate on apart from the effort you’re putting in. But if you know what you can do to get quicker, it’s really motivating. And speaking from my own personal experience, that’s what’s a lot of fun is continuing to refine the stroking and seeing these little improvements over the course of a few months there.

Brenton Ford: And that’s really motivating. So I think that’s, it doesn’t take a lot to have someone look forward to go into the pool. It just takes a, you know, a little bit of sort of background on what you can do to swim fast and little bit of background on technique and for you, what do you do in terms of training compared to what you were doing when you first started? So you mentioned you’re following the workouts that we’ve got in the membership. What were you doing when you first started compared to now?

Stephen Jackson: Oh, well when, before the session with you, I would go down to the pool, maybe swim a kilometer to get out and that’d be it. And you know, two 25 and okay. Done. Bought Adam and Brian. Why did we get that almost instantly after having been doing the, the sessions with you? It started the, okay, you’ve given me these drills to do and working through the drills, but also understanding what the drills were for and while they were doing them, but the concentrating on one particular thinky legs. So my rear-end was almost dragging on the bottom of the pool and we started working on the core and the kick there was sort of right at the beginning. Then the crossover was really creating issues and we started to work on the catch and we’re working on that one now. Core all the time. And now I think, recently you’ve done a part on core strength and that made the connection through the body. And I think that’s a really big key one that’s not obvious to new swimmers that it makes such a difference when you think about it as you swim, you see my reorient popping of the water, which is something is just can be amazing. Okay. It’s common for most women. So familiar. It’s amazing.

Brenton Ford: Oh look to speak to 50% of people who are swimming once or twice a weekend. If your hips and your legs are up near the surface. It can be magic. So, I mean I was talking to Amy Jones on a podcast about that this morning as well. And we were just talking about it really all starts with the, with the posture and the ability to engage the core lightly, which kind of sets up the body position because without that you’re just fighting. You’re fighting the water and without that connection through the core, then you’re not going to be able to connect up there. The catch with the rotation and the kick and it’s, everything’s working separately and that’s really hard work. But if you can have that course, which done and you can generate a lot of power from the hip rotation, very small movement, but a lot that you can generate and that’s quite evident I think when we look at your first video compared to now. And that is really one of those things that’s an ongoing process. But I mean, is that something that you feel now when you swim compared to before?

Stephen Jackson: Oh, very much so. It’s that feel for the water. It’s still an evolving exercise, but the feel of the different parts of the body, what they’re doing in the water and where they are. It still surprises me when I look at the video that you go, hang on, that’s not what I thought I was doing. But, when you compare it to 12 months ago, you go, yep, okay that that is working. But that switching on the core is something which I find really at the moment is making a big difference to everything. It’s just one of those little feelings that trying to get the muscle memory to lock it in and of itself and get, well not as holding a thing. It makes such a difference.

Brenton Ford: And in the next say 12 months,what’s your target pace for your half iron man, what do you feel like if you continue to improve your stroke and can fit those workouts in, what do you feel like you can get down to?

Stephen Jackson: Oh, that’s how he face his strength. It used to be, if I could ever swim one forty I’d be tickled pink. But now my Western Sydney was one forty three and I think if I can get into the pool more often, that’s my biggest challenge. If I can get more time in the water then one thirty is doable and I’m 62 but regardless, it doesn’t matter. It’s all I just number. I can reckon that,why not? Once it is the target on the horizon.

Brenton Ford: That’s great. And I mean I love hearing from some as like yourself, like in your sixties and you’re doing PB’s in the water continuing to get better and it’s certainly possible and there’s, I know a lot of swimmers who are able to do that. Even people who have swung our younger, you can still absolutely get faster and that’s probably one of the fewer sports where you can do that. You know, if you think of running, it’s probably a little bit more taxing on the body. But with swimming because it’s so technical, you can still continue to get quicker.

Stephen Jackson: Without doubt, my running has certainly slowed down cause I counted the miles anymore because of the knee. But both the cycling and the swimming, but swimming particularly is coming along with leaps and bounds. And so, [inaudible].

Brenton Ford: Awesome. Well all the best for Jalong and I appreciate your sharing your experience and the things that you’ve learned over the last couple of years. So Steve, thanks again for being on the podcast.

Stephen Jackson: Thank you Brenton. Since the June 27 nine you’ve taken out of Milwaukee buck.

Brenton Ford: I’m happy to and I’m glad you remember it so clearly, but obviously for the right reasons. So that’s a good thing.

Stephen Jackson: Oh good. Thanks. Nice talk soon.

It might be a little unusual, but I think a key difference is you introduced me to the technique, the concept of technique, and that there was so much science behind swimming, and that really got me in. 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 Stephen Jackson, and Stephen is a swimmer who I met in Bathurst at the start of 2017, and Steve, you came along to a swim clinic there, and then over the last two, two and a half years we’ve worked together to refine your technique and hopefully make you a faster swimmer in which you’ve been able to do so, and really just pick up your swim. So today I want to talk about what you’ve changed in the last two and a half years to go from around that 210 mark down to the 140s, and for you what’s really made the

difference and share that because I think it could certainly help other people. So Steve, first of all, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Brenton. I really appreciate being here. So what was your background as an athlete? You didn’t start out as a swimmer? No, no. I’ve got many, many years, and I hate to admit how many years of running. That was my long and truly my background, which doesn’t lend itself to switching to swimming because there’s no body fat and no buoyancy, but it was a decent marathon run. I had reasonable times there, and then about three or four years ago now,

knee problems, not running related. I got crash tackled playing touch football.

The surgeon said, no, can’t do anything, take my C and buy a push bike. I bought a push bike, started cycling through four years ago, and the natural progression was to go swimming, and that’s where we met. And so now you’re doing triathlon and we’re talking before you’re targeting a world spot, hopefully for next year in the 70.3. And so that running background’s obviously got to make a huge difference for you, and doing that little bit of cycling has got to help as well. And so what made you make the decision to come along to a clinic two and a half years ago? It was the 3rd of June, 2017, and I actually went back and had a look at Mastrava and the very generous of you to say 210. They were swimming 220s at that stage, if anything, because I just decided to start doing some club tries, and I was at park run that morning. I’m a regular park runner to keep the running going, and somebody mentioned that there

was a clinic on over at the pool, which is 100 meters away. So I thought, oh, well, may as well, can’t lose anything. And so I just sort of tagged along to see what happened with the view that I swim like a rock, you know, kind of useless in that space. But I’ve always viewed my triathlon is that on the last day of the water, better on the bike and best on the run. So you spend the whole time passing people, which is great. So it was very much luck of the draw. You were doing clinics in the country. I happened to be in the town where you were. And I thought I had nothing to lose to see if I could do something to improve my rock bike swimming. And I actually had to look back at some of that footage from from back then. And I’m actually I’m going to do a video for YouTube and just kind of do a before and after just to show some of those differences. And it’s it’s a it’s a great thing to see because that original video, as you said, like the legs were

quite low, quite probably short with your stroke and not and in terms of rhythm and flow with the stroke, it’s no way near what it is now. And now the stroke flows flows really nicely. The legs and the hips are really coming up a lot more. And I mean, that’s quite evident with with where you’re at now with your your time. So what thinking back over the last two and a half years? What what are some of those things that have helped make the difference for you in that time? I think a key difference is you introduced me to the technique, the concept of technique and that there was so much science behind swimming. And that really got me in because a little bit of swimming I’ve been doing was how you go and do a tail lapse and get out of the film the way you go. But learning that see it at the other end of the spectrum running, you run more, you go faster cycling somewhere in between swimming. It’s all about technique

sure that you’ve got to get fit for it. But it is technique and your introduction and the way you explain what the technique was the various bits of it. And gently you ease me into it really made the difference. And that that hooked me into wanting to find out more and to start to implement some of that stuff and bit by bit consistency of getting into the pool regularly and just wanting to work on a bit more of technique and with as we exchange videos and talk further about it, it was just it continues to absorb me that that whole trying to understand the whole technique of swimming. It’s really interesting and I can completely understand. I mean, if you’re brand new going to the pool, you’ve got all you do is just try and survive and turn the arms around and keep the legs going just to stay afloat and move back and forth. But as you said, there’s so much to it. And one of the things I really enjoy is being able to

simplify it as much as possible and make it seem seem seem really sort of simple but but giving you some step by step ways to progress through the stroke. And that’s something you’ve done really, really well is like we’re kind of at that point where we we’re continuing to refine some of the aspects of the stroke and thinking back over the last couple of months. Yeah, we’re working on a little bit less rotation through the through the upper body to be able to improve the catch and we spent time working on being a little more patient in the in the catch and getting a bit more reach in the stroke and that length in the stroke. And it’s it’s an ongoing process and you never you never done. But the good thing about what what you’ve been able to do is you like you send videos regularly and we continue kind of going back and forth. It’s like, all right, this thing is improved. This thing might have sort of come back to

the old old way of doing it. So we want to get back on on top of it and just continuing to refine it that way. And you’re you it seems like you enjoy the process of refining the strike. Before that faithful workout with you, the faithful session, my only interest in swimming was finding a set of earphones that I could listen to music or podcast and by plan, but almost immediately my partner commented that you’re looking at paddles, you’re looking at at pool boys, you’re looking at different goggles, you’ve got into the the equipment, the toys of swimming and it continues to fascinate me. But yeah, it’s a combination of that technique, having someone who picks up little things, because I look at the video before I send it to you and then you come back with something totally different. How did I miss that, which is brilliant. But also having the programs, you know, that that, okay, I’ve got 2k, wanted to 2k, how do I break it up? What goes in there? And that makes a difference is that

consistency of doing that. I’m only two or three times a week. But boy, it’s really the two and a half years to go from, you know, to 20s down to 140s is just something which is stumpy. And I’ve now got so far, so much further to go. Yeah, there’s, I had actually someone email me the other day saying he’s at the two minute mark, and he feels like his limit will be 150 because of his his height and his stature. And I’m thinking that there’s no way that 150 is your limit, like you’re thinking much too small. And when you actually see what can be done, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be looking at 140s and 130s and on from there with the right focus and obviously doing the work as well. And I was speaking to the biomechanist who works with Kate Campbell, and he’s working with her and he said, even in Kate Campbell stroke, there’s so much that she can still improve. And he’s really excited to work on it. So if Kate Campbell’s got something to work

on, there’s no excuse for anyone else to say, I think I’m done. I think I’m as good as I can possibly get. And over that time, when it comes to racing and implementing these changes in your stroke into a race, what’s your what’s your approach now or how do you how do you find you’re able to to do that when there’s obviously so much to think about your concentration on a lot when you’re when you’re training? What’s your approach now when it comes to racing? You’re still thinking about a lot of that stuff or you’re able to just get into race mode? No, I’m still thinking about every little bit of it. And I’ve just did the western Sydney Half Iron Man and that’s a 2k swim. And from the get go, it’s okay, looking at where my hands going, thinking about my core, you know, lifting the butt up a bit, not too much. And it just head rotating, only having one goggle in it. It’s an ongoing problem, talking to myself

the whole way, which is great because the next thing you know, at the end of the swim,

but it’s yeah, the run, okay, I get into red mist mode, as my partner tells me, you know, the flag as I just take off, cycling is heading that way and the running carries over well. But none of that, not the fitness, the general aerobic fitness, nothing carries over to the swim. So it’s all an education and an ongoing education. And I travel a fair bit for work, which is probably the biggest pain in the proverbial because I miss my swimming, which is if you’d asked me that three years ago, that wasn’t me, I’m not. It’s just weird. You’ve done weird things there, Britain’s all your fault. Oh, well, that’s that’s what I’m happy to take responsibility for. And it’s good that as soon as you look forward to getting in the pool, and you look forward to your swims, it makes such a world of difference. And I can completely understand for any athletes out there who aren’t looking forward to the swim, like if you if you don’t know what’s going to make you faster, in terms of your your stroke

and your technique, you kind of get to the pool and like, yeah, you might bang out a good workout. But really, there’s there’s nothing else to concentrate on apart from the effort you’re putting in. But if you know what you can do to get get quicker, it’s really motivating. And like speaking from my own personal experience, it’s like, yeah, that’s, that’s what’s a lot of fun is is continuing to refine the stroke and seeing these little improvements over the course of a few months there. And and that’s really motivating. So it’s, I think that’s, it doesn’t take a lot to have someone look forward to go into the pool. It just takes a little bit of sort of background on on what you can do to swim fast and a little bit of background on on technique. And and for you, what what do you do in terms of training compared to what you were doing when you first started. So you mentioned you’re following the workouts that we’ve got in the membership. What were you doing when you first

started compared to now? Before the before the session with you, I was go down to the pool, maybe swim a kilometer, get out and that’d be it. And yeah, 220 pace and okay, done forward out of my brain the way we go. But almost instantly after having doing the the sessions with you, it started to okay, you’ve given me these drills to do and working through the drills, but also understanding what the drills were for and why they were doing them. But the concentrating on one particular sinky leak. So my rear end was almost dragging on the bottom of the pool when we started. So working on the core and the kick there was sort of right at the beginning. Then the crossover was really creating issues. Then we started to work on the catch and we’re working on that one now core all the time. And now I think I think recently you’ve done a potty on core strength and that need for the connection through the body. And I think that’s a really big key one that’s not obvious to to

new swimmers that it makes such a difference when you when you think about it as you swim. My I can see my rear end popping out of the water, which is, you know, something is just to me amazing. Okay, it’s common for most women. But for me, it’s amazing. Oh, look, you speak to speak to 50% of people who are swimming once or twice a week. And if you if your hips and your legs are up near the surface, yeah, it can be magic. So I mean, I was talking to any Jones on a podcast about that this morning as well. And we’re just talking about like a really it really all starts with the with the posture and the ability to engage the core lightly, which kind of sets up the the body position. Because without that, you’re just fighting, you’re fighting the water. And without that

connection through the core, then you’re not going to be able to connect up there, the catch with the rotation and the kick and it’s everything’s working separately. And that’s that’s really hard work. But if you can have that, that core switched on and you can generate you can generate a lot of power from the hip rotation, very small movement, but a lot that you can generate. And, you know, and that’s quite evident. I think when we look at your first video compared to to now, and that is really one of those things that that’s an ongoing process. But I mean, is that something that you feel now when you when you swim compared to before? Oh, very much so. It’s that feel for the water. It’s still an evolving exercise that the the feel of the different parts of the body, what they’re doing in the water and where they are. It’s still surprising when I look at the video that you go hang on, that’s not what I thought I was doing. But when you compare it to 12 months ago, you go, yep, okay,

that that is working. But that switching on the core is something which I find really, at the moment, it’s making a big difference to everything. It’s just one of those little feelings that trying to get the muscle memory to lock it in and everything. I think, well, not not holding it. And as soon as you hold it, bang, it makes such a difference. And in the next, say, 12 months, what’s what’s your target pace for your half Ironman swim? What do you what do you feel like if you continue to improve your stroke and and can fit those workouts in? What do you feel like you can get down to?

That’s that’s how long the piece of strength. It used to be if I could ever swim 140, I’d be tickled pink, but now my Western Sydney was 143. And I think if I can get into the pool more often, that’s my biggest challenge. If I can get more time in the water, then, you know, 130 doable once and I am 62. But regardless, that doesn’t matter. It’s all ages number. I can I reckon that yet why not 130 is the target on the horizon. That’s great. And I mean, I love hearing from from swimmers like yourself, like in your 60s, and you’re doing PBs in the water, like continuing to get better. And like it’s and it’s certainly possible. And there’s a lot of swimmers who are able to do that, even like people who have swum when they were younger, like you can still absolutely get faster. And and that’s a, you know, it’s probably one of the fewer, fewer sports where you can do that. You know, if you think of like running, it’s probably a little bit more taxing on the

the body, but with swimming, because it’s so technical, you can you can still continue to get quicker. Without doubt, my running has certainly slowed down because I can’t do the miles anymore because of the knee, but both the cycling and the swimming, but swimming particularly coming along, it leaps and bounds. And so I’m now sub-five, I reckon, through Geelong Half-Line Man conference with that. Awesome. Well, all the best for Geelong. And I appreciate you sharing your experience and the things that you’ve you’ve learned over the last couple of years. So Steve, thanks again for being on the podcast. Thank you, Brendan, since, you know, 3rd of June, 2017, you’ve taken off my lofty butt.

I’m happy to, and I’m glad to remember it so clearly, but obviously for the right reasons. So that’s that’s a good thing. Oh, good. Thanks, guys. 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 2:20 to 1:40/100m Pace with Stephen Jackson appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Eney Jones is coming back for the third time to share what she has been working with recently and about trying a different approach for triathletes who needs help with their swimming.

01:31 Origin Of Phrases That Swim Coaches Have Used
08:26 Core Connection
10:18 Working With Triathletes
12:43 The Mental Aspect
13:41 Aloha!
15:54 Alternate Ego
17:26 You Either Win Or You Learn
19:28 Between The Stimulus And Response
21:24 Going Back To The Fundamentals Of Breathing
22:49 Connecting To Your Breath
24:37 Shells And Rocks
32:36 One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Eney Jones:
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Transcription:

Brenton: So Eney, welcome back to the podcast. This is your third time on here.

Eney: Thank you. I wish I were there, but this is second best.

Brenton: Yeah, well it’s just starting to heat up here and you’re starting to get pretty cold by the sounds of it. But one of the things that’s happening is you’re coming over here… Well, coming to Noosa for our Noosa Camp in May, which will be awesome. And you said it’s your first time visiting Noosa?

Eney: Yeah, I’m excited to go to Noosa, I’ve always wanted to go there. And the closest I’ve been is a friend of mine is from Noosa and makes yogurt here called Noosa. So that’s the only thing that I’ve had, the only Noosa experience I’ve had.

Brenton: Well yeah, it’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s just such a good spot for swimming, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast today was just to see what you’ve been working on and researching because I think you’re probably the coach who I know that looks into things and loves to look back at the history and where things come from. And there’s been a couple of things lately where you’ve found the origin of some of the typical cues or the phrases that coaches have used across the years. And it’s given you a much better understanding of why some people… Or why we use the cues that we do. But a lot of the times it’s not actually helping the swimmer. So what have been some of the recent ones that you’ve sort of come across?

Eney: So looking at some of the etymology of swimming, the first one that I came across was lie down, look flat, swim downhill, you have to press down to lift your legs. And I had somebody come in the flume at CU and they wanted me to teach Navy Seal swimming, and I said, “No, I don’t know how to do that.” And he said, “Watch these videos.” And I said, “Are you trying to be a Navy Seal?” And he said, “No, I am a finalist to be on a reality TV show to pretend I’m a Navy Seal, so I need to learn their swimming style.” And Navy Seals are in the water for hours upon hours and they’re trying not to get shot. They’re trying not to be seen. So they really want to be low in the water. Most of the people that I work with, the athletes are either open water swimmers or triathletes and they want the fastest, easiest, not the hardest.

Eney: So with water being 800 times denser than air, the lower you are in the water, the harder it is. And I was so happy to hear some of this Navy Seal stuff because I had heard coaches say swim down hill and I thought it was to denote ease, but it’s actually from Navy Seals. And when I watched the videos and the Navy Seal said, “You’ve got to press down to lift your legs.” And I wanted to say to him, “No, my legs are connected with my core.” So if I want to lift my legs, it doesn’t matter where my chest is. But I’ve always said stretch your chest. It is a press, but it’s also a chest like a proud superhero chest. When you do that, it actually lifts your shoulders higher and makes sighting easier.

Eney: The other one recently I’ve come across is from Red Cross, and they taught people to cup their hands, which you lose surface area and now the research has come out, you want 10 degrees between your fingers so you’re moving more water and you’re not using energy to cup. They also teach breathe back into the pocket because they thought it was a safe place for people to breathe not getting water in their mouth, but what it does is it either causes people’s arm to rise so they’re in their shoulder or they spread their legs and their arm goes to the side and their legs spread. So looking back is not where you want to be breathing, you want to be breathing in the front part of your strike.

Eney: And we talked earlier before we were on air about how sometimes anything’ll work, and I’ve had some athletes do Oceanside, and I that I will sometimes teach them to breathe back because when you’re trying to catch a wave coming in, you need to look back to see, to practice the timing. And to me that always seems like a given growing up in Florida, but working with a lot of people in Colorado, they’ve never been in the surf, they’ve never been in the waves. So you know, that’s the only time I will teach that.

Eney: The other misnomer is from Total Immersion, the lie on your side to look up and press down. And to me, he got people to relax, but it’s hard on your shoulder to press down. It also sometimes with people I had worked with creates almost a vertigo when they breathe and go look all the way up to the ceiling and come back down. Then they get out in a triathlon and they’re like, “Oh my God, I’m so dizzy.” And I’m like, “Look at your eye pattern, it’s going way up and then way down.” So there’s benefits to it, he does get people to relax, but there’s different ways.

Eney: And looking at where some of these phrases have come from going, “Wait, it’s time for us and me to put our stuff out there.” Because seeing where some of these phrases come from, swimming is just science. Like Doc Counsilman used to say, “Press the T in the science of swimming.” And that’s true, but it’s actually a press and a stretch so that your heart is kind of forward, it lifts your shoulders out of the water and then it engages your core. Like if a boxer is going to punch you, if they punch straight out, it’s just shoulder. But if you punch forward and down and lift that opposite leg, you’re engaging your core.

Eney: So there’s so many sports that have similarities and so many sports, it does come down to your hips. That’s where it comes down to, your abs. I’ve seen a lot of people when they put on a buoy, they swim like they’ve… Or core shorts, they swim like they’ve had an epidural from the waist down. And to me, I think, “Wait, that’s where your power is.” The reason I like my buoy is you have to squeeze it to navel swivel to get your hips out of the way and you have to incorporate the… I always call it surf paddling and salsa dancing, but you have to start engaging that salsa.

Eney: And with a lot of triathletes, mostly men, they’re tight in their psoas, hip flexors, lower lumbar and sacroiliac. So just recently teaching people how to relax that, I’ve had people pull with their ankles crossed just to get the relief in their sacroiliac, their lower lumbar, and even start to move their hips out of the way. And it’s even like Mike Bottom, the coach of Michigan, when he used to explain hip drive, I don’t think people knew it’s like golf. So much of your power, even with your catch, comes from your hips. It’s not just reaching forward, it’s that hip hike of the opposite hip and that naval swivel to get that hip out of the way to get more length in the back.

Brenton: Yeah. And that’s one thing that… Like when people sending their videos for me to analyze, oftentimes I have to start with just that core connection or getting the core involved. And we see their inner thighs and their knees sometimes can be very far apart, and getting that connection, or that core, to be used, it’s not going to happen when the knees are that far apart. So what do you like to use? You mentioned get them to put a pool boy in and to cross their ankles is one way to feel it.

Eney: Yeah. I also am a big fan of DMC fins, and they’re Australian. They’re not too long, so they don’t mess up the kick timing. They’re made of silicone, so they’re heavy. They teach people awareness. So I will have people pull with a band and fins on to actually learn to power from their hips. And then a more advanced drill is to take the buoy out and have fins and the band to keep them almost like a tail-like mermaid or merman movement to get some power from their hips. And that’s another misnomer that I’ve heard in the past about stop moving your hips, lie flat. And I think, “No, no, no, there’s so much power in your hips.” And it’s really an easy way to gain power without a lot of effort.

Brenton: Yeah, exactly, it’s such a small movement through the hips, but you can get so much from it. And when I was looking into it, it’s called the Serape Effect, which is when… It’s the lengthening of those muscles through the torso, and it’s when those muscles contract and they shorten that you get that snap back effect. And for very little effort you can really have a lot of output there. And you notice that when people are able to make that change from being not connected through the body or through the hips to then having that connection, it makes a big, big difference. And you’ve been working with a professional triathlete guy, Sam Long, and working on a number of these different things. And we were talking earlier about what some of those things were for him and those different ways he had to think about his stroke. Do you want to talk a bit about what you’ve been doing with Sam?

Eney: Yeah, so Sam is an amazing athlete and he’s got an unbelievable engine. Nd he hasn’t really been swimming that long, but he needs to go from a 57 Iron Man swim to about an easy 50 to be able to win the big ones. And with he’s got a great mind body connection and once he feels something, he’s great at clearing and letting go and not thinking about it. So with him he was breathing way too far back so he wasn’t getting power in his catch on the opposite side in his lat. So we’ve been working on him lifting his chin, keeping his neck neutral, heart forward, and even little drills like having a paddle with no strap in front of your head, so you lift your chin, breathe, your head’s angled like it’s on a pillow and then you put it back. We’ve also been tying his legs together and having him cross his ankles when he pulls, and then doing more of a propeller kick to even get more with his lower abs because he was not using them at all.

Eney: Also with his feet, he had a tendency to stabilize with his feet pointing out. And I think his feet are, I don’t know what it is in Australia, but it’s a size 13 US. So they were these huge things to the side that were just stopping. So putting him in find has just… It’s not like the old school thing where they used to make us actually stand on the front of our feet to get the stretch, but it’s teaching him where his toes… It’s adding awareness of teaching him where his toes are pointed. It’s not like he’s even using the fins, but he’s using it for awareness and then even a little more core power. And it seems to be helping.

Eney: We’ve also been putting him in the flume at CU and we make small changes and he incorporates it and then I turn the flume on faster than he can swim or the pace he wants to swim and we can monitor when his stroke breaks down, like how long he can keep it up. And what he’s found in the endless pool is the hardest thing for him has really been the mental aspect. Because when you’re in a pool, you get to flip wall-to-wall, you see people, when you’re in the ocean, there’s beautiful sites and it’s almost like solitary confinement. And I relate it to… There’s a yoga story about a dog chewing a bone, and at first the dog chews it, but then he starts chewing on the inside of his cheek and he gets that yummy blood and then he gets so much more into it.

Eney: So with Sam, one of the big things we started working on recently is breathing. He had never… I realized I had never taught it. Most of the sports he did, it came naturally. But he told me he’s even starting to take some of the breathing stuff that we’ve worked on to the bike and the run. For instance, we started with the word Aloha because you know he loves Kona. The word Aloha, A-L-O means presence, and then ha is breath. So even that the word alone is something to focus on. And we’ve been trying to put more commas in his breath, meaning people think you can’t control your autonomic nervous system, you’re breathing in your heart rate, but by slowing down your breathing, you slow down your heart rate. But by putting a comma after you breathe in and then you take a pause and then you exhale, and this is the biggest pause because you’ve let all your air out, you don’t immediately exhale. They found that this is a good place to reset your breath. You have nothing right there and you stay with that nothing.

Eney: So the breadth has really helped him just even focus on more of that because really in a sport like triathlons it can be a moving meditation, but we’ve kind of lost control over our thoughts and we go to the next great thing and I get… I don’t know if you get, I get a lot of runners and they say, “I just want swimming to feel like running. I don’t want to be thinking.” And I said, “That’s what I want you to do too. I want you to swim with your heart and not your head. Press and lift your heart forward, slow down all the thoughts in your head by relaxing your breathing.” So it’s been kind of interesting how one thing then helps something else that you didn’t imagine it to help.

Brenton: Yeah, that’s a real… It’s an easy trap to get caught in, overthinking your swimming. And especially when there’s so much to think about and… You do need to have some things in mind when you are changing your stroke. And what I’ve tried to convey at clinics now is that when I get people to do drills, think about it, use your thinking brain. When it comes to swimming and translating that drill into the swim, go a bit more by feel because you’re not going to lose your timing, you’re not going to be as tense and rigid, you’ll be able to relax a bit more. And just trying to have that comparison there of your thinking brain and your feeling brain.

Eney: Yeah, so… And he’s got a good body mind connection. And as an athlete, he’s one of the biggest heart athletes I’ve ever seen. He loves it. He loves the people, he loves what he’s doing, he appreciates it. And I think that in that sense, no matter what his results, he’s already gotten it. You know, his exuberance carries over into people wanting that. Because I think people forget to have fun, they forget to realize how lucky they are, they forget to really enjoy it. And to really realize today I watched him… I made him watch kind of a religious video on Nick Foles, and he’s a quarterback here that had an injury and he said, “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me because it’s easy to be happy when I won the Lombardi trophy. But to me to realize this is part of the process. What am I learning from this? How can I keep moving forward?”

Eney: And I find it interesting because years ago one of my favorite books was called Red Gold and it was a Russian book on training techniques and they talked about having an alternate ego or naming yourself. You’d be The Brenton Ford. And Sam already does this, he calls himself… His race name is Big Unit, that’s what he calls himself. And you look through the years and Herschel Walker had multiple personalities and he said that really helped him because if he had a bad game he didn’t lose his self esteem. And just recently I was reading a book called Alter Ego and they talk about the same thing, how important it is to not be your performance. And I laugh that some great athletes have known this for so long, but now all the research is coming out saying it’s not who you are, name yourself for what your performance is and that way if you are retiring or if you have a bad race or a bad game, you can move on without losing your self esteem.

Eney: And you know, there’s the old adage that says you either win or you learn, and when you look back, and I’d be interesting to see with you, sometimes your best races are your worst performances because you learned the most, either about yourself or how to coach somebody because you would think you never would have this. There’s a woman here that used to be married to Dave Scott, Anna Scot and she was an amazing sprinter and she did a race in a cold lake in the mountains in a wetsuit. And her breathing was shallow, she actually was holding onto the kayak and she’s like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’m Anna Scot.” But you know, she had to dial it in and get over herself. And I think that happens to so many of us where we think we’re, our performances are our history and we need to clear an experience and realize that each experience, not only can it help you as an individual, it can help you as a coach. Or it can even help you as a person realizing your reaction is super important.

Eney: There’s a guy named Viktor Frankl and he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning and he said between the stimulus and the response, there is time and stay there and figure out your response. And I think so many of us are emotional and reactive and we react without… Well not you, because I feel like you’re able to do this, but create your response and look at all your options. And I think it happens in open water swimming all the time where you have to go, “Wait a minute, this happened, but what are my options?” And there’s another great book out there called Mindset where it’s like if you have a fixed mindset, you don’t see… You want to have a growth mindset because there are so many options and you need to go, “Okay well what are they?” You’re never totally defeated in an Iron Man because it’s a long day and there’s a next step and you don’t know what’s going to happen with your competitor or yourself or the weather. And so to keep having a growth mindset where you assess what’s going on without a lot of emotion.

Eney: So the breathing has come up a lot. And I wanted to talk to you about that because I’ve been working with people, I had somebody come in yesterday and I said, “What I want you to do is go for a walk for 30 seconds and try not to think and just connect to your brain.” And he’s like, “I can do it when I’m walking. I can do it when I’m running.” I said, “But swimming?” “That’s where I’m struggling.” So we’ve been working on the commas, the slowing down of the breath, and sometimes having it be audible cues, sometimes having it be counting, sometimes having it be a mantra that just is soothing and relaxing.

Brenton: One of the things that we did in Thailand this year for our camps there was every morning session I had the group do their TheraBand stuff to warm up and then we’d do about 10 minutes of breathing exercises. And I’d always get them to finish on… The final breathing was basically just trying to reduce how many breaths cycles you were doing per minute. So just a long drawn out inhale, long drawn out exhale. And sometimes I get down to doing like two, three or four breaths per minute. That’s not many breasts per minutes, it’s really slowing the breathing cycle down. And what I found especially in the technique session that we did, but also for the sessions where we were working them pretty hard, they were in a really good head space there. I think they were able to swim center and then coming from that place that you were just talking about, that’s when you can really… I don’t know, You can just really perform a lot better when you’re centered and your breathing is controlled and you’ve got that in place.

Brenton: And so that’s something that I’m going to continue to do it at camps. And I think it’s so easy to just look at it and go, “Oh, it’s just breathing. It can’t really do that much for you.” But in reality, it is everything. You don’t breathe for two minutes and you’re going to be in trouble. Breathing really is everything. And if you come back to those fundamentals, I think there’s a lot that you can get from that.

Eney: No, and I used to teach a lot of yoga and one of… And I used to run a film festival and one year the film came called Doing Time, Doing Vipassana and a Vipassana is a silent meditation. So often when we have a thought, we attach emotion to it rather than it going by. So some of the things that I’ve looked into are having people even wear a snorkel in their car to a race just to slow down their breathing. Or when you scuba dive, just the sound of your own breath can be… I like that you smiled. But they can be super relaxing because we forget that you have everything you need and your breath is everything and you can relax it.

Eney: So even in a stressful situation to step back and connect to your breath and even when you’re in a wave and a big wave comes and go, “Wait, I have my breath, I can slow.” You can actually slow time down and just really compose yourself by creating that awareness. And I think that we forget, but in so many cultures and in so many different activities, like women having a baby and Lamaze, and we forget that swimming is a perfect activity to not only regulate your breath, but to slow it down and then also realize that you can control everything by the awareness of your breath to the awareness of your thoughts by just not giving it any emotion and clearing it and going on to the next thing.

Brenton: When we had the Hawaii camp this year, one of the things that I really enjoyed was you came to the pool and you’ve got two bags full of different things. You’ve got these shells and rocks and all this different stuff to use as teaching tools at the camp. And I like that you think out of the box and you’re always looking for new ways for people to learn or to bring awareness to these different aspects of their stroke. Can you talk about some of those things that we did in Hawaii? Like you had the rocks and you had those shells as well. What was the purpose of each of those things?

Eney: Yeah, so people are real connected to their hands and they think their hands are important. But really there’s more surface area in your forearms. So to engage your core and in open water you want a deeper catch. If you’re going to skip a rock, they found the angle of a rock to skip the most is 20 degrees. So depending on people’s mind, if they want an angle. But the rock actually makes them engage their catch a little bit lower and then set, some people say early vertical form, but I don’t usually say that because if people are collapsed in their chest, they end up in their traps in their shoulders rather than having their diaphragm stretched and lifted. So the rocks help lift, they help people with their catch, get the depth.

Eney: But then the next phase I call the power phase, and it’s at the shoulder and at the shoulder you want the happy family, you want the dad, the mom and the kid altogether, the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist. So having that weight in your hand is almost like throwing that rock back so then they can actually feel the weight in the rock. So it kind of teaches and heightens awareness.

Eney: I think I also brought some biscuit sand dollars and some shells because I was having trouble teaching split tempo. I get a lot of athletes that are super runners and they’re cyclists and they’re super methodical, having the same tempo through the air and the water. But it’s a very different… Water’s 800 times denser, so you can be much more deliberate underneath and faster through the air. So your tempo actually goes from slow to faster underneath and then through the air from slow to fast. So with these shells and biscuit sand dollars, you put them in your hands and it teaches that to people without them thinking because it fills up underneath and then it drains through the air. So when people are even trying to learn a gallop or to learn to not be so perfect and shoulder and trap driven and deltoid driven in the water, it kind of teaches it without even having to speak.

Eney: And it’s helped me because I’ve worked with people from all over the world and sometimes language becomes a barrier. So if I can teach feel without saying something, once they feel it, they’ve got it and they might put their own words to it. But tools like that, and I know sometimes people think they need a really expensive swim machine, but I’ll even have people put a cable behind them and almost work on punching so they get their scapula to open and they get that airspeed in the front. Because of course everybody’s going to work underneath, but to actually get that speed and alacrity and velocity through the air before you reset. So sometimes teaching people on land is a good way to do it, just so… Or when they’re holding something that prevents them from totally thinking with their hands.

Eney: So right now when you’re sitting with me, lift your elbows and pressure index finger up and down. You can feel that in the front of your shoulder. Do you feel that in the front? Now with the third finger, press it up and down and it moves mid shoulder. So then go to the fourth and fifth fingers and it takes it to your triceps and lats. And what’s interesting is, is you’ll see a lot of people that are thinkers and they’ve entered thumbs down, index fingers, traps, and they found the difference between a good pianist and a great pianist is these fourth and fifth fingers, but also neurologically the first and second fingers are the front of your brain and we’re texting and we’re on the computer, but we really need to activate the fourth and fifth.

Eney: So some coaches do the okay drill, but they didn’t know why they were doing it. Like if you hold a golf ball and have these fingers just to create the awareness in them and to lift the chest. So you’ll get a lot of people, even when you do this, do this with your hands where your thumbs are down in your index fingers. You can feel that in your traps and then press your chest and flatten your hands and lift your elbows. All of a sudden you can get more in your lat. So when I’m trying to teach lat involvement in the catch, sometimes I’ll have people hold their lat because anything tactile is good, so they swim one arm holding their lat. And then to work on body position, I’ll have them put their arm behind their back so that… I call this Roger Bannister Breaking the Tape. It really makes you open up through the diaphragm and swim one arm with your hand behind your back as high as you can get the other hand. And they think they can’t do it, but what it does is it changes their water awareness.

Brenton: Yeah, and that’s where I… It’s a good place to start with so many people, especially for triathletes, because one thing that I really teach now if they’re open water swimming or doing triathlon is you probably want to be looking somewhere forwards. Obviously not straight forwards, but down at that 45 degree angle. Still keep the neck neutral and long, but have that proud posture, set the eyes slightly forwards, you’re going to be so much better off. And one of the things you mentioned in a recent post was you’ve got so much better awareness around what’s happening in your race, in the open water, when you are looking slightly forwards

Eney: And it makes sighting easier. It actually makes swimming easier because when you’re stretched through the chest, it lifts the shoulders and you can almost peek one eye out without even stopping. And then your head is not pushing water either because your head’s pretty high, not lifted from the neck but from the chest. So what’s been interesting to me is to monitor people in the flume and just by changing body position, people have been 11 seconds faster per 100 without more effort, keeping the same effort, but by changing their body position. And that to me is where I start because in open water there are a lot of obstacles and in triathlons, pretty much everything you want to see is in front of you unless you’re doing a race where there’s big surf and you’re getting out and you do need to look back. But to have people breathe more forward and open their chest in the diaphragm has made a really big difference.

Eney: And at first it was hard because it’s countered to a lot of stuff that’s out there, whether it’s Red Cross or Navy Seals or, “My coach in Des Moines said this.” But then when it starts working and you present it as an option rather than a given and more of an exploratory thing, because I do think not everybody’s somatotype is the same. As you get older, people get injured and sometimes they have to change how they’re doing things. So you know, you can’t have it be one size fits all.

Brenton: Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And I think that’s one of the things that when I first came across the stuff that you were doing, that’s one of the things that appealed to me. It’s like, “Well, this is what’s commonly taught, but this is actually what you’re seeing at the top level with a certain range of swimmers. So why are we teaching it?” And I’m talking about a crossover kick, and there’s a number of other things like that that I’ve sort of looked into and learned from you that I try and take on board when I’m working with someone because there’s so many different nuances to all these different parts of the stroke and it really depends on what they’re training for. Like with a triathlete, the stroke or what you’re trying to teach them can be very different than someone who’s going to be swimming in the pool only.

Eney: Oh, exactly. And there are people that can change it. Like one of the reasons Katie Ledecky is so fun to watch is she actually changes her kick through a 1500. And even watching Paltrinieri this last year do so well in the pool; and you’ve seen him, his crossover kick is at his ankles, but it’s really… He went a 1:49 at us nationals for the 10K, that to me is amazing. You know, and it’s not classic swimming, but there are people that have been doing this for years and that’s where it’s been fun, to look at the history of the sport, look at the etymology, look at what works. And even having people be safe in open water, I don’t want them looking down and plowing through the water. I just don’t think that that’s how people should swim in open water, there’s too many obstacles. And even in a race you have to be aware of the different factors.

Brenton: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so for people who are listening, you do a lot of coaching in Boulder and that’s where you’re based, and obviously you’ll be coming over to the Camo in May in Australia, but for anyone who wants to get in contact with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Eney: So you can contact me through my website, which is any www.eneyjones.com or through Eney Buoy which has a… You can submit a question. Also, the business name is Catalyst Advisors. So even if you just Googled my name, there’s three different ways. I also respond to Facebook, Instagram, any kind of social media. And I do answer a lot of questions because the phase I’m in right now is I want to give coaches some tools and some different ways of doing things and also athletes, because a lot of people get stuck and think, “Well this is as fast as I can swim and I just have to go to more practices to get my fitness better.” But if they learned different ways to manipulate their body position, change their breathing, heighten their awareness, it could be a little easier and they can spend time doing other stuff. So I’m pretty responsive as far as you know, you don’t have to subscribe, you can just ask and I’ll answer questions about, “Hey, I have an athlete that we’re stuck here. What do you think?”

Eney: And I think that’s the beauty of a lot of the way that you teach and you present things, you don’t present just the one way, there’s a lot of different ways, and I know being a former teacher, educator, people learn in different ways and there’s always a different approach to get the result you want. So sometimes you have to go through a lot of different things to where it can click with an athlete and as a coach, learning how they respond. Do they need to do it? Do they need to read articles? Do you need to go through what every coach that they’ve had a said and say, “Well, okay, but maybe try this. And they said that because of this.” So you know, even learning with your athlete I think is a great way to coach because you can’t just stand on deck and say the same thing over and over again if they’re not getting it.

Brenton: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I was actually… I had a podcast recently with a swimmer who I did some filming with, and she’s a very high level surf lifesaver. And her coach was saying her… She was basically crossing over and her coach had told her again and again and again, and she just didn’t quite get it until she saw herself swimming. And it’s like, that’s all she needed. She’s a visual learner.

Eney: Yeah-

Brenton: And so it doesn’t take a lot.

Eney: I do think that that’s… I think so many people when they see themselves then they go, “Oh I got it now.” Yeah.

Brenton: And so if you haven’t got yourself an Eney Buoy yet, grab one of those as well, because they’re… If you don’t know what they added, a pool boy that you’ve developed and it’s basically two plastic, cylindrical containers with a very narrow connector in the middle and it’s really good for buoyancy and it’s got this narrow gap in the middle so you can really keep their core connected. So I really, I love your pool boy and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s looking to get one. And you’ve had that around for quite a while and I think it’s just one of the best tools that, especially triathletes and open water should get. But for anyone who’s swimming, I just, I love to use my Eney Buoy when I’m at the pool.

Eney: Oh, well great. Well thank you.

Brenton: So anyway, Eney, thanks so much for being on the podcast again, and I’m looking forward to seeing you in May in sunny Queensland.

Eney: Great, thanks. Okay.

People think you can’t control your autonomic nervous system, your breathing and your heart rate, but by slowing down your breathing, you slow down your heart rate. But by putting a comma after you breathe in, and then you take a pause, and then you exhale, and this is the biggest pause because you’ve let all your air out, you don’t immediately exhale. They found that this is a good place to reset your breath. You have nothing right there, and you stay with that nothing. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that helped swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer, and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

So, Eni, welcome back to the podcast. This is your third time on here. Thank you. I wish I were there, but this is second best. Yeah, it’s just starting to heat up here, and you’re starting to get pretty cold by the sounds of it, but one of the things that’s happening is you’re coming over here, well, coming to NUSA for our NUSA camp in May, which will be awesome, and you said it’s your first time visiting NUSA. Yeah, I’m excited to go to NUSA. I’ve always wanted to go there, and the closest I’ve been as a friend of mine is from NUSA and makes yogurt here called NUSA, so that’s the only thing that I’ve had, the only NUSA experience I’ve had. Well, yeah, it’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s just such a good spot for swimming, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, and one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast today was just to see what you’ve been working on and researching, because I think you’re probably the coach

who I know that looks into things and loves to look back at the history and where things come from, and there’s been a couple of things lately where you’ve found the origin of some of the typical cues or the phrases that coaches have used across the years, and it’s given you a much better understanding of why some people or why we use the cues that we do, but a lot of the times, it’s not actually helping the swimmer, so what have been some of the recent ones that you’ve sort of come across? So looking at some of the etymology of swimming,

the first one that I came across was lie down, look flat, swim downhill, you have to press down to lift your legs, and I had somebody come in the flume at CU and they wanted me to teach Navy SEALs swimming, and I said, no, I don’t know how to do that, and he said, watch these videos, and I said, are you trying to be a Navy SEAL? And he said, no, I am a finalist to be on a reality TV show, to pretend I’m a Navy SEAL, so I need to learn their swimming style, and Navy SEALs are in the water for hours upon hours, and they’re trying not to get shot, they’re trying not to be seen, so they really wanna be low in the water. Most of the people that I work with, the athletes, are either open water swimmers or triathletes, and they want the fastest, easiest, not the hardest. So with water being 800 times denser than air, the lower you are in the water, the harder it is, and I was so happy to hear some of this Navy SEAL stuff

because I had heard coaches say, swim downhill, and I thought it was to denote ease, but it’s actually from Navy SEALs, and when I watched the videos and the Navy SEALs said, you’ve gotta press down to lift your legs, and I wanted to say to him, no, my legs are connected with my core, so if I wanna lift my legs, it doesn’t matter where my chest is, but I’ve always said stretch your chest. It is a press, but it’s also a chest, like a proud superhero chest. When you do that, it actually lifts your shoulders higher and makes siting easier. The other one recently I’ve come across is from Red Cross, and they taught people to cup their hands which you lose surface area, and now the research has come out, you want 10 degrees between your fingers so you’re moving more water and you’re not using energy to cup. They also teach breathe back into the pocket because they thought it was a safe place for people to breathe, not getting water in their mouth,

but what it does is it either causes people’s arm to rise so they’re in their shoulder or they spread their legs and their arm goes to the side and their legs spread. So looking back is not where you wanna be breathing, you wanna be breathing in the front part of your stove. And we talked earlier before we were on air about how sometimes anything will work. And I’ve had some athletes do ocean side and that I will sometimes teach them to breathe back because when you’re trying to catch a wave coming in, you need to look back to practice the timing and to me that always seems like a given growing up in Florida but working with a lot of people in Colorado, they’ve never been in the surf, they’ve never been in the wave. So that’s the only time I will teach that. The other misnomer is from Total Immersion, the lie on your side to look up and press down. And to me, he got people to relax but it’s hard on your shoulder to press down.

It also sometimes with people I had worked with creates almost the vertigo when they breathe and go look all the way up to the ceiling and come back down, then they get out in a triathlon and they’re like, oh my God, I’m so dizzy. And I’m like, look at your eye pattern, it’s going way up and then way down. So there’s benefits to it, he does get people to relax but there’s different ways and looking at where some of these phrases have come from going, wait, it’s time for us and me to put our stuff out there because seeing where some of these phrases come from, swimming is just science. Like Doc Councilman said, used to say press the T in the science of swimming. And that’s true, but it’s actually a press and a stretch so that your heart is kind of forward, it lifts your shoulders out of the water and then it engages your core. Like if a boxer is gonna punch you, if they punch straight out, it’s just shoulder but if you punch forward and down

and lift that opposite leg, you’re engaging your core. So there’s so many sports that have similarities and so many sports, it does come down to your hips, that’s where it comes down to your abs. I’ve seen a lot of people, when they put on a buoy, they swim like they’ve had or core shorts, they swim like they’ve had an epidural from the waist down. And to me, I think, wait, that’s where your power is. The reason I like my buoy is you have to squeeze it to navel swivel to get your hips out of the way and you have to incorporate the, I always call it surf paddling and salsa dancing but you have to start engaging that salsa. And with a lot of triathletes, mostly men, they’re tight in their psoas, hip flexors, lower lumbar and sacroiliac. So just recently teaching people how to relax that, I’ve had people pull with their ankles crossed just to get the relief in their sacroiliac, their lower lumbar and even start to move

their hips out of the way. And it’s even like Mike Bottom, the coach of Michigan, when he used to explain hip drive, I don’t think people knew it’s like golf. So much of your power, even with your catch, comes from your hips. It’s not just reaching forward. It’s that hip hike of the opposite hip and that navel swivel to get that hip out of the way to get more length in the back. Yeah, and that’s one thing that like when people send in their videos for me to analyze, oftentimes I have to start with just that core connection or getting the core involved. And we see like their inner thighs and their knees sometimes can be very far apart and getting that connection or that core to be used. It’s not gonna happen when the knees are that far apart. So what do you like to use? You mentioned you’re getting to put a pool boy in and to cross their ankles as one way to feel it. Yeah, I also am a big fan of DMC Finns and they’re Australian.

They’re not too long, so they don’t mess up the kick timing. They’re made of silicone, so they’re heavy. They teach people awareness. So I will have people pull with a band and fins on to actually learn to power from their hips. And then a more advanced throw is to take the buoy out and have fins and the band to keep them almost like a tail-like mermaid or merman movement to get some power from their hips. And that’s another misnomer that I’ve heard in the past about stop moving your hips, lie flat. And I think, no, no, no, there’s so much power in your hips. And it’s really an easy way to gain power without a lot of effort. Yeah, exactly. It’s such a small movement through the hips, but you can get so much from it. And when I was looking into it, it’s called the Serape effect, which is when it’s the lengthening of those muscles through the torso. And it’s when those muscles contract and they shorten that you get that snapback effect.

And for very little effort, you can really have a lot of output there. And you notice it when people are able to make that change from being not connected through the body or through the hips to then having that connection. It makes a big, big difference. And you’ve been working with a professional triathlete guy, Sam Long, and working on a number of these different things. And we were talking earlier about what some of those things were for him and those different ways he had to think about his stroke. Do you want to talk a bit about what you’ve been doing with Sam? Yeah, so Sam is an amazing athlete and he’s got an unbelievable engine. And he hasn’t really been swimming that long, but he needs to go from a 57 Ironman swim to about an easy 50 to be able to win the big ones. And with him, he’s got a great mind-body connection. And once he feels something, he’s great at clearing and letting go and not thinking about it.

So with him, he was breathing way too far back. So he wasn’t getting power in his catch on the opposite side in his lap. So we’ve been working on him lifting his chin, keeping his neck neutral, heart forward. And even little drills like having a paddle with no strap in front of your head. So you lift your chin, breathe, your head’s angled like it’s on a pillow and then you put it back. We’ve also been tying his legs together and having him cross his ankles when he pulls and then doing more of a propeller kick to even get more with his lower abs because he was not using them at all. Also with his feet, he had a tendency to stabilize with his feet pointing out. And I think his feet are, I don’t know what it is in Australia, but it’s a size 13 US. So they were these huge things to the side that were just stopping. So putting him in fins has just, it’s not like the old school thing where they used to make us actually stand

on the front of our feet to get the stretch, but it’s teaching him where his toes, it’s adding awareness of teaching him where his toes are pointed. It’s not like he’s even using the fins, but he’s using it for awareness and then even a little more core power. And it seems to be helping. We’ve also been putting him in the flume at CU and we make small changes and he incorporates it. And then I turn the flume on faster than he can swim or the pace he wants to swim and we can monitor when his stroke breaks down, like how long he can keep it up. And what he’s found in the endless pool is the hardest thing for him has really been the mental aspect. Cause when you’re in a pool, you get to flip wall to wall, you see people when you’re in the ocean, there’s beautiful sights. And it’s almost like a solitary confinement. And I related to,

I related to,

there’s a yoga story about a dog chewing a bone and at first the dog chews it, but then he starts chewing on the inside of his cheek and he gets that yummy blood and then he gets so much more into it. So with Sam, one of the big things we started working on recently is breathing. I realized I had never taught it. Most of the sports he did, it came naturally, but he told me he’s even starting to take some of the breathing stuff that we’ve worked on to the bike and the run.

For instance, we started with the word aloha because he loves konai. The word aloha, A-L-O means presence and then ha is breath. So even that the word alone is something to focus on. And we’ve been trying to put more commas in his breath, meaning, so the breath has really helped him just even focus on more of that because really in a sport like triathlons it can be a moving meditation, but we’ve kind of lost control over our thoughts and we go to the next great thing. And I get, I don’t know if you get, I get a lot of runners and they say, I just want swimming to feel like running. I don’t wanna be thinking. And I said, that’s what I want you to do too. I want you to swim with your heart and not your head. Press and lift your heart forward, slow down all the thoughts in your head by relaxing your breathing. So it’s been kind of interesting how one thing then helps something else that you didn’t imagine it to help.

Yeah, it’s a real, it’s an easy trap to get caught in overthinking your swimming. And especially when there’s so much to think about and like you do need to have some things in mind when you are changing your stroke. And what I’ve tried to convey at clinics now is that when I get people to do drills think about it, use your thinking brain when it comes to swimming and translating that drill into the swim go a bit more by feel because you’re not going to lose your timing. You’re not gonna be as tense and rigid. You’ll be able to relax a bit more and just trying to make it have that comparison there of your thinking brain and your feeling brain. Yeah, so, and he’s got a good body, mind connection. And as an athlete, he’s one of the biggest heart athletes I’ve ever seen. He loves it. He loves the people. He loves what he’s doing. He appreciates it. And I think that in that sense no matter what his results he’s already gotten it, you know

his exuberance carries over into people wanting that. Cause I think people forget to have fun. They forget to realize how lucky they are. They forget to really enjoy it. And to really realize today I watched him I made him watch kind of a religious video on Nick Foles and he’s a quarterback here that had an injury. And he said it’s the best thing that ever happened to me because it’s easy to be happy when I won the Lombardi trophy but to me to realize this is part of the process what am I learning from this? How can I keep moving forward? And I find it interesting cause years ago one of my favorite books was called Red Gold and it was a Russian book on training techniques and they talked about having an alternate ego or naming yourself you would be the Bretton Ford and Sam already does this. He calls himself his race name is big unit. That’s what he calls himself. And you look through the years and Herschel Walker had multiple personalities

and he said that really helped him because if he had a bad game he didn’t lose his self esteem. And just recently I was reading a book called Alter Ego and they talk about the same thing how important it is to not be your performance. And I laugh that some great athletes have known this for so long but now all the research is coming out saying it’s not who you are. You know, name yourself for what your performance is

and that way if you are retiring or if you have a bad race or a bad game you can move on without losing your self esteem. And there’s the old adage that says you either win or you learn. And when you look back and I’d be interesting to see with you sometimes your best races are your worst performances cause you learn the most either about yourself or how to coach somebody because you would think you never would have this.

There’s a woman here that used to be married to Dave Scott, Anna Scott. And she was an amazing sprinter and she did a race in a cold lake in the mountains in a wetsuit. And her breathing was shallow. She actually was holding on to the kayak and she’s like, oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’m Anna Scott. But, you know, she had to dial it in and get over herself. And I think that happens to so many of us where we think were our performances or our history and we need to clear an experience and realize that each experience not only can it help you as an individual it can help you as a coach or it can even help you as a person realizing your reaction is super important. There’s a guy named Victor Frankel and he wrote Mansearch for Meaning and he said between the stimulus and the response there is time and stay there and figure out your response. And I think so many of us are emotional and reactive

and we react without, well not you because I feel like you’re able to do this but create your response and look at all your options. And I think it happens in open water swimming all the time where you have to go, wait a minute, this happened, but what are my options? And there’s another great book out there called Mindset where it’s like if you have a fixed mindset you don’t see, you wanna have a growth mindset because there are so many options and you need to go, okay, well what are they? You’re never totally defeated in an Ironman because it’s a long day and there’s a next step and you don’t know what’s gonna happen with your competitor or yourself or the weather. And so to keep having a growth mindset where you assess what’s going on without a lot of emotion. So the breathing has come up a lot and I wanted to talk to you about that because I’ve been working with people I had somebody come in yesterday and I said what I want you to do

is go for a walk for 30 seconds and try not to think and just connect to your brain. And he’s like, I can do it when I’m walking I can do it when I’m running. I said, but swimming, that’s where I’m struggling. So we’ve been working on the commas, the slowing down of the breath, and sometimes having it be audible cues, sometimes having it be counting, sometimes having it be a mantra that just is soothing and relaxing. One of the things that we did in Thailand this year for our camps there was every morning session I had the group do their Theraband stuff to warm up and then we do about 10 minutes of breathing exercises and I’d always gotten to finish on the final breathing was basically just trying to reduce how many breath cycles you were doing per minute. So just a long drawn out inhale, long drawn out exhale and sometimes I’d get down to doing like two, three or four breaths per minute. Like that’s not many breaths per minute.

So it’s really slowing the breathing cycle down. And what I found in the, especially in the technique session that we did, but also for the sessions where we were working them pretty hard, they were in a really good head space there. I think they’d be able to switch center and then coming from that place that you’re just talking about, that’s when you can really, I know you can just really perform a lot better when you’re centered and your breathing’s controlled and you’ve got that in place. And so that’s something that I’m gonna continue to do it at camps. And I think it’s so easy to just look at it and go, it’s just breathing, like it can’t really do that much for you. But in reality, like it is everything. You don’t breathe for two minutes and you’re gonna be in trouble. Breathing really is everything. And if you come back to those fundamentals, I think there’s a lot that you can get from that. No, and I used to teach a lot of yoga

and I used to run a film festival and one year the film came called Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. And a Vipassana is a silent meditation. So often when we have a thought, we attach emotion to it rather than it going by. So some of the things that I’ve looked into are having people even wear a snorkel in their car to a race just to slow down their breathing or when you scuba dive, just the sound of your own breath can be, I like that you smile, but it can be super relaxing because we forget that you have everything you need and your breath is everything and you can relax it. So even in a stressful situation to step back and connect to your breath and even when you’re in a wave and a big wave comes and go, wait, I have my breath, I can slow, you can actually slow time down and just really compose yourself by creating that awareness. And I think that we forget, but in so many cultures and in so many different activities

like women having a baby and Lamaze and we forget that swimming is a perfect activity to not only regulate your breath, but to slow it down. And then also realize that you can control everything by the awareness of your breath to the awareness of your thoughts by just not giving it any emotion and clearing it and going on to the next thing. Well, when we had the Hawaii camp this year, one of the things that I really enjoyed was you came to the pool and you’ve got two bags full of different things. You’ve got these shells and rocks and all this different stuff to use as teaching tools at the camp. And I like that you think out of the box and you’re always looking for new ways to prepare people to learn or to bring awareness to these different aspects of their stroke. Can you talk about some of those things that we did in Hawaii, like you had the rocks and you had those shells as well? Like what was the purpose of each of those things?

Yeah, so people are real connected to their hands and they think their hands are important, but really there’s more surface area in your forearms. So to engage your core and in open water, you want a deeper catch. If you’re gonna throw, skip a rock, they found the angle of a rock to skip the most is 20 degrees. So depending on people’s mind if they want an angle, but the rock actually makes them engage their catch a little bit lower and then set. Some people say early vertical form, but I don’t usually say that because if people are collapsed in their chest, they end up in their traps and their shoulders rather than having their diaphragm stretched and lifted. So the rocks help lift, they help people with their catch get the depth. But then the next phase I call the power phase and it’s at the shoulder. And at the shoulder, you want the happy family. You want the dad, the mom, the kid altogether, the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist.

So having that weight in your hand is almost like throwing that rock back. So then they can actually feel the weight in the rock. So it kind of teaches and heightens awareness. I think I also brought some biscuit, sand dollars and some shells because I was having trouble teaching split tempo. I get a lot of athletes that are super runners and they’re cyclists and they’re super methodical having the same tempo through the air and the water, but it’s a very different, water’s 800 time denser. So you can be much more deliberate underneath and faster through the air. So your tempo actually goes from slow to faster underneath and then through the air from slow to fast. So with these shells and biscuit sand dollars, you put them in your hands and it teaches that to people without them thinking because it fills up underneath and then it drains through the air. So when people are even trying to learn a gallop or to learn to not be so perfect

and shoulder and trap-deriven and deltory driven up in the water, it kind of teaches it without even having to speak and it’s helped me because I’ve worked with people from all over the world and sometimes language becomes a barrier. So if I can teach feel without saying something, once they feel it, they’ve got it and they might put their own words to it but tools like that and I know sometimes people think they need a really expensive swim machine but I’ll even have people put a cable behind them

and almost work on punching so they get their scapula to open and they get that air speed in the front because of course everybody’s gonna work underneath but to actually get that speed and alacrity and velocity through the air before you reset. So sometimes teaching people on land

is a good way to do it just so or when they’re holding something that prevents them from totally thinking with their hands.

So right now when you’re sitting with me, press, lift your elbows and press your index finger up and down. You can feel that in the front of your shoulder. Do you feel that in the front? Now with the third finger, press it up and down and it moves mid-shoulder. So then go to the fourth and fifth fingers and it takes it to your triceps and lats and what’s interesting is you’ll see a lot of people that are thinkers and they’ve entered thumbs down, index fingers, traps and they found the difference between a good pianist and a great pianist is these fourth and fifth fingers but also neurologically, the first and second fingers are the front of your brain and we’re texting and we’re on the computer but we really need to activate the fourth and fifth. So some coaches do the okay drill but they didn’t know why they were doing it. Like if you hold a golf ball and have these fingers just to create the awareness in them

and to lift the chest. So you’ll get a lot of people even when you do this do this with your hands where your thumbs are down and your index fingers, you can feel that in your traps and then press your chest and flatten your hands and lift your elbows. All of a sudden you can get more in your lat. So when I’m trying to teach lat involvement in the catch sometimes I’ll have people hold their lat cause anything tactile is good. So they swim one arm holding their lat and then to work on body position I’ll have them put their arm behind their back so that I call this Roger Bannister or breaking the chest tape. It really makes you open up through the diaphragm and swim one arm with your hand behind your back as high as you can get the other hand. And they think they can’t do it but what it does is it changes their water awareness. And that’s where I, it’s a good place to start with so many people, especially for triathletes

because one thing that I really teach now if they’re open water swimming or doing triathlon is you probably wanna be looking somewhere forwards. Not obviously not straight forwards but down at that 45 degree angle still keep the neck neutral and long but have that proud posture, set the eyes slightly forwards. You’re gonna be so much better off. And one of the things you mentioned in a recent post was you’ve got so much better awareness around what’s happening in your race in the open water when you are looking slightly forwards. And it makes sighting easier. It actually makes swimming easier because when you’re stretched through the chest it lifts the shoulders and you can almost peek one eye out without even stopping. And then your head is not pushing water either because your head’s pretty high not lifted from the neck but from the chest. So what’s been interesting to me is to monitor people in the flume and just by changing body position

people have been 11 seconds faster per hundred without more effort like keeping the same effort but by changing their body position. And that to me is where I’ve started because in open water there are a lot of obstacles. And in triathlons pretty much everything you wanna see is in front of you unless you’re doing a race where there’s big surf and you’re getting out and you do need to look back but to have people breathe more forward and open their chest in the diaphragm has made a really big difference. At first it was hard because it’s countered to a lot of stuff that’s out there whether it’s Red Cross or Navy Seals or my coach in Des Moines said this but then when it starts working and you present it as an option rather than a given and more of an exploratory thing because I do think not everybody’s somatotype is the same as you get older people get injured and sometimes they have to change how they’re doing things.

So you can’t have it be one size fits all. Yeah, yeah exactly right. And that’s I think that’s one of the things that when I first came across the stuff that you were doing that’s one of the things that appealed to me. It’s like, wow, this is what’s commonly taught but this is actually what you’re seeing at the top level with a certain range of swimmers. So why are we teaching? Why are we teaching? And I’m talking about like a crossover kick and there’s a number of other things like that that I’ve sort of looked into and learned from you that I try and take on board when I’m working with someone because there’s so many different nuances to all these different parts of the stroke and it really depends on what they’re training for like with a triathlete the stroke or what you’re trying to teach them can be very different than someone who’s going to be swimming in the pool only. Exactly. And there are people that can change it.

Like one of the reasons Katie Ledecky so fun to watch is she actually changes her kick through a 1500 and even watching Paltraneri this last year do so well in the pool and you’ve seen him he his crossover kick is at his ankles but it’s really he went a 149 at US nationals for the 10K that to me is amazing. And it’s not classic swimming but there are people that have been doing this for years and that’s where it’s been fun to look at the history of the sport, look at the etymology, look at what works and even having people be safe in open water I don’t want them looking down and plowing through the water. I just don’t think that that’s how people should swim in open water. There’s too many obstacles and even in a race you have to be aware of the different factors. Yeah, exactly. And so for people who are listening you do a lot of coaching in Boulder and that’s where you’re based and obviously you’ll be coming over to the camp

in Maine, Australia but for anyone who wants to get in contact with you what’s the best way for them to do that? So you can contact me through my website which is www.eeniejones.com

or through Enie Buie, which has a, you can submit a question. Also the business name is Catalyst Advisors. So even if you just Googled my name there’s three different ways. I also respond to Facebook, Instagram any kind of social media and I do answer a lot of questions because the phase I’m in right now is I wanna give coaches some tools and some different ways of doing things and also athletes because a lot of people get stuck and think, well, this is as fast as I can swim and I just have to go to more practices to get my fitness better. But if they learn different ways to manipulate their body position, change their breathing, heighten their awareness it could be a little easier and they can spend time doing other stuff. So I’m pretty responsive as far as you don’t have to subscribe you can just ask and I’ll answer questions about, hey, I have an athlete that we’re stuck here what do you think? And I think that’s the beauty of a lot of the way

that you teach and you present things you don’t present just the one way there’s a lot of different ways and I know being a former teacher, educator

people learn in different ways and there’s always a different approach to get the result you want. So sometimes you have to go through a lot of different things to where it can click with an athlete and as a coach learning how they respond do they need to do it? Do they need to read articles? Do they need to go? Do you need to go through what every coach that they’ve had a said and say, well, okay but maybe try this and they said that because of this. So even learning with your athlete I think is a great way to coach because you can’t just stand on deck and say the same thing over and over again if they’re not getting it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I was actually, I had a podcast recently with a swimmer who I did some filming with and she’s a very high level surf lifesaver and her coach was telling her she was basically crossing over and her coach had told her again and again and again and she just didn’t quite get it

until she saw herself swimming. It’s like, that’s all she needed. She’s a visual learner. Yeah. And so it doesn’t take a lot. I do think that that’s, I think so many people when they see themselves then they go, oh, I got it now. Yeah. And so if you haven’t got yourself in any buoy yet, grab one of those as well because they’re, if you don’t know what they are it’s a pool boy that you developed and it’s basically like two, two plastic cylindrical containers with a very sort of narrow connector in the middle and it’s really good for buoyancy and it’s got this narrow gap in the middle so you can really keep their core connected. So I really, I love your pool boy and I recommend it to anyone who’s looking to get one and you’ve had that around for quite a while and I think it’s just one of the best tools that especially triathletes and open water swimmers should get but for anyone who’s swimming, I just, I love to use my any buoy when I’m at the pool.

Oh, well, great. Well, thank you. So any thanks very much for being on the podcast again and I’m looking forward to seeing you in May in sunny Queensland. Great, thanks. Okay. 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 A Different Approach To Technique For Triathletes Stuck In Their Swimming With Eney Jones appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Our guest today is Harriet Brown who is a World Ironwoman Champion, Nutri-Grain Ironwoman Series Champion, Australian Team Captain, and Molokai to Oahu Paddle Board Champion.

01:26 Underwater Filming
03:10 Injury During Championship
05:14 Being Out For The Whole Season
07:18 Exercise Makes You Happy
07:51 Injury As A Positive Experience
08:54 Having Some Time Off
10:45 Considering A Career After Sports
11:59 Molokai to Oahu Paddle
14:32 Cut The Race Into Little Parts
16:20 “You Are Lucky To Be Here”
17:00 What Do You Tell Yourself To Keep You Going?
19:03 Good Races And Bad Races
20:10 You Have To Stay Present
21:20 What Do You Love About Racing?
25:03 Managing Three Sessions A Day, Six Days A Week Of Training
27:09 Sleep Is The Best Form Of Recovery
31:29 We Cope With Load Differently

Harriet Brown
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2020 Hell Week Camp (Thailand)

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Transcription:

Brenton: So Harriet, thanks for joining me on the podcast. I’ve known about you for a couple of years. I went to college with your sister. And then sort of met you a couple of times down at the Pier to Pub in Melbourne. And we got to catch up and do some underwater filming at the, a couple of months ago, on the Gold Coast. And, I posted that footage on our Instagram. And I think people really appreciated seeing your stroke underwater because you’ve got such a nice stroke. And it was really good to be able to see that. And we were talking before, and you were saying it’s, you haven’t really had much underwater footage taken. And what was it like for you to be able to sort of see what it, how you swim? And then be able to translate that back to your own training and your technique.

Harriet: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. That technique session that you did with me with the underwater footage has actually helped me so much. I’m a bit more of a visual learner, and to actually see what I was doing and to make a few of those changes, taking it back to swimming has really helped me. I think the number one thing that helped me the most is that, so you were mentioning that I was coming across too far in my stroke, across my body and I need to keep it more in line with my shoulder. And since I’ve made those changes, I haven’t had shoulder issues. Which I’ve had ongoing for my whole career, my whole swimming career. So it’s been awesome. Thank you.

Brenton: Yeah, well you were saying that your coaches mentioned it to you a lot of times, about that that crossover at the front of the stroke. But it’s not until you actually saw it that you fully understood how far across your where coming. And, it’s just one of those things, isn’t it? That it’s very hard, what you’re perceived to be doing is very different than what you’re actually doing. And, it’s great to hear that you haven’t had those shoulder injuries.

Brenton: And one of the things that you tend to see in that, when you slow footage down, is you look at some of the positions that the shoulder is in through the stroke. And, let’s say it is across the body it can be in quite an uncomfortable position. And, if you’re doing several thousand strokes across the course of a week, it kind of makes sense that there would be issues there. So, it’s really good to hear that it’s helped with your shoulders. And speaking of injuries, at the end of last year you had probably one of the worst injuries that you’ve had. And it happened to be in the World Championships for the Surf Life segment. You are Australian Team Captain and you managed to break your foot on the first day. Do you want to tell that story and what happened there?

Harriet: Yeah that was a pretty tough time. So we headed to Adelaide for the World Championships, not the most exciting place we’ve raced for Worlds before. But regardless, we were all ready to race. Being part of the Australian team was such an honor. And especially being Captain I felt like there was, yeah, a little bit riding on results and just having a really good hit out. Because we haven’t beaten, so the Australian team hasn’t beaten the New Zealand team for about eight years. And that was our goal for the competition. And, in the first race I ran into the water, stood on a rock, and split my foot. And I knew it was, there was something going on. It was really, really painful. But there were no substitutes in our team. So I knew that I had to race on it for another 10 events over that weekend, so across three days.

Harriet: And so, strapped it up, took some painkillers and kept racing. And, it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. It’s almost like when you have to put your hand on like a hot stove and you know it’s going to hurt, but you have to do it anyway. Racing on a sore foot like that was probably like that. But I didn’t actually know how severe it was until we finished the competition. The Australian team actually won, which was awesome. The team definitely pulled through for me. I did okay. But yeah, it was a bit of a tough, tough weekend. Bitter sweet for me. I flew back home and found out that I needed surgery, three screws in my foot and I was out for the season.

Brenton: And, what was it like having to basically sit still for a number of weeks and just not be able to stay as active as you used to?

Harriet: Yeah, that was actually, physically it wasn’t too bad. So I kept myself occupied with doing things, reading books, learning, kind of making the most of some downtime to see friends and that kind of thing. But after a few days of that, I found that I wasn’t really that happy. And not because of what I was doing or not. I was pretty disappointed that I didn’t get to race, and I was out for the whole season and I was doing so well.

Harriet: But it wasn’t until I went to the gym, I think it was about six days after surgery, and just did a little bit of movement and came out of that just with the endorphins sailing high that I realized that my body just misses exercise and craves exercise to keep my mind happy and my body happy. So, after that I just took some small steps. Every couple of days I’d do a little bit of exercise, couldn’t do too much. So, sometimes it was just some dumbbells in the gym, or some activation exercises. But that kind of kept me sane while I was moving through the process.

Harriet: And, it was a tough time because all my friends were racing. I was currently leading the NetScreen series at the time. So I was feeling really great with my competition. But I guess those things happen. And I just had to accept it. I had a time frame, which was the season out. So I think once you’ve been given, like I’ve had knee injuries over the past and that’s kind of difficult because you never know when you’ll be back. Whereas with this one, I knew that I had a break. And so I just started writing little goals and each week I’d try and get a little bit stronger.

Harriet: And just, yeah, work on toning up to do a little bit of movement, but enjoy some sleep in’s as well. So at the beginning it was really tough, but then I started to enjoy it a little bit more. And I realized, one of the biggest things I realized, well one is that exercise actually makes you happy. Which, after doing it my whole life, you just kind of take that for granted, that feeling of fitness. But the other thing I learned too is how much more productive you can be in a day when you’re not completely exhausted from training. We train three times a day, six days a week, so I got a few more things done. So, that was nice.

Brenton: Yeah. So I mean it’s still somewhat early days, it’s about 12 months after doing it. But, do you feel like you were able to, looking back it’s been in a way a positive experience? Where you’ve been able to take some things out of it where you can actually, where you’ve felt like you’ve grown as a personal level, or become a bit wiser with it?

Harriet: Definitely. I think any athlete, or anyone who goes through hardship at the end of it they always say, “Oh, that was the best thing that ever happened to me. That was a blessing in disguise”. And at the time people kept saying to me, “You’ll learn from this, you’ll grow. And you’ll come back bigger and better”. And at the time it’s really, really, really hard to believe that and hard to take on board that positivity. But I really did try and make the most of that downtime. And now that I’m back racing again, I had my first race back in the series at Burley a few weeks ago, and ended up coming third. So I was really, really happy about that. I just love racing and being back in that feeling again. But having some time off for me was actually a really good thing. Because I’ve raced in the professional series, so trained for Ironman for the last 10 years ever since I finished school. And I’ve never really had much of a break.

Harriet: And so to have time off it kind of made me think about, a little bit, more about a career after sport. Or, just get a little bit of a taste for that transition into retirement when Surf Lifesaving isn’t my whole life. So, I took onboard lots of different opportunities and said yes to lots of things that I would’ve never done if I was just focused on training all the time. So, in that way it was a blessing in disguise. And now I come back and I miss training and I don’t take it for granted. And I try not to whinge about it when it’s cold because I know that for so long I wasn’t able to do that.

Brenton: Yeah, it’s certainly as soon as you can’t do something, you’re getting a much better appreciation for it. I came off the mountain bike four weeks ago and I’m just starting to be able to swim again. And, before that I was probably swimming the best I ever had and I was really enjoying it. I wasn’t taking it for granted at the time, but now I just think, “Oh, if I can’t swim and surf, I’m not the happiest of people”. So now that, I’m glad that I can get back into it, but I’ve still got to take it steady for probably another, I don’t know, four to eight weeks.

Brenton: But, in it right now it’s like, yeah, I can’t see it being a necessarily positive experience, but I’m sure it will be by the time that I can fully recover and look back and there’ll be something that I can take out of it. But it is good to have that break, because it certainly gives you the appreciation that you may not other otherwise have when you’re in the thick of it. Especially for 10 years. I mean that’s a long time to be training that much and it’s, what was it like for you to sort of get a taste of what it might be like to not be able to train as much if you are working full time? Or, what sort of clarity did you get around what you might do after sport?

Harriet: I’m actually really excited for life after sport. I think I will always continue to do sport, and train and take on some little goals along the way. But, it does make me look forward to that. I’m not ready for it just yet. I still love racing and I still feel like my body’s holding in there and it’s got a lot more to give. But yeah, getting a bit of a taste of different things that I can do. I work as an exercise physiologist, and so I took advantage of a few different things that I might like to do later on. Nothing’s set in stone. I did commentary for the Australian titles and the state championships. And I organized a Sports Conference, which we ran on the Gold Coast in May last year. So just dabbling in a few different things that I really get a lot of satisfaction out of doing new things and challenging myself in a way that’s not necessarily physical.

Brenton: Yeah, that’s good. And, one of the other events that you’ve done is the Molokai to Oahu paddle. Now, is that 42 kilometers from Island to Island? Is that right?

Harriet: 52.

Brenton: 52.

Harriet: 32 miles. 52 kilometers. Yes.

Brenton: Oh so I was short.

Harriet: Yeah. No, it’s a long, long way. Don’t take those last 10 kilometers. They’re the worst. So don’t take those ones off. Yeah, it’s a huge race. The Molokai to Oahu, it’s one of my favorite events. I have done it three times now. And it’s a crossing from one Island to another in Hawaii. And you fly over the day before to Molokai, and that’s probably the craziest thing. You look out the window and see where you’ll be paddling back from the next day. And that’s really, really daunting. And it does scare me a lot seeing that. And then on the next day we all wake up on that Island and we start the race.

Harriet: And at the beginning you genuinely… Normally you can’t see Oahu where you’re paddling to, so you kind of out in the open ocean and it’s really, really rough. It’s called the channel of the bones. It’s one of the deepest shipping channels in the world, I think. Not too sure. Anyway, it’s really dangerous, really rough. But that’s why we love it too because sometimes you get the best swell and the best runners pushing through there. So it’s a pretty cool race. And there’s a support pro that goes along and feeds you. Well, my sister came with me this year and jumped off and switched my drinking bottles around and gave me some gels. And yeah, it was really tough. This year was probably the toughest. I was coming second all the way until the last two kilometers and we had a sprint finish. Which, when you’re paddling for five hours is mentally really tough.

Brenton: What was it like having to dig that deep after 50 kilometers of paddling? Had you been to that place before in different races, or was this something on a whole new level for you?

Harriet: Molokai is a whole new level for me. Generally when we race in the Nutri-Grain series, the races go up to about an hour. Whereas this one is five hours of paddling and you’re on your own out in the middle of the ocean. You have your support boat there, but you can’t really talk to them because there’s so much chop and wind and swell. So, it really is just five hours of me and my thoughts. And you go into some pretty dark places.

Harriet: This year I definitely did. There were moments during the race that I wanted to stop. I really did. My shoulder started getting sore, and I was really worried about it. And I didn’t feel strong. And it’s amazing how your mind can really take over with those negative thoughts. And I got myself into that point of nearly wanting to pull out, but you have to pull yourself out of that. And I’ve done it through training. I’ve got to some pretty low points, and then really tried to work on that positive self talk and turn it around and just cut up the race into little parts.

Harriet: If you think about a 52 kilometer paddle, that seems like a long way. But if you think, all right, just another half an hour of focus. And catch this runner, and catch the next runner, and try and catch Lizzie, who is my friend. She ended up coming second, but she was ahead of me most of the way. So I was really just focusing on trying to catch up to her a little bit. And for that amount of time, it’s such a mental game and you go on a roller coaster of emotions. And then sometimes I feel like I’m distracted and I’m thinking about other things. And then I’m like, “No Harriet. Back to the race. Focus on what you’re doing.”

Harriet: And there’s flying fish jumping out of the water and turtles and some other paddlers around that you start to see. And there’s also the tracking as well, so you need to make sure that you’re on the right line. Because the currents change, the swell change, the tides change. So you kind of make a plan with your support crew during the day, the morning before. But things change throughout the day so you kind of have to read the ocean as well. So it’s a pretty cool race. It’s really, really challenging just paddling with your arms for that amount of time. But it’s super satisfying at the end when you finish it.

Brenton: Oh, it would be. When I did the Rottnest channel swim last year, about 15 Ks in, I started to have those dark thoughts. And I had to tell myself, “You’re lucky to be here. A lot of people wouldn’t get the chance to do this”. And I just had to convince myself that I was lucky to be doing the race. And that eventually got me through. But geez, I don’t think, I probably went that sort of deep with how bad it felt at the very end of the Iron Man I did in 2016. But it was just like, it was a really hard thing. And I wanted to pull out because I was cold, my arms didn’t have much left and it was a hard thing to stay in there. And, what’s some of those thoughts that you told yourself to keep you going? Or, was it more of just like, “Just take it one 500 meters at a time”?

Harriet: Yeah, it was a bit about taking it 500 meters at a time. But I think also when those dark thoughts come in, you’re trying to figure out what’s rational and what’s not. And I think, you might have felt it too, you’re cold. And you know that if you’re really cold and your body’s hurting, that there is a chance that you can do some damage. So I think you start to say to yourself, “Oh, maybe I should pull out. Like maybe.” With me it was my shoulder, “Maybe I should pull out. Maybe this will stuff me up for the rest of the season”. But then you don’t know whether you’re just giving yourself that out and giving yourself kind of an option to pull out.

Harriet: So those were like these two dialogues in my head. One is like, “It’s fine, like you’ve done really well. No one will care. It doesn’t really matter. You might hurt your shoulder”. And then the other one was like, “No way. If you hurt your shoulder, you can deal with it later. You’ve dealt with your foot surgery. It’s really not that bad. You haven’t broken anything”. It was a bit of bursitis. So inflammation, I found out a bit of tendonitis. But, and I was like, “You’ve come all the way over here”. Just that self talk of, “You’ve set yourself a goal. Just do everything you can to achieve it and you’ll feel satisfied. Much more satisfied at the end of just completing it, no matter what you come”.

Harriet: Because I think that’s also where the negative thoughts come in is when you’re probably not sitting in a position that you’d like to. When you’re at the front doing really well, or on track with your time, it’s so easy to feel positive and feel good about yourself. Whereas when you’re sitting in behind, or you’re not on track with your time, that’s when those negative thoughts take over too. So I try not to think about the placing, and more to think about that next runner, that next 500 meters. And also we were broken up by every half an hour I’d take a gel. So, that would be something I’d look forward to.

Brenton: Yeah, and that’s all it needs to be sometimes too. Like in the Rottnest swim I was doing, yeah, every half an hour. And it’s just like, “All right, I’ll get to the next. I’ll get to the next gel, or the next feed, and then I can make a decision then.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay. Now I feel fine. I’ll get to the next one and keep going”. And eventually it gets you there. And I was talking to a friend of mine, Mitch Kibbey, he’s a professional triathlete. And we’re just talking about, well he was talking about when he’s had good races and races that haven’t been so good.

Brenton: And, oftentimes the races that haven’t been so good, aside from any sort of physical things that sort of might come up, it’s been when he’s projected too far ahead. He’s been looking too much towards the finish line. Whereas the races he’s done well, it’s just been, he’s been very present. Being focused on what’s happening right now and just taking it one step at a time. And, I think there’s a lot of truth to that where if we’re thinking, if you’re thinking about the last kilometer sprint and you’re only half way, your mind is really distracted from the task at hand. And then it doesn’t allow you to enjoy or just really focus on what’s happening at the time.

Harriet: Absolutely. Those are very, very wise words. And I try and take that on board through all of my racing. Because it’s so easy when you’re in the middle of a race sitting there being like, “Oh, this is good. I might come third. Or, I wonder if there’s a sprint finish if I can do that”. Whereas especially when I’m doing surfing and woman racing, we have to be present. Because I’m paddling and then a big wave comes and you have to decide, “Do I pop? Do I go over the top? Do I roll to go underneath it? And then I jump back on? And then on the way in, do I go towards the left to try and catch the runners or the waves over there? Or, do I go to the right and then when do I jump up? Is it too shallow? Is it too deep?”

Harriet: There’s so many decisions throughout a race that you have to stay present. Because as soon as you start to think too far ahead, which I tend to do sometimes, and I really have to stop myself and get back to being in the process. And I think everyone can relate to that with whatever race you are doing. And especially, I think people that look at time and they’re really judging themselves by the time as well. That’s when they start to think too far ahead.

Brenton: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, what is it that you love about racing?

Harriet: Oh. Well, I love my sport. I love surf lifesaving. I love being in the ocean. I grew up doing a lot of different sports. Up until 18 I did about five different sports. Not all of them all that well, but I loved surf lifesaving. One because I was naturally not too bad at it. But two, I just loved being at the beach and being in the ocean. And I love that you can turn up to a race and you’ve got so many different things going on. You never know what you’re going to get. So the ocean is different every day. I love that factor. That’s probably more what I love about training, actually. Turning up to the office and it’s different every day.

Harriet: What I love about racing is I love challenging myself to get to the position that I feel as fit as I can. So, you gradually building up training, you’re trying to go faster in the pool, or you’re trying to go fast on the track, on the board, on the ski. And factor in that recovery. And it’s just such a science behind it all. But when it comes to the race you stand. I love the feeling of standing on the line knowing that I’ve done everything possible that I can to get myself in the best possible fitness feeling. So it’s kind of like a body thing that you feel.

Harriet: I don’t know if I can explain this really very well. But I love pushing myself to see how hard I can go, and feeling really fit. So then when you stand on the line, you feel confident. I hate turning up to a race and not feeling good. I don’t like racing like that. So, what I love about racing is feeling like I’m ready to go and I’m ready to fire. And I feel fast and powerful and fit and strong. That’s what I love about racing. And it’s also like it’s great when you win and you achieve your goals, but it’s also great when you do good things like make good decisions. Or feel like you’ve pushed yourself further than mentally, then you physically were capable of.

Brenton: It makes perfect sense. I think back to the like the main races I’ve had. And if you’ve eaten well, and this can be over the course of several months or even the entire year, where if you’ve eaten well, you’ve done the strength work, you’ve done the training, it takes time to get to that point. But in your body, there’s something there where you just feel like you are like you’ve built that engine. And you just feel so strong and so confident that you just want to see, you want to test yourself and see what you’re capable of doing after all of that hard work. And it’s, and that’s what I think it’s really all about. It’s about the feeling that you have around that and the emotion. And yes, results are great, but at the end of the day it’s really comes down to the things that you’re proud of and the things that you enjoy doing. And yeah, I can relate to that. And that’s where I’m sort of like right now, because I haven’t been able to do much with this shoulder. Like I just-

Harriet: Frustrating.

Brenton: It’s frustrating. And, I haven’t got that confidence in the water where I like, I’m just, I can’t pull through with any power. And it’s just like, it is a frustrating thing.

Harriet: Yeah. So you probably wouldn’t enjoy racing now.

Brenton: No, no. And I’m sorry we’ve got Pier to Pub coming up and I’m thinking, I don’t know if I’ll be able to, I don’t know if I’ll race. Because I don’t want to race if I can’t apply any power with my right arm.

Harriet: No, it’s not fun. Not enjoyable. Sometimes it’s okay to do that, and have no expectations on yourself. But it’s definitely not enjoyable.

Brenton: No.

Harriet: It’s that challenge and that satisfaction. The satisfaction after you know you’ve given it everything.

Brenton: And, how do you go through the three sessions a day, six days a week? How do you maintain your body and your recovery and your sleep? What’s your general sort of structure for a week?

Harriet: So this is something I’ve been working on and probably learnt a lot over the years about. I know that everyone is really different and some of the girls I train with, you can tolerate a lot of load, and some of the girls don’t tolerate as much load. So when I say that I’m training at Northcliffe surf club at the moment and eight of the girls are in the Nutri-Grain series out of 20. So it’s a pretty competitive squad. So we’re all training with each other, pushing each other hard all the time.

Harriet: But it’s also hard to go hard every session. So for myself, I’ve put a few things in place to just make sure that I’m getting the best out of my training. Because it is very easy to get caught up with training either too much, well that’s probably the main thing. Caught up with training too much, rather than not enough. Because there’s so many sessions that we can go to. So what I do is I make a bit of a plan at the start of the week. I’ll talk to my coach Floody about it. And I’ll say, “These are the sessions I’m going to go to. Make sure that it’s not too much”. So when we train three times a day, six days a week on Saturdays, we just train once. But with those sessions I’ve now realized that I can’t do every session really, really hard. Otherwise, I’m just training in that gray zone.

Harriet: So I’ll pick a few sessions that I will really target. And those are the ones that I’ll put my all into. And genuinely that might be a couple of swim sessions, and an iron session on Saturday definitely, and maybe a ski or a board session as well. So there’s a few key sessions in there. And then the other sessions might be a little bit lower intensity. Or I’ll turn up and train but won’t push myself to be at the front all the time. I won’t go too hard on myself if I’m not quite up there. So planning is one thing.

Harriet: Sleep is another thing. And I really try and be onto this on time. Because sleep I believe is the best. And I think the research is out there as well. Is really the best form of recovery. It’s really hard to get many hours sleep when you wake up at 4:30 in the morning. So, I have to be really strict on myself. So every night that I’m home, because obviously there’s some things life gets in the way, there’s events on these things that you might be out a little bit later than usual. But I try and minimize those to maybe one time a week. And every other time that I’m home I’ll be in bed by eight o’clock. And then everything on my phone shuts down at 8:30 at night. So I don’t have that option of, “Oh I can’t really sleep. I’ll go on my phone and check what’s going on and mindlessly read or scroll or anything like that”. So that’s something I’ve had to put in place because it’s, I guess making rules for yourself, make things easier. So to sleep by 8:30.

Harriet: I’m really passionate and interested in food, and good food. So that’s something, it’s probably just second nature to me now, but I cook a lot. I’ll make sure I prepare my food. So, I’ve got gym this morning and I’ll make a smoothie. So that straight after gym I can have a smoothie that’s got a mix of veggies, fruit, protein and some good fats in there. And then, lunch will be leftovers from last night. So pretty onto all the food and that kind of thing. And then physio because my shoulders and back and all these other things. I start to get niggles, but it’s mostly stemming from my foot surgery. I’ll have that maybe once a week, depending. I work at Gold Coast Physio, so I work in a physio practice. So, that’s pretty handy having that at work.

Harriet: And being, listening to my body is probably the final thing. So I’ve made a plan, I’m trying to get a bed early, I’m trying to eat well. But sometimes life gets in the way and there’s other things that you need to do and you might miss a session, or you might stay up too late and be a little bit more tired. So having a nap is important or potentially even missing a session. Because I think sometimes we all get fixated on these are the kilometers we need to do, these are the bike sessions I’ve planned, and if I don’t get there then I’m not going to race well. And I think that thinking needs to change. So I’m trying to be a little bit more adaptive. It’s hard, because I am such a planner and I like to tick all those boxes. But now I’m trying to be okay with having a session off if I feel like I’m really tired so that I can execute the next session better. But that’s the hardest thing. Knowing your body, knowing when to start and knowing when to push hard.

Brenton: Yeah. Do you feel like that’s something that you’ve changed over the last 10 years? Like looking back when you first started, how much has all of that changed for? And, how much smarter you’ve got about your training?

Harriet: That has changed so much. So, so much for me. When I first started, I guess racing the professional in the Nutrigrain series, I was 19. And I was studying full time at uni, but I was also living on campus. I’d moved away from home. It was just quite a new lifestyle for me. I didn’t realize how much my mum did for me with cooking and cleaning, and all of those other things. And so yeah, working, studying, training. And I was so keen, I would just train every session hard and probably not get enough sleep. And ended up getting glandular fever. So that was probably my biggest lesson in learning how to rest and recover.

Harriet: But after that I started getting stronger and I was just, I guess I wanted to race and do well so badly that I was willing to just turn up to every session and go hard in every session. That for a few years there, I’d start on Monday feeling really good and by Thursday morning I was swimming terribly because I just went hard at every session. I was so keen. And it would get to Saturday and I’d be wrecked. And then I’d rest and then I’d start all over again. So I’m trying to avoid that at the moment.

Brenton: That’s something that I noticed when I was sort of training nine sessions a week. It was like I was similar to you. It’s every session I want to do it hard because I felt like that’s what was going to make me the best swimmer that I could possibly be. But as you said, like it’s a lot of time spent in the gray zone. And I was pretty broken down halfway through the week. And the swimmers who didn’t have that same sort of work ethic oftentimes progressed more and performed better, especially on race day. Because, they might’ve been a little bit lazy because they took some sessions easy or easier. But then in those fast ones, they applied themselves and they actually got a lot more value out of the training because they weren’t pushing every session. But, like looking back now I can realize that. But at the time it was a little bit frustrating because I was the one who was training the hardest, yet those guys who had a few more lazy tendencies were the ones getting the results in competition. But, everything sort of makes sense in hindsight.

Harriet: Yeah, it all makes sense now. And I think a lot of the research and a lot of the training methods are now focused a little bit more on changing that intensity up. Whereas in the past it would just be old school, turn up, train hard, day in, day out. And see if you don’t make it you get broken and then that’s it. But, it is hard because everyone is really different. And that’s something that I really have seen over the years with the girls and guys that I race with. But also through work and the research I like to look into myself as an expert. But we all cope with load really differently. And some people struggle with that high intensity and need a little bit more time to recover. And others can just train all the time, but they might not be at that high intensity. But I definitely think that having some key sessions where you can go really hard and you’re not fatigued for, and then having other sessions where you back off. That definitely helps me now.

Brenton: Yeah, absolutely. And looking forwards for the next sort of six, 12 months and onwards from there. You’ve obviously got the Nutri-Grain series this summer. And what other challenges have you got planned, or are you thinking about, over the course of the next couple of years?

Harriet: So yeah, Nutri-Grain series, that’s my main focus at the moment. So I’m right in competition phase at the moment. And in amongst that I’m hoping to come down for the Pier to Pub in January. So if you’re fit and ready to go, I’ll race you.

Brenton: I don’t think I’ve beaten you yet. I think I’ve been like within about 10 seconds of you most times. But, I don’t know if I’ve beaten you yet. Maybe once but this year I don’t think it’s going to happen, so I might have to sit it out.

Harriet: I always love that race because I’m not the best pool summer. I actually did a PD this morning so I was stoked with that. But not the best pool swimmer. But when it comes to tactics in the ocean, and Pier to Pub is great because of you race, I race with the boys. So you can kind of get a bit of a pull along and jump on people’s feet. So that’s always a good one. And then we’ve got a few other races. So there’s a Shannon Eckstein classic, which is an Iron Man race up on the Gold Coast at Northcliffe.

Harriet: And then we’ve got States and then Ozzy’s. So it really is just the summer of racing, Summer Of Surfs in there as well. A few other different carnivals. But main goals, Nutri-Grain series, and then the Australian Championships. And then taking a little bit of a break after that. I’m not going to do Molokai this year. It’s just a huge, huge sacrifice and a lot of load on the shoulders, months of training leading into that. And it means it’s in winter, the Molokai race. So it means I’m training all year round, so giving my body a little bit of a rest. And then we’ve got the World Championships in Italy next year.

Brenton: Awesome. Well, that’d be good. Well all the best for the upcoming races. And, I’m sure I’ll see you down at the Pier to Pub. And for those people listening, where’s the best place for them to either get in contact with you or to follow you on your social media?

Harriet: Social media? Mostly Instagram. I do have a Facebook page that I sometimes put things up on as well. But yeah, Instagram I try and keep it real, put up a bit about what I do at training and also daily life as well.

Brenton: Awesome. That’s at Harriet Brown.

Harriet: Ah, yes, sorry. Yes, my Instagram is at Harriet Brown. Yeah. And I also have a website, Harrietbrown.com.edu, where you can also get in contact with me as well.

Brenton: Awesome. Well thanks for chatting Harriet, and looking forward to seeing you in January.

At the beginning, it was really tough, but then I started to enjoy it a little bit more and I realized one of the biggest things I realized, well, one is that exercise actually makes you happy, which after doing it my whole life, you just kind of take that for granted, that feeling of fitness. But the other thing I learned who is how much more productive you can be in a day when you’re not completely exhausted from training or we train three times a day, 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 Harriet Brown. She’s a World Iron Woman Champion, Nutri-Grain Iron Woman Series Champion, Australian Team Captain and Molokai Tuowahu Paddleboard Champion. Let’s get into the podcast. So Harriet, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

I’ve sort of known, I’ve known about you for a couple of years. I went to college with your sister and then sort of met you a couple of times down at the Peer to Pub in Melbourne and we got to catch up and do some underwater filming a couple of months ago on the Gold Coast and I posted that footage on our Instagram and I think people really appreciated seeing your stroke underwater because you’ve got such a nice stroke and it was really good to be able to see that and we’re talking before and you’re saying it’s you haven’t really had much underwater footage taken and what was it like for you to be able to to sort of see what it how you swim and then be able to translate that back to your own training and your technique? Yeah, thanks for having me on. That technique session that you did with me with the underwater footage has actually helped me so much. I’m a bit more of a visual learner and to actually see what I was doing

and to make a few of those changes, taking it back to swimming has really helped me. I think the number one thing that helped me the most is that so you were mentioning that I was coming across too far in my stroke across my body and I need to keep it more in line with my shoulder. And since I’ve made those changes, I haven’t had shoulder issues, which I’ve had ongoing for my whole career, my whole swimming career. So it’s been awesome. Thank you. Yeah, it’s what you were saying that you like your coaches mentioned it to you a lot of times about that crossover at the front of the stroke, but it’s not until you actually saw it that you that you fully understood how far across you were were coming. And it’s just it’s just one of those things, isn’t it? That it’s very hard. What you’re perceived to be doing is very different than what you’re actually doing. And it’s it’s great to hear that you haven’t had those shoulder injuries.

And one of the things that like you tend to see in that when you slow footage down is like you look at some of the positions that the shoulder is is in through the stroke. And let’s say it is like across the body or, you know, it can be in quite an uncomfortable position. And if you’re doing several thousand strokes across the course for a week, it’s like it kind of makes sense that that there would be the issues there. So it’s really good to hear that it’s that it’s helped with your shoulders. And speaking of like injuries at the end of last year, you had probably one of the worst injuries that you’ve had. And it happened to be in the the world championships for the surf lifesaving. You were Australian team captain and you managed to break your foot on the first stage. You want to tell tell that story and and what happened there?

Yeah, that was a pretty tough, tough time. So we headed to Adelaide for the world championships. Not the most exciting place we’ve raced in for worlds before. But regardless, we were all ready to race. Being part of the Australian team was such an honour. And especially being captain felt like there was

yeah, a little bit riding on on results and just having a really good hit out because we haven’t beaten. So the Australian team hasn’t been the New Zealand team for about eight years. And that was our goal for the competition. And in the first race, I ran into the water, stood on a rock and split my foot, and I knew it was there was something going on. It was really, really painful, but there were no substitutes in our team. So I knew that I had to race on it for another 10 events over that weekend. So across two days. So strapped it up, took some painkillers and kept racing. And it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. It’s almost like when you have to put your hand on like a boil, a hot stove and you know it’s going to hurt, but you have to do it anyway. Racing on a sore foot like that was probably like that. But I didn’t actually know how severe it was until we finished the competition.

The Australian team actually won, which was awesome. The team definitely pulled through for me. I did OK. But yeah, it was a bit of a tough, tough weekend, bit of sweet for me. I flew back home and found out that I needed surgery. Three screws in my foot and I was out for the season.

And what was it like having to basically sit still for a number of weeks and just not not be able to stay as active as you used to?

Yeah, that was that was actually physically it wasn’t too bad. So I kept myself occupied with doing things, reading books, learning, kind of making the most of some downtime to see friends and that kind of thing. But after a few days of that, I found that I wasn’t really that happy and not because of what I was doing or not. I wasn’t I was pretty disappointed that I didn’t get to race and I was out for the whole season. I was doing so well, but it wasn’t until I went to the gym. I think it was about six days after surgery and just did a little bit of movement and came out of that just with the endorphin sailing high that I realized that my body just misses exercise and craves exercise to keep my mind happy and my body happy. So after that, I just took some small steps every couple of days. I’d do a little bit of exercise, couldn’t do too much. So sometimes it was just some dumbbells in the gym or some activation exercises.

But that kind of kept me sane while I was moving through the process. And it was it was a tough time because all my friends were racing. I was currently leading the Nutcrane series at the time. So I was feeling really great with my competition. But I guess those things happen and I just had to accept it. I had a time frame, which was the season out. So I think once you’re you’ve been given

like I’ve had niggling injuries over the past and that’s kind of difficult because you never know when you’ll be back. Whereas with this one, I knew that I had a break. And so I just started writing little goals. And each week I try and get a little bit stronger and just work on turning up to do a little bit of movement. But enjoy some sleepings as well. So at the beginning, it was really tough. But then I started to enjoy it a little bit more. And I realized one of the biggest things I realized. Well, one is that exercise actually makes you happy, which after doing it my whole life, you just kind of take that for granted, that feeling of fitness. But the other thing I learned is how much more productive you can be in a day when you’re not completely exhausted from training. Well, we train three times a day, six days a week. So I got a few more things done, so that was nice. Yeah, so I mean, it’s still somewhat early days.

It’s about 12 months after doing it. But do you feel like you’re able to, like looking back, it’s been in a way a positive experience where you’ve been able to take some things out of it where you’ve felt like you’ve grown as a person or learned or become a bit wiser with it? Definitely. I think any athlete or anyone who goes through hardship, at the end of it, they always say, oh, that was the best thing that ever happened to me. That was a blessing in disguise. And at the time people kept saying to me, you’ll learn from this, you’ll grow and you’ll come back bigger and better. And at the time it’s really, really, really hard to believe that and hard to take on board that positivity.

But I really did try and make the most of that downtime. And now that I’m back racing again, I had my first race back in the series at Burley a few weeks ago and it ended up coming thirds. I was really, really happy about that. I just love racing and being back in that feeling again. But having some time off for me was actually a really good thing because I’ve raced in the professional series. So Neutrine Ironman for the last 10 years, ever since I finished school. And I’ve never really had much of a break. And so to have time off, it kind of made me think about a little bit more about a career after sport or just get a little bit of a taste for that transition into retirement when surf lifesaving isn’t my whole life. So I took on board lots of different opportunities and said yes to lots of things that I would have never done if I was just focused on training all the time. So in that way, it was a blessing in disguise.

And now I come back and I miss training and I don’t take it for granted. And I try not to whinge about it when it’s cold because I know that for so long, I wasn’t able to do that. Yeah, certainly as soon as you can’t do something, you get a much better appreciation for it. Like I came off the mountain bike four weeks ago and I’m just starting to be able to swim again. And before that, I was probably swimming the best I ever had and I was really enjoying. I wasn’t taking it for granted at the time, but now I just think, if I can’t swim and surf, I’m not the happiest of people. So now that I’m glad that I can get back into it, but I’ve still got to take it steady for probably another, I don’t know, four to eight weeks. But in it right now, I can’t see it being necessarily a positive experience, but I’m sure it will be by the time that I can fully recover and look back and there’ll be something that I can take out of it.

But it is good to have that break because it certainly gives you the appreciation that you may not otherwise have when you’re in the thick of it, especially for 10 years. I mean, that’s a long time to be training that much. And what was it like for you to sort of get a taste of what it might be like to not be able to train as much if you are working full-time or what sort of clarity did you get around what you might do after sport?

I’m actually really excited for life after sport. I think I will always continue to do sport

and train and take on some little goals along the way, but it does make me look forward to that. I’m not ready for it just yet. I still love racing and I still feel like my body’s holding in there and it’s got a lot more to give.

But yeah, getting a bit of a taste of different things that I can do. I work as an exercise physiologist and so I took advantage of a few different things that I might like to do later on. Nothing set in stone. I did commentary for the Australian titles and the state championships and I organized a sports conference which we ran on the Gold Coast in May last year. So just dabbling in a few different things that I really get a lot of satisfaction out of doing new things and challenging myself in a way that’s not necessarily physical. Yeah, that’s good. And one of the other events that you’ve done is the Molokai to Oahu paddle. Now, is that 42 kilometers from island to island? You got that right? 52. 32 miles, 52 kilometers, yes. I was telling you to show it. Yeah, no, it’s a long, it’s a long, long way. Don’t take those last 10 kilometers, they’re the worst. So don’t take those ones off.

Yeah, it’s a huge race. Molokai to Oahu, it’s one of my favorite events. I have done it three times now and it’s crossing from one island to another in Hawaii and you fly over the day before to Molokai and that’s probably the craziest thing. You look out the window and see where you’ll be paddling back from the next day and that’s really, really daunting and it does scare me a lot seeing that. And then on the next day, we all wake up on that island and we start the race. And at the beginning, you generally, normally you can’t see Oahu where you’re paddling to. So you’re kind of out in the open ocean and it’s really, really rough. It’s called the channel of the bones. It’s one of the deepest shipping channels in the world, I think, not too sure. Anyway, it’s really dangerous, really rough, but that’s why we love it too because sometimes you get the best swell and the best runners pushing through there. So it’s a pretty cool race

and there’s a support boat that goes along and feeds you. Well, my sister came with me this year and jumped off and switched my drinking bottles around and gave me some gels. And yeah, it was really tough. The issue was probably the toughest. I was coming second all the way until the last two kilometers and we had a sprint finish,

which when you’re paddling for five hours is mentally really tough. What was it like having to dig that deep after 50 kilometers of paddling? How’d you been to that place before in different races or was this something on a whole new level for you? Molokai, it is a whole new level for me. Generally, when we race in the Nutscreen series, the races go up to about an hour, whereas this one is five hours of paddling and you’re on your own out in the middle of the ocean. You have your support boat there, but you can’t really talk to them because there’s so much chop and wind and swell. So it really is just five hours of me and my thoughts. And you go into some pretty dark places this year. I definitely did. There were moments during the race that I wanted to stop. I really did. My shoulders started getting sore and I was really worried about it and I didn’t feel strong. And it’s amazing how your mind can really take over

with those negative thoughts and I got myself into a point of nearly wanting to pull out, but you have to pull yourself out of that. And I’ve done it through training. I’ve got to some pretty low points and then really tried to work on that positive self-talk and turn it around and just cut up the race into little parts. If you think about a 52 kilometer paddle, that seems like a long way. But if you think, all right, just another half an hour of focus and catch this runner and catch the next runner and try and catch Lizzie, who’s my friend. She ended up coming second, but she was ahead of me most of the way. So I was really just focusing on trying to catch up to her a little bit. And for that amount of time, it’s such a mental game. And you go on a roller coaster of emotions and then sometimes I feel like I’m distracted and I’m thinking about other things. And then I’m like, no, Harry, back to the race. Focus on what you’re doing.

And there’s flying fish jumping out of the water and turtles and some other paddlers around that you start to see. And there’s also the tracking as well. So you need to make sure that you’re on the right line because the currents change, the swell change, the tides change. So you kind of make a plan with your support crew during the day, the morning before, but things change throughout the day. So you kind of have to read the ocean as well. So it’s a pretty cool race. It’s really, really challenging, just paddling with your arms for that amount of time. But it’s super satisfying at the end when you finish it. No, it would be. When I did the Rotnest Channel swim last year, about 15Ks in, I started to have those dark thoughts. And I had to tell myself, you’re lucky to be here. A lot of people wouldn’t get the chance to do this. And I just had to convince myself that I was lucky to be doing the race. And that eventually got me through.

But jeez, I don’t think I was probably went that sort of deep with how bad it felt at the very end of the Iron Man I did in 2016. But it was just like, it was a really hard thing. And I wanted to pull out because I was cold. My arms didn’t have much left. And it was a hard thing to stay in there. And what were some of those thoughts that you told yourself to keep you going? Or was it more of just like, just take it one, 500 meters at a time? Yeah, it was a bit about taking it 500 meters at a time. But I think also when those dark thoughts come in, you’re trying to figure out what’s rational and what’s not. And I think you might have felt it too, you’re cold. And you know that if you’re really cold and your body’s hurting, that there is a chance that you can do some damage. So I think you start to say to yourself, oh, maybe I should pull out. Like maybe with me, it was my shoulder. Maybe I should pull out. Maybe this will stuff me up for the rest of the season.

But then you don’t know whether you’re just giving yourself that out and giving yourself kind of an option to pull out. So those were like these two dialogues in my head. One is like, it’s fine. Like you’ve done really well. No one will care. It doesn’t really matter. You might hurt your shoulder. And then the other one was like, no way. If you hurt your shoulder, you can deal with it later. You’ve dealt with your foot surgery. It’s really not that bad. You haven’t broken anything. It was a bit of bursitis. So inflammation I found out, a bit of tendonitis.

And I was like, you’ve come all the way over here. Just that self-talk of you’ve set yourself a goal. Just do everything you can to achieve it and you’ll feel satisfied, much more satisfied at the end of just completing it. No matter what you come, because I think that’s also where the negative thoughts come in is when you’re probably not sitting in a position that you’d like to. When you’re up the front doing really well or on track with your time, it’s so easy to feel positive and feel good about yourself. Whereas when you’re sitting in behind or you’re not on track with your time, that’s when those negative thoughts take over too. So I try not to think about the placing and more just think about that next runner or that next 500 meters. And also we were broken up by every half an hour. I’d take a jowl. So that would be something I’d look forward to. Yeah, and that’s all it needs to be sometimes too. Like in the rottenness swim,

I was doing every half an hour and it’s just like, all right, I’ll get to the next, I’ll get to the next jowl or the next feed and then I can make a decision then. And it’s like, oh, okay, no, I feel fine. I’ll get to the next one and keep going. And eventually it gets you there. And I was talking to a friend of mine, Mitch Kibbey. He’s a professional triathlete and we were just talking about, well, he was talking about when he’s had good races and races that haven’t been so good. And oftentimes the races that haven’t been so good, aside from any sort of physical things that sort of might come up, it’s been when he’s projected too far ahead, he’s been looking too much towards the finish line. Whereas the racists he’s done well, it’s just been, he’s been very present, being focused on what’s happening right now and just taking it one step at a time. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that where if you’re thinking about the last kilometer sprint

and you’re only halfway, your mind is really distracted from the task at hand and then it doesn’t allay to enjoy or just really focus on what’s happening at the time. Absolutely, those are very, very wise words and I try and take that on board through all of my racing because it’s so easy when you’re in the middle of a race sitting there being like, oh, this is good, I might come third or I wonder if there’s a sprint finish if I can do that. Whereas especially when I’m doing surf, I’m woman racing, we have to be present because I’m paddling and then a big wave comes and you have to decide, do I pop? Do I go to the top? Do I roll to go underneath it? And then I jump back on and then on the way in, do I go towards the left to try and catch the runners or the waves over there or do I go to the right? And then when do I jump up? Is it too shallow? Is it too deep? There’s so many decisions throughout a race that you have to stay present

because as soon as you start to think too far ahead which I tend to do sometimes and I really have to stop myself and get back to being in the process. And I think everyone can relate to that with whatever race you are doing and especially I think people that look at time and they’re really judging themselves by the time as well. That’s when they start to think too far ahead. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And what is it that you love about racing? Oh, well, I love my sport.

I love surf lifesaving. I love being in the ocean. I grew up doing a lot of different sports. Up until 18, I did about five different sports. Not all of them all that well but I loved surf lifesaving. One, because I was naturally not too bad at it but two, I just loved being at the beach and being in the ocean and I love that you can turn up to a race and you’ve got so many different things going on. You never know what you’re gonna get so the ocean is different every day. I love that factor. That’s probably more what I love about training actually. Turning up to the office and it’s different every day. What I love about racing is

I love challenging myself to get to the position that I feel as fit as I can. So you gradually building up training, you’re trying to go faster in the pool, you’re trying to go fast on the track, on the board, on the ski and factoring that recovery and it’s just such a science behind it all but when it comes to the race, you stand, I love the feeling of standing on the line knowing that I’ve done everything possible that I can to get myself in the best possible fitness feeling. So it’s kind of like a body thing that you feel. I don’t know if I can explain this really well, very well but I love pushing myself to see how hard I can go and feeling really fit. So then when you stand on the line, you feel confident. I hate turning up to a race and not feeling good. I don’t like racing like that. So what I love about racing is feeling like I’m ready to go and I’m ready to fire and I feel fast and powerful and fit and strong.

That’s what I love about racing. And it’s also like, it’s great when you win and you achieve your goals but it’s also great when you do good things like make good decisions or feel like you’ve pushed yourself further than mentally than you physically were capable of. It makes perfect sense. Like I think back to the main races I’ve had and if you’ve eaten well and like this can be over the course of several months or even the entire year where if you’ve eaten well you’ve done the strength work, you’ve done the training. Like it takes time to get to that point but in your body there’s something there where you just feel like you’ve built that engine and you just feel so strong and so confident that you just wanna test yourself and see what you’re capable of doing after all of that hard work. And that’s what I think it’s really all about. Like it’s about the feeling that you have around that and the emotion and like yes, results are great

but at the end of the day it’s really comes down to the things that you’re proud of and the things that you enjoy doing and yeah, I can relate to that. And that’s why I’m sort of like right now because I haven’t been able to do much with this shoulder. Like I just- Frustrating. It’s frustrating and I haven’t got that confidence in the water where I’m just, I can’t pull through with any power and it’s just like, it is a frustrating thing. Yeah, so you probably wouldn’t enjoy racing now. No, no. And I’ve sort of got Peter Pub coming up and I’m thinking I don’t know if I’ll be able to, I don’t know if I’ll race because I don’t wanna race if I can’t apply any power with my right arm. No, it’s not fun, not enjoyable. So I’m like sometimes it’s okay to do that and have no expectations on yourself but it’s definitely not enjoyable. No. It’s that challenge and that satisfaction, the satisfaction after you know you’ve given it everything.

And how do you go through the three sessions a day, six days a week? How do you maintain your body and your recovery and your sleep? What’s your general sort of structure for a week? So this is something I’ve been working on and probably learnt a lot over the years about.

I know that everyone is really different and some of the girls I train with, you can tolerate a lot of load and some of the girls don’t tolerate as much load. So when I say that I’m training at North Cliff Surf Club at the moment and eight of the girls are in the new train series out of 20. So it’s a pretty competitive squad. So we’re all training with each other, pushing each other hard all the time but it’s also hard to go hard every session. So for myself I’ve put a few things in place to just make sure that I’m getting the best out of my training because it is fairly easy to get caught up with training either too much. Well, that’s probably the main thing, caught up with training too much rather than not enough because there’s so many sessions that we can go to. So what I do is I make a bit of a plan at the start of the week. I’ll talk to my coach, Flutty, about it and I’ll say these are the sessions I’m going to go to

make sure that it’s not too much. So when we train three times a day, six days a week on Saturdays, we just train once. But with those sessions I’ve now realised that I can’t do every session really, really hard. Otherwise I’m just training that gray zone. So I’ll pick a few sessions that I will really target and those are the ones that I’ll put my all into. And generally that might be a couple of Zoom sessions and an iron session on Saturday definitely and maybe a ski or a board session as well. So there’s a few key sessions in there and then the other sessions might be a little bit lower intensity or I’ll turn up and train but won’t push myself to be at the front all the time or won’t go too hard on myself if I’m not quite up there. So a planning is one thing. Sleep is another thing and I really try and be onto this all the time because sleep I believe is the best and I think the research is out there as well

is really the best form of recovery. It’s really hard to get many hours sleep when you wake up at 4.30 in the morning. So I have to be really strict on myself. So every night that I’m home because obviously there’s some things life gets in the way, there’s events on and there’s things that you might be at a little bit later than usual but I try and minimize those to maybe one time a week and every other time that I’m home I’ll be in bed by eight o’clock and then everything on my phone shuts down at 8.30 at night. So I don’t have that option of oh I can’t really sleep, I’ll go on my phone and check what’s going on and mindlessly read or scroll or anything like that. So that’s something I’ve had to put in place because it’s I guess making rules for yourself makes things easier. So to sleep by 8.30

I’m really passionate and interested in food and good food. So that’s something, it’s probably just second nature to me now but I cook a lot, I’ll make sure I prepare my food. So I’ve got gym this morning and I’ll make a smoothie so that straight after gym I can have a smoothie that’s got a mix of veggies for protein and some good fats in there and then lunch will be leftovers from last night. So pretty on to all the food and that kind of thing and then physio because my shoulders and back and all these other things I start to get niggles but it’s mostly stemming from my foot surgery.

I’ll have that maybe once a week depending I work at Gold Coast Physio so I work in a physio practice. So that’s pretty handy having that at work and being listening to my body is probably the final thing. So I’ve made a plan, I’m trying to get it bed early, I’m trying to eat well but sometimes life gets in the way and there’s other things that you need to do and you might miss a session or you might stay up too late and be a little bit more tired. So having a nap is important or potentially even missing a session because I think sometimes we all get fixated on these are the kilometers we need to do, these are the sessions I’ve planned and if I don’t get there then I’m not going to race well and I think that thinking needs to change. So I’m trying to be a little bit more adaptive, it’s hard because I am such a planner and I like to tick all those boxes but now I’m trying to be okay with having a session off if I feel like I’m really tired

so that I can execute the next session better but that’s the hardest thing, knowing your body, knowing when to stop and knowing when to push hard. Yeah, do you feel like that’s something that you’ve changed over the last 10 years? Like looking back when you first started, how much has all of that changed for you and how much smarter have you got about your training? That has changed so much, so, so much for me. When I first started, I guess, racing in the New York Gain series, I was 19 and I was studying full-time at uni but I was also living on campus and I’d moved away from home.

It was just, it was quite a new lifestyle for me. I didn’t realize how much my mom did for me with cooking and cleaning and all of those other things and so yeah, working, studying, training and I was so keen, I would just train every session hard and probably not get enough sleep and ended up getting glandular fever so that was probably my biggest lesson in learning how to rest and recover but after that I started getting stronger and I was just, I guess, I wanted to race and do well so badly that I was willing to just turn up to every session and go hard in every session that for a few years there, I’d start on Monday feeling really good and by Thursday morning, I was swimming terribly because I just went hard at every session, I was so keen and it would get to Saturday and I’d be wrecked and then I’d rest and then I’d stall all over again so I’m trying to avoid that at the moment. That’s something that I noticed

when I was training nine sessions a week, it was like, I was similar to you, it was every session I wanna do it hard because I felt like that’s what was going to get the, going to make me the best swimmer that I could possibly be but as you said, that’s a lot of time spent in the gray zone and I was pretty broken down halfway through the week and the swimmers who didn’t have that same sort of work ethic oftentimes progressed more and performed better, especially on race day because they, like they might’ve been a little bit lazier because they took some sessions easier but then in those fast ones, like they applied themselves and they actually got a lot more value out of the training because they weren’t pushing every session but like looking back now, I can realize that but at the time, it was a little bit frustrating because I was the one who was training the hardest and I could get those guys who had a few more lazy tendencies

were the ones getting the results in competition but everything sort of makes sense in hindsight. Yeah, it all makes sense now and I think a lot of the research and a lot of the training methods are now focused a little bit more on changing that intensity up whereas in the past, it would just be old school turn up, train hard, day in, day out and see if you don’t make it, you get broken and then that’s it but it is hard because everyone is really different and that’s something that I really have seen over the years with the girls and guys that I race with but also through work and the research I like to look into myself as an ex-fiz but we all cope with load really differently and some people struggle with that high intensity and need a little bit more time to recover and others can just train all the time but they might not be at that high intensity but I definitely think that having some key sessions where you can go really hard

and you’re not fatigued for and then having other sessions where you back off that definitely helps me now. Yeah, absolutely. And looking forwards for the next sort of six, 12 months and onwards from there you’ve obviously got the Nutri-Grain series this summer and what other challenges have you got planned or are you thinking about over the course of the next couple of years? So yeah, Nutri-Grain series that’s my main focus at the moment so I’m right in competition phase at the moment and in amongst that I’m hoping to come down for the Peter Parb in January so if you’re fit and ready to go or race you.

I don’t think I’ve beaten you yet. I think I’ve been within about 10 seconds of you most times but I don’t know if I’ve beaten you yet, maybe once but this year I don’t think it’s gonna happen so I might have to sit it out. I always love that race because I’m not the best pool swimmer. I actually did a PB this morning so I was stoked with that but not the best pool swimmer but when it comes to tactics in the ocean and Peter Parb is great because you race I race with the boys so you can kind of get a bit of a pull along and jump on people’s feet. So that’s always a good one. And then we’ve got a few other races so there’s a Shannon Eckstein classic which is an Ironman race up on the Gold Coast at Northcliff and then we’ve got States and then Aussies. So it really is just a summer of racing, summer of surfs in there as well, a few other different carnivals but main goals, new crane series and then the Australian championships

and then taking a little bit of a break after that I’m not going to do Molokai this year. It’s just a huge, huge sacrifice and a lot of load on the shoulders, months of training leading into that. And it means it’s in winter, the Molokai race so it means I’m training all year round so giving my body a little bit of a rest and then we’ve got the world championships in Italy next year. Awesome. Well, that’d be good. Well, all the best for the upcoming races and I’m sure I’ll see you down at the Peer to Parbon. For those people listening, where’s the best place for them to either get in contact with you or to follow you on your social media? Social media, mostly Instagram. I do have a Facebook page that I sometimes put things up on as well but yeah, Instagram I try and keep it real, put up a bit about what I do at training and also daily life as well. Awesome. And that’s at Harriet Brown? Yes, sorry. Yes, my Instagram is at Harriet Brown.

Yeah. And I also have a website, harrietbrown.com.au where you can also get in contact with me as well. Awesome. Well, thanks for chatting Harriet and looking forward to seeing you in January. 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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