Effortless Swimming

The freestyle catch is one of the most confusing parts of the stroke — and that’s exactly why so many swimmers either avoid it or get it completely wrong. In this episode, we’ll break down what the catch actually is, how to do it right, and why it’s the key to real propulsion in your freestyle.

If you’ve been swimming for a while but not seeing much progress, this might be the missing piece. I’ll share what I’ve learned from watching thousands of swimmers, coaching nearly 10,000 people in our freestyle clinics here in Australia, and studying what truly makes a great catch work.

By the end, you’ll understand how the freestyle catch ties into your whole stroke — and how to use it to swim with more grace, speed, and efficiency the next time you hit the pool.

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.

The freestyle catch is one of the most confusing parts of the stroke. And that's why a lot of people tend to avoid it, or they just do it completely wrong. In this video, I'm going to share with you exactly how to go through your catch in freestyle, because it's where most of your propulsion is going to come from. And if you don't do it right, not only will it mean that your swimming probably won't progress much over the next 12 to 18 months, but it also means that you're leaving a lot of speed and efficiency on the table. And I have seen so many videos on this topic, I've read so many books on this topic, and I've coached almost 10,000 people in our freestyle clinics here in Australia. And so I've seen exactly how it's done well, and how it's not done well and mistakes that a lot of people make. So let's jump into the freestyle catch, how it ties into your stroke, and how to make sure that you do it well, so you are swimming with grace and speed and efficiency, the next time you go to the pool. And if all of this sounds like a lot of information, we've condensed it all down to our five day catch challenge, which more than 15,000 people have done. So I'll link to that in the description. Now when we think about the catch in freestyle, it's just one part of the stroke. So if we look at the different phases of the stroke, we have the catch, which is from here down to here on our arms at about 45 degrees. Then from here all the way back towards the hip, I would call the pull or the press phase of the stroke, and the exit as the hand is coming out past the hip. And then we've got the overwater recovery.

So there's different parts of the stroke. And the propulsive phases of the stroke are the catch, the pull and press, and the exit. And the non propulsive is the recovery. Now our aim with the catch is to ideally anchor our arm in the water and have our body move past that point. So we're not trying to pull our arms through the water necessarily, we're trying to anchor them so they stay in almost the same spot while it's our body

moving past that point. And that's not going to exactly happen like that. But that's what we're trying to work towards. It's almost like if you imagine a ladder on the bottom of the pool, and that ladder has rungs on it. And every time you set yourself up and you perform the catch, you're anchoring on that rung of the ladder, and you're moving on to the next arm and anchoring on the next rung forwards. So that's what we're trying to achieve with a good freestyle catch. So let's start with the beginning of the catch. This is where we are rotated onto our side to 30 or 40 degrees, our arm is extended forwards, and we're long from our fingers all the way through to our toes. And this is where we're going to be longest in the stroke. And this is where we're going to be the furthest on the side. So typically our hips and shoulders will be at about 30 or 40 degrees if we're looking front on and measuring that with the surface of the water. The next step is we need to make sure we get our fingers slightly below our wrist, wrist slightly below our elbow, as we're going to begin the catch. Because if we have the opposite where the fingers are above the wrist, the wrist is above the elbow, not only does that create a lot of drag out in front, but we can't actually press back from that position. And where our propulsion is going to come from is our hand and forearm pressing backwards on the water. That can't be achieved if the elbow is dropping. So we need to start in that position. And we typically find that the fingers are about the same depth as your underarm in that position. Now to get to that position, we also need to make sure that our scapula has slid up along our rib cage. And it's almost like we're somewhat shrugging the shoulders, not shrugging them up here, but shrugging them up this way, where the shoulder can actually move up next to our cheek here.

So a good catch, if you look at any footage of a really good swimmer, you'll find that their shoulder is next to the side of their face, next to their cheek. So it's not covering their ear, and it's not down low, it's just slid up alongside their cheek. And that allows you to achieve that position. And that's a crucial position to getting to, because it's that position that will connect up the arm with the rest of the body. Because a mistake I often see made there is people either don't extend forwards and they just they stop here, or they let their shoulder drop down, and then it really disconnects that scapula from the body, and then we don't really generate much power from it. The other important thing here is that the catch, and particularly this extension phase through here as we're going to start the catch, this is the slowest part of the arm movement. So when we're swimming freestyle, we're slowest out in front, we're quickest out through the back. So think of it as slow to fast, but we're not trying to stop, we never want to pause and lose all of our speed there. It's going to nicely flow into the next part of the stroke, but we are traveling the same direction. So this is the slowest in that part of the stroke. Now as we go through the catch itself, there's a few things that we need to do here. The first thing is to initiate the catch, our hands actually going to move slightly away from the center. And along with that our elbow, and this is the important part, the elbow is going to slide out to the side as well.

Because that's going to allow us to open up through our underarm and allow us to get what we'd call a high elbow catch position. Now high elbow doesn't refer to the depth in the water, that's going to depend on the swimmer, but high elbow refers to the position where we really want the elbow to be higher than the hand in the water. But the way I would picture a high elbow catch is, if we draw a line from your shoulder to your fingers, if your elbow is higher than that line, if we're looking from the side, that would be a high elbow catch. And that's going to give you more surface area of your hand and forearm, pressing backwards on the water. And that's the thing that's going to help move you forwards. So that is what a high elbow catch would typically mean. Now as your hand is coming slightly away from the center and the elbow is going out to the side, that is going to open up through your underarm. And you can see at this position we're still able to connect our scapula, our shoulder blade to the body when we do this. Now if we don't do that, let's say our elbow stays very narrow, so we're here, that sets us up in what we call a dropped elbow catch, where most of the surface area is going to be pressing down and that doesn't move us forwards very much at all. So that's why it's important to get that elbow out to the side, fingers point away, and then we're setting up with the catch. And this is often where it can get confused when people are trying to learn it. They either will think about almost bending the elbow a lot instead of just letting that elbow slide out to the side. And another mistake that people will often make here is they sometimes will think about pulling straight back.

But in order to set up this catch, the hand will move downwards in the water, the elbow will move down a little bit, but it's not going to move down too much at all. So we're not trying to pull straight backwards, it's almost like we're trying to roll over this imaginary ball out in front, and that's going to set up that position. Now to make sure that we're getting as much propulsion from this movement as possible, we need to make sure the palm of your hand is facing backwards. If the palm is turned out to the side or turned inwards, then the direction of that force isn't going to be backwards, so it's not going to be as effective. And we also need to make sure that our hand and forearm is together. If we bend the wrist too much here, we've effectively halved our paddle. So we need to slightly elevate the wrist, just pop it up slightly so that's straight. We never want to drop the wrist or bend it too much in that direction. And through this movement, we're not putting a lot of force on the water. Firstly, because if we go for broke straight away, we're only pressing down, which is not that effective. And secondly, in this position overhead, we're not that strong, especially compared to under here, which is more the power phase. So it might feel like a 3 or a 4 out of 10 in terms of the effort. We're not going for zero, but we're certainly don't want to go for a 7, 8 or 9 in the catch phase. We will build up that power and intensity as we go through the rest of the stroke. And that's quite often where a lot of mistakes will get made when someone is trying to overpower the catch.

Not only does it put your shoulder in an awkward position, it's very uncomfortable. That is where a lot of injuries can come from, because applying a lot of force through this movement here really tends to load up the front of the shoulder. And quite often the common mistake we'll see here is people will initiate the catch with their elbow, where they're pulling back straight away with the elbow. Instead of letting the hand travel down and the fingers point down while the elbow bends and folds, they're pulling back with the elbow straight away. So we need to delay that step just a little bit so that we can set ourselves up in that high elbow. At Effortless Swimming, our mission is simple. Make swimming more enjoyable. Whether you're training for your next race, swimming for fitness or just love being in the water, we're here to help you swim faster, smoother and with more confidence. And one thing that can make or break a swim is your goggles. If you've ever struggled with foggy lenses mid-session, you know how frustrating it can be. That's why we created the Effortless Swimming Hydro Clear Anti-Fog Goggles for long lasting crystal clear vision. I've been using them myself and the difference is night and day. And I'm not the only one. Deborah swam 36 kilometers down the Derwent River and the entire time her vision stayed crystal clear. No fog, no frustration, just an uninterrupted swim. So what makes a Hydro Clear Goggles different? It's all in the technology. Unlike ordinary anti-fog coatings that wear off over time, Hydro Clear Super Hydrophilic technology is built into the lens material itself.

Here's how it works. Instead of fog forming as tiny droplets, water spreads evenly across the lens, creating a thin film that prevents fog from even starting. And the result? Consistently clear vision, swim after swim. And the durability? Our lenses are CNAS certified. Tests show that even after 2000 rubs with a wet cloth under a 200 gram load, the lens stays fog free. No gimmicks, just serious performance that lasts. Using them is simple. Just wet the lenses before putting them on and you're set for a fog free swim. Ready to see the difference yourself? Get 15% off your first pair of Hydro Clear anti-fog goggles with the code PODCAST at shop.effortlessswimming.com. That's 15% off your first pair of goggles with the code PODCAST at shop.effortlessswimming.com. We also have a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're not happy with the goggles for any reason, you can simply return them for a refund. Don't let foggy goggles ruin another swim. Try Hydro Clear today and experience clear vision from start to finish. Now, if you're looking at videos of your swimming, let's say you've sent in videos to our coaching membership or you're analyzing your own underwater footage. Find that a good catch for middle to long distance swimmers will have this angle of 100 to 120 degrees at the elbow when they're in that high elbow catch. So if you are looking at footage of yourself swimming and your angle is 160, 170 degrees at the elbow from the front,

then you're probably going a bit too deep and straight or you might also be dropping your elbow through the catch. Now the other part of that too is your rotation. So as we are reaching out in front and we start our catch, that is when we're going to be on our side, 30 or 40 degrees. Then as we're going through the catch here, we're starting to rotate back to the other side. So once we finish the catch, that is when we are almost back to flap as we're switching onto the other side. So we're not just going to be doing this move in isolation. We're going to be tying that in with the rotation of the body. So as we're going through this catch, we're starting to rotate back onto the other side. The next phase of the stroke is the pull or the press phase. And this is really the power phase of the stroke. This is where you'll be putting in the most effort. But again, we're not going for a 10 out of 10. You might go for a six or a seven out of 10. So in the pull and the press phase of the stroke, this is once we've finished our catch and then we're going all the way back to the hip. Now as we go through this part of the stroke, we need to have a few things happening. Hand and forearm needs to be facing backwards. And we also need to make sure that we're not pulling back too early with that elbow. We need to make sure this is all going together. And if we look from the front, a position or a term that we came up with for where we want the arms to be is the power diamond. So as the hands are coming underneath the shoulders, your arm will look like half a diamond as the hands about to pass under that shoulder.

You see that with the very best swimmers in the world. They always get to that power diamond position. And what that means is that through their lats and their back and shoulder, they're very strong through there. And it's well connected with the rest of the stroke. Now someone who isn't really getting that position will typically have the arm too straight. So we need to make sure that elbows still out to the side, the elbows pointing to the side there and the fingers are pointing mostly downwards. And it's almost like if you were to get yourself up onto a ledge, then that is where you'd have your arms. So very similar position because that's going to be the strongest part of the stroke or strongest position to be in. Now, as you go through this part of the stroke, this is when you pretty much starting to get onto the other side. So we're not trying to stay flat through this movement. Our body will be rotating along with it. Now, the other reason why this is the power phase of the stroke is this is when we're starting to travel past our hand. So we've done the hard work of setting up the catch and then our body has almost moved past our hand and our arm. So we're getting past it there. And that is when we can obviously be a lot stronger through the stroke. And we've we're able to accelerate a little bit more through that part of the stroke as well. And that's why it can feel like we're going from slow to fast because it's easier to move through that part of the stroke because we have gotten our body past that point. Now, at this point, you can bring your hand close to your center line and we do want it to start to move somewhere in towards the center.

Now, it shouldn't cross the center. It doesn't need to brush the center, but it should start to move inwards through here. So the first part, we are in line with the shoulder and then we come away from the center slightly. And then we're going to come in closer towards the body through that back part of the stroke. Now, quite often I'll see with people, they go through the catch and then they continue to go out wide. But they lose that connection with their arms, with the body, if they do that. So that is why from this point, we actually need to start to come in closer towards the center and almost close this window. All this gap through here as we're starting to finish the stroke. Now, as we go through the exit, the exit is when the hand comes just past the hip. Normally we're exiting just near our upper thigh. And a lot of people will ask, do I have my thumb brush my hip as I do it? It's not a bad way to teach or train that movement, but the thumb doesn't have to touch the thigh necessarily. But in the exit, we want to make sure we finish the stroke and release the water where we've still got a little bit of bend remaining in the elbow. Because if you push back as far as you can and your elbow gets locked out, that is when it's hard to get the arm over the top and we get stuck. So we need to keep that a little bit of bend in the elbow as we finish it. And that way we can release the water and come over very easily and comfortably. So we're pushing back. We're not trying to force as much water out the back as we can.

We're not trying to muscle that part of the stroke, but we will be accelerating through the back end a little bit there. And that helps us transition nicely into the over water recovery. And through this movement, we're still keeping the hand and the forearm pressing back all the way through. And you will find that naturally the hand just turns into the body, the last little bit of that to help it come out of the water. That's fine, but we don't want the hand to turn into the body too early, which I see with a lot of swimmers that I'm coaching at clinics and camps is they turn in too early. But keep that palm facing back because that will give you more surface area, which will give you more propulsion. And once you finish the stroke at the back, the recovery over the top of the water, we want to make sure that we're not trying to come too close to the body. So if you think of what's a sustainable and a comfortable way to bring our arm over the top. Well, if we use our rotation to help us come over the top of the water, then we should get our hand out to the side, elbow pointing up to the sky. And we just bring the arm over in quite a comfortable way where we're nice and open through our underarm as we come through. Now, a lot of people will think they need to have this high elbow recovery and they need to do this. But if you look at where that shoulder is and where the arm is, that's not sustainable or comfortable. So we release out the back, bring the arm through where it feels like the elbow is causing the rest of the arm to come over the top, and then we can place it in front. And then we would start the process all over again.

Now, if we think of the path that the hand should take through the catch in the pool, if you look at it in this video here, with the hand will start in line with the shoulder when we extend it out in front. It will come away from the center slightly and it will come in towards the center. And then just as you're coming out past the hip, it's going to come slightly away from the center again. So it looks a bit like a skinny S shape pull through. Now, you will hear a lot of swimmers and a lot of coaches talking about trying to pull through almost completely straight. Naturally, we're going to have some curve. You are never going to be completely straight there because we're basically our hand in our arms trying to find this still water for us to be able to press back on as we move past it. So we're always going to have some left to right movement. But it's not like they used to teach 40 or 50 years ago with a big S shape pull. We want to make sure that we're doing a little bit of it, but only just enough to help us find that still water to keep the pressure on the hand. Now, there's a number of ways to learn how to do this. The way that we do it in clinics and camps and in our online coaching. I do like to use quite a few drills to help people get used to this movement. Outside of our online coaching membership, we've got all of our freestyle drills that you can do for the catch. And this can help you learn how to do that movement without thinking too much about it. But if you want to keep this nice and simple, get our five day catch challenge below, which 15,000 swimmers have gone through.

And that's a great way to learn this step by step without overthinking it. If you enjoyed this video, check out our 33 minute breakdown of freestyle technique in this video above. And let me know in the comments which part of the stroke you think is going to help make you faster than yesterday. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you'd like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlessswimming.com.

The post Transform Your Catch In 17 Minutes with Brenton Ford appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, Brenton and Tas discuss the key takeaways from their recent training camp in the Maldives. They cover essential themes such as identifying bottlenecks in swimming technique, the importance of community support, overcoming self-doubt, and the significance of consistency in training. The conversation emphasizes practical strategies for improvement, including the use of simple cues, the power of reframing concepts, and the benefits of practicing techniques on land. The hosts also highlight the value of rhythm in swimming and the effectiveness of contrast drills to enhance performance.

00:57 Identifying and Focusing on Bottlenecks

Join a camp:

FREE Freestyle Technique Checklist https://effortlessswimming.com/freestyle-checklist/

7-Day Freestyle Fix https://members.effortlessswimming.com/7-day-beginner

Courses Membership https://effortlessswimming.com/courses-membership/

But what I found quite beneficial with the swimmers is when they actually stopped looking at all of that and they started to focus on feel and being able to recognize what feels right, being able to recognize if perhaps they are doing the incorrect technique that they’re wanting and how that’s able to feel. How that feels, they’re all then able to course correct and as a result, they’re gonna be ending up swimming much quicker. But if you’re just constantly focusing on the splits or the times or how fast you can go, as you’ve said earlier, you wanna swim from the inside out, you’re missing that inside part. 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. The Effortless Swimming Podcast, Brenton here with Tasman, who recently returned from the Maldives camp a couple of weeks ago.

And on this episode, I want to cover the 12 takeaways that we got from the camp as coaches and 12 takeaways that you as an athlete or a swimmer can use in your own training and swimming to not only get better, but see progress, hopefully a lot faster. So Tas, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So first, anyone who’s part of our membership will have seen you in there. You sort of run out our online membership and do a lot of our stroke analysis in there with me. So this is the first time on a podcast. So it’s nice to have you joining me here. But you’ve also come on a couple of camps as well. So I thought it’d be great to chat and just cover some of the things that we saw coaching and some of the things that really work for people to help them have those breakthroughs in their stroke and really make some big changes. Yeah, that sounds good. Well, the first one that we’ve got here is focus on the bottlenecks.

Yes, I mean, I think what’s, you know, when you do an analysis, it can feel quite overwhelming to see, for example, if there are a lot of issues that are identified. We never want that to deter people because what tends to happen is that it’s more, you know, we’re identifying all of the different areas. But ultimately, there’s one particular main area or the bottleneck. And if we can just focus on that one area, all of the other areas tend to get fixed. So for example, we had one summer. During the analysis, his legs were sprained. He was rolling completely over. As he was breathing, his lead arm was dropping. And as a result of that, he wasn’t getting in a high catch. So that can be quite overwhelming, right, for all four of those areas to be identified and to think that you need to focus on all four of those areas. But what helped there is we actually just focused on his over rotation and we identified over rotation

as that bottleneck. So by only focusing on him getting a reach, getting the rotation from the reach as opposed to forcing that rotation, his rotation was reduced. So that allowed him to rock into a breath, keep the lead arm extended as he was taking a breath, keeping his legs together, getting in a high elbow catch. So yeah, ultimately, he just focused on one area and the cause and it just kind of fixed all of the other symptoms. So that would just be my takeaway and my advice for people, you know, if you do feel like there are a couple of areas that you’re struggling with, pick the one thing to focus on for the whole swim, let the rest go. And how you can do that is you just really want to be able to find that bottleneck and we do have a checklist, right, that you can really just find the order that you can work from. Yeah, that’s right. So it can be very overwhelming when someone sees themselves swimming, especially if there’s a whole bunch of things

that are going wrong. And so quite often what we see is there’s that one thing that if we just make that change, we release that bottleneck, everything else just starts to fall into place. And so it can feel like a challenge to identify that bottleneck. But as you said, on our freestyle checklist, which we’ll put in the show notes, it goes through the order that we like to analyze the stroke in. And so for the most like the simplest way to put it is, head and body position, rotation, and then we look at what the arms are doing in the catch and the pull and the recovery. And then there’s also some timing things in there. Breathing is one as well. It depends on what they’re doing with their breath, but that’s usually one of the first things that we look at too. But that sort of sequence is how we like to teach the stroke and how in the back of my mind, I’ve always got it there just as sort of the template of how I would analyze someone’s stroke.

And that bottleneck is often just the earlier thing in the line of things that they have to work on. And I think a good way to think of that too is swimming from the inside out, is making sure that we think about our core, our torso. We need to get this stuff right first, then we can go out to the extremities from there. So always thinking inside out with our swimming.

So focus on the bottlenecks. Number two, keep drills simple and focus on progression sets.

Yeah, so my experience with the swimmers is you really don’t want to over complicate things with too many drills. You want to stick to a couple of handful of drills. And what’s more important here is as you are doing those drills is to really have a progression plan in mind so that you can go from drill to free, because a lot of feedback we get from some of the swimmers is I’m able to hold my stroke during the drill as soon as I do it in freestyle, I just lose my stroke. So if you can just create a small progression milestones where you’re constantly challenging yourself, you’re bridging the gap from drill to free and then you’re making improvement steps by steps. That’s the best way that you can slowly start. You can just think of it as building blocks, right? You’re just slowly starting to add that. So a way that I like to do it, and it obviously depends on the area that you’re doing, right? But go from drill and then go to catch up

because catch ups are a really nice way to be able to control the stroke. And then from catch up, you can move on to free. And that’s the same thing with aids. You can use fins or use a snorkel initially, to challenge yourself a little bit more thereafter. Do the drill without those aids, then progress to catch up, for example, you could do it with fins, without fins, and then progress to normal free. That just makes it far more manageable as opposed to taking a massive leap from going from drill and now trying to replicate the technique that we’re learning into normal free while doing quite an intense set over longer distance. Yeah, it’s such a nice approach because it can feel quite… Like if you go from just, say, kicking on the side, for example, if you’re working on rotation and then into a swim, it might work. But if you were to do something like side kick into 616, into 636, and then to full stroke swimming,

it’s a really nice way to build it up. And one of the swimmers that we worked with on camp, one of the swimmers I worked with, one of the issues she was having was her… She just wasn’t comfortable with her breathing. She would sort of hold her breath, wasn’t exhaling through the nose, and so was just never really calm in the water. So we did like a three-step progression. We went to just sink downs where I’d get a take a breath in, exhale through the nose, come straight back up, and repeat that five times. So starting with sink downs, then we went into just floating on our front arms and legs extended. Then we went into kick on the front with the arms extended, and then we went into to swim. And she was able to build up through that sequence to then be able to just get that level of comfort where she could feel like her breathing was fine. The water was supporting her because she learned how to hold her body properly.

And then she was able to do some 25s where she’s like, this is actually… I can stay calm, but I don’t need to feel that anxiousness or overwhelm in the water. For sure. It’s making it bite-size. I think swimming can be quite overwhelming to a lot of people. And so if you can just break it down into bite-size chunks, just mentally even, it’s far more manageable. It’s easier to grasp your head around what you’re needing to do. And then it just makes training far more enjoyable because you’re not putting all that pressure on yourself in terms of getting it from the issue all the way to free. Now, number three, the value of community. And I think this is one that we especially see on camps. It’s like a five-day or a seven-day intensive where you’re living with 15, 20 other swimmers and you really get to know everyone very quickly just because you’re seeing them for hours. Hours on end, you’re having meals with them.

But I think this is one that sometimes gets overlooked. I would say this would be one of the most important takeaways for myself because the swimmers really enjoyed the training. Just the feedback that you got from them, they loved the analysis, they loved the technique improvements that they were making. But equally, they’re just really in love connecting with like-minded people. And I think it can be a little bit of an isolating sport as opposed to some of the others. You are quite dependent on yourself to show up to when you’re putting in the work itself, you’re either looking at the floor or you just head down and swimming open water. So if you can find some sort of a squad, if that’s not possible, find an online community. So similar to the community that we really encourage on the effort of swimming membership, really as a place just to support you so that you can be held accountable or you can connect with people.

You can just share a laugh. I think if you can just encourage that engagement and that enjoyment of swimming, you will want to go to training the next day. It really just encourages swimming at the same time. Yeah, absolutely. The reason that I don’t think I’ve ever missed a session, except if I’ve gotten like two hours sleep or something, I don’t think I’ve missed a session in the last couple of years because I’m swimming with a squad and people expect me to be there because I’ve written a set. And it’s just that. It’s just that that gets me out of bed even if I’m tired or not feeling good. It doesn’t take much. It really just takes some other people who are expecting me to be there. But that’s just a way of getting to the pool. But I think the community aspect of it and having someone or having other people there just to kind of share the ups and the downs or having someone helping guide you. I mean, in terms of running effortless swimming,

I’ve had the same business coach for 15, maybe 16 years now. And so in that community, that’s the thing that’s kind of helped me along because otherwise running something like this can be a bit of a lonely journey. You just kind of have to figure it out. But having someone there and other people there to kind of talk about stuff and what’s working has helped me immensely. And so I think the value of our effortless swimming, coaching members there, that’s a big one where you’re writing the squad workouts every month. You’re answering questions. We’re doing our video analysis as well. So that’s a really good way, especially if you’re swimming solo to be able to keep tapped in to that kind of thing where you’re not doing it alone because it does get kind of boring and lonely if you’re just doing it by yourself all the time. Yeah, no, 100%. And I was just thinking, on the membership, just to actually try and get that engagement even more,

there are the different features that I found are quite popular. So the progress journals, Summers are using that to really hold themselves accountable, but at the same time check in on each other too, which is such a cool thing to see as well. Or you’re able to, even if you are doing it as a lonely swimmer by yourself, so you’re not necessarily training in a squad, but you’re doing our workouts. On the membership, I’ve seen Summers connect over some events that they will be entering. So they might be on separate sides of the world, but they see that they’re both training for the same event. Then you’ve already got that connection and you’ve got an online training buddy, which I think is very helpful too. Absolutely. Yeah, number four is believing yourself. So where does this one come from? So I would say this would probably be the second most important one or maybe it’s on par with the connection. And this was a massive takeaway,

especially I would say in the second week. So I think a lot of the times, especially if you don’t come from a swimming background or if swimming is not very much within the community, it can be daunting. And I think some Summers can sometimes naturally maybe limit themselves mentally, as opposed to actually knowing what the capability is. And so sometimes a breakthrough usually comes when you just stop doubting yourself and you test what you’re able to do. And that’s so much easier said than done, but if you do have a community behind you or just one person there that is able to cheer you on, it makes it far easier. So if I can just give an example. In the second week, we had a swimmer who didn’t come from a swimming background. Swimming wasn’t something that they actively did as part of growing up or even as an adult. And she was quite reliant on a tow float. So the first session in, I think we were swimming maybe 30 meters

and she really wanted to use this tow float. But what ended up happening, like her confidence just boosted, I think with the encouragement of the coaches and the encouragement of the other Summers, she was able to see her ability in the water as well. And as a result, she, at the end of the camp, we saw a lapper on the island, right? So she swam the whole lap and very comfortably and she only used the tow float for the first half and the second half she went without. And the swell can be quite gnarly as well and it was quite hectic on that day. So, you know, if we just compare the progress of how she first started and her maybe self-doubt that she had as opposed to at the end, where she just absolutely smashed the island some it was just so amazing to see. Yeah, it’s a huge change from in five days where, and I remember we do a group welcome, everyone sort of tells a bit of their story and where they’re from and their level of experience as well.

And we’ve never had anyone that we haven’t gotten around the island even if they’re not a strong swimmer. I remember last year we had someone who was getting gassed out within about 30 meters and just like had to stand up, get the breath and go again. But I was like, it’s all good. We’ll get around the island. And we did. You can make some big changes in the course of five days. And I think for a lot of people it’s just very difficult especially as not out to get any coaching, like the intensive coaching like this to help them get the confidence especially in open water. And so that’s particularly the Maldives camp. I think that’s probably the best one for this kind of thing just because of where we are and how we were able to run it, where we’re doing a lot of our technique coaching in the lagoon. You can sort of stand up and we’ve got three coaches there. We’ve got 15 swimmers. So there’s a lot of like a one-on-one coaching

and a lot of support there to help people get the tools that they need and the confidence that they need to be able to get around the island on the last day. So I thought when she was introducing herself I thought, yeah, for sure we’re going to get you around the island. And I was for me next to her for the first half well the whole way around actually but the first half we’re going against the current into the wind and we it took us about it was a while it was like maybe 30 minutes to go about 500 meters because of this current. And so I was for me next to her and I’m like she must be absolutely buggered because like we’ve been going non-stop and we’re not moving anywhere and you can hardly see the floor going you’re not hardly moving past it. But then when we sort of stopped after five or six hundred I’m like, hey, how are you going? So good. I wasn’t even out of breath and I think if we’d done that at the start of the camp

it would have been a very different story but just giving them some of the tools like all right, this is how we need to be breathing this is how we need to be exhaling don’t worry you will make progress even though you don’t see yourself making much progress into the current like just some of those strategies that can really help you get through those tough conditions and it was great to see and she wasn’t the only one either who had those sorts of results which was nice to see. Now, number five, consistency over perfection.

Of course, I mean, I think a lot of swimmers and I’m sure this is the most sport right but they can perhaps overanalyze their stroke and I think they need to know the technique instantly but a good lesson here is just knowing that the breakthrough or the progress instead of wanting to see progress by tomorrow it’s actually just more about constant steady practice and small changes that will lead to lasting improvement so that’s what we tend to do at the start of the analysis is just prep everyone with that as in you’re here for a week we’re going to try and get you we’re going to part as much knowledge onto you as we can you will see progress but the main thing here is what you’ll do after the camp with all of the tools that you’ve given and so that’s where the consistency comes from what’s very important here is after the clinics or the camps or any coaching that you do or just a general analysis right it’s really just to maintain what you’ve learned

and if you ask the main for example by yourself that can be a little bit more challenging because you aren’t going to have that coach to constantly be there to remind you but that’s really where the biggest improvements happen and where the difference can really count so my recommendations would be there just to continuously remind yourself just to stay consistent go into every training with a plan and specific goals set yourself small, medium, long-term goals just really so that you’ve got small little stepping stones that you can work towards and if you just constantly putting in the small progress over time you will start to see a long-lasting improvement as opposed to just putting in the work for a week and then you know the following week you are maybe feeling a little bit more bushed or tired because you just weren’t able to continuously keep it up and one of the things we’re seeing in there what’s that growth afterwards is

there’s quite a few of the swimmers who like I’m back in the pool and I’m actually getting pretty fatigued I’m quite tired more so than I normally would be and the thing with that is that’s very normal I would expect a lot of the swimmers will be going through it because they’re changing their stroke and they’re thinking about it a lot they just don’t have that well they don’t have the muscle memory they’re going to be using different muscles as well and it’s just not natural right now so that’s really normal and I’ve seen it for years and years that this is something that tends to happen after camps for a lot of the swimmers some certainly make nice progress immediately but it’s just because we’re seeing changes and if you’re not feeling any difference if you’re not experiencing something that’s noticeably different than what you used to then you’re probably just going back to old habits so it’s not always this upward trajectory straight away

quite often it might be a solid six to eight weeks of feeling like oh is this actually doing anything positive for me but then often they had that breakthrough like alright pay it off and I just need to be consistent with it and then I can see that perfection in the stroke a bit more so yeah it’s all really normal stuff and I think us as coaches we need to just prepare them for that know what to expect and I think we do a good job of that just reminding people you might not be 15 seconds faster per 100 when you go back next week you might actually be a little bit slower that’s completely normal I’m sure consistency is key I think that’s the main thing there just keep at it and you will see that progress and I think even on a personal note there what we did as coaches every morning was get up, go for a swim around the island which took about 30 minutes and it wasn’t really hard at any point it was all just putting

for the most part of aerobic swimming but just swimming every day for two weeks I’ve come home and I’m feeling really good after that I normally swim three times a week do four to five k but this was nearly probably 13-14 days of two kilometers or maybe more if we did an extra lap but I’ve noticed a big improvement in my own swimming just from that consistency 100% I came back almost it felt like flying in the water right and it’s exactly what you’ve said it’s just like slowly getting the you’d be just boarding it up slowly but surely without even thinking about it and then as you said a couple weeks later you’re like oh wow you’ll start to feel the difference even if you don’t feel it initially number six is process and feel over data yeah so I think in this day and age it’s so normal to be checking the watches be checking the data but I think that can be a little bit counterproductive it’s obviously a big value for that

but what I found quite beneficial with the swim is when they actually stopped looking at all of that and they started to focus on feel and being able to recognize what feels right being able to recognize if perhaps they are doing the incorrect technique they’d be wanting and how that’s able to feel how that feels they were then able to course correct and as a result they’re going to be ending up swimming much quicker but if you’re just constantly focusing on the splits or the times or how fast you can go you as you’ve said earlier you want to swim from the inside out you’re missing that inside part and so a great example here is the week we do the coaching and the analysis and on the final day we do another another analysis during that analysis you see the guys start overthinking they’re like they’re told to work on these five things and then they’re on swimming as fluidly as what we’d want them to do so my recommendation

there would be is obviously keep an eye on the data it’s good but don’t let that drive your stroke focus on feel if you can and if you are feeling like you are overthinking something take a step back just go for it and focus on the feel of the water I think with one of the swimmers with analysis she was overthinking it so much we even got her to pause we did the other swimmers and then we redid her stroke and we said just get out of your head and she ended up swimming so beautifully so yeah just ultimately always just go for feel yeah that’s and there was a couple in that first week as well it was like I was thinking I was thinking of three or four things and then it kind of fell apart free film let’s just pick one thing to focus on this is not the make or break of your swimming career how are you looking at the video here especially when the camera is on there’s a lot of pressure for the people they want to look better than they did at the start

so I get that I get that want to like really nail the last video but yeah if you can have the feeling of knowing what it’s like when you’re doing things correct and knowing what it’s like when you’re not doing things correctly that in itself is a big takeaway because sometimes people don’t have that understanding of like how it should feel when you’re actually doing it correctly because they just don’t know what they’re doing because they’ve never seen themselves swim and so that’s one of the things that we I think would hopefully do quite well is building up that awareness of what’s right what’s wrong and then what does that actually feel like so you can take away that feeling and become your own coach where you know whether you’re getting it right or not and that way you can make a change because if you don’t have that it’s unlikely long-term you’ll make any long-term changes yeah for sure and I think especially

if you are really focusing on an area then focus on feel and use the data to as a way to like inform whether you’re on the right track right in terms of stroke counting and time but try avoid using that data as the leading motivator behind the swimming at least as I said like while you are refining your technique do it by feel use it to kind of aid and give you additional support but if you can really get that good feeling for the water yeah you’ll be good to go and you’ll always be able to course correct you’ll always be able to adapt you’ll start to feel how certain paces feel as opposed to needing to rely on your watch I mean I think that’s how we grab swimming right so that would just be my take weight if you can kind of get to the point where you don’t need to use the data as much and you can really base the technique the pacing the time based on feel yeah you just become a far more knowledgeable swimmer but yeah like back in our day

pre-text suits pre-watches can I only have the 60 second clock to go by yep alright number seven simple cues unlock big changes so I think this was one of like the key success in a take where I think for us coaches and the swimmers as well you would think that you would think that a simple cue could make such a big difference but it really can in terms of connecting how you know the swimmer connects to the technique so throughout the camps there were ample cues that were used but even more than others even two three weeks later the swimmers are still using them and that’s just such a great way I guess for them to you know lock in on they just associate the technique with the cue it gives them less things actually to focus on because they’re not not needing to think about like for example one of the cues that I use with my swimmers is when they would breathe their lead on would drop and so it would be like a simple thing of like up up up

and instead of them now having to think every time I breathe I need to try to push my lead on up all of that was explained beforehand now we’ve got the cue they know what they need to do and it’s stuck with them they’re still using it now and I think that’s what’s going you know on going on in their head so I think you know these kind of quick reminders they can really just cause like just it to click a little bit better or the way to drop technically and that also just really helps reinforce conditioning so just trying to think a couple other ones that come to mind that were quite successful and popular were the performance platform so just that’s a great way to great way to just think about the positioning of your your body positioning opening up the chest really be able to use your chest as an anchor to support your stroke up up up as I said just to keep the lead on up and then a third one that comes to mind that

really stuck with a lot of the summers was just using your the pocket of power right so that’s just a great way to have an understanding of if you can get a solid press back past the hip it’s going to help you get that reach and rotation forward and that just it as I said it just really clicked with a lot of the summers so yeah use the simple cue cues as much as you can they can really make big changes in terms of how you connect the technique and and all of the information they’ve been giving you and then how you can then apply it in the water you gave me some breaststroke coaching on one of the days towards the end there which it which it was really needed because I just I don’t do much breaststroke and you’re you’ve been primarily a breast striker so but it was really good so one of the things you noticed with my breaststroke was as I was coming in to the recovery here my elbows I just I wasn’t sort of keeping a good catch my elbows coming

through narrow and so one of the things I was thinking yesterday at training was just elbows wide keep the elbows wide as I’m going through my my catch here and that helps a lot and then another one was actually dropping the hips at a certain phase of the stroke and then another one was actually kicking down more than sort of backwards now some of those things might sound a little bit maybe opposite of what you would think you need right like we don’t want to drop our hips and go low we want to be kicking back in a way to go forwards but just for what I needed in the stroke those couple of cues in the breaststroke had me feeling really really good yesterday so yeah it doesn’t take much but just like a phrase a word goes a very long way and especially in the heat of the moment when you’re racing or when you’re going fast you can’t be thinking about a whole lot it’s just got to be simple and so I found that when we’re doing

these sprints yesterday in breaststroke elbows wide drop hips it’s like I can do this not every strike but I can do it and it’s sad to feel really good yeah for sure it just makes it more manageable I think that’s if I’m just like listening to the themes of what we’re saying we just really want to be able to make it manageable it really doesn’t have to be this overwhelming thing in terms of thinking about the in-depth technique I think if you can get a solid understanding of what you need to do why you need to do it pair that with the cue then as you said you know when you are swimming and perhaps you’re pushing yourself or perhaps you’re doing an open water race and there’s so many other variables you need to think of if you can just have that one cue that sticks in your mind it’s far more manageable for you to just be able to implement the technique that you really wanting to do

number eight the power of reframing

so I think what I found quite interesting with the camp is if something you know I think some swimmers they might not perhaps grasp the concept or perhaps just explain one where every coach has got a different way of explaining things I should say and so I think what’s important just as a swimmer to be mindful of and perhaps a coach as well that if you know if you feel like a concept hasn’t clicked it just needs to be reframed in a certain way so that you can really identify it so you know I might teach something a certain way in comparison to you or in comparison to one of the other coaches Gary but I think what was very successful on the camp is because that there were so many different coaching voices everyone was able to find someone that they were able to identify with so that would just be my just a tip there I should say that you know if you if there is a concept and you are feeling perhaps a bit lost on it it’s not you it just might be the

way in which the concept is being explained and so just keep digging do research chat to other people they might just be able to explain it in a way that really just clicks for you you’re one of the ones that comes to mind there is when we’re working on their timing and rhythm of the stroke we had him try a few different ways of thinking of it one of them was with that Waltz tempo it was like a one two three one two three and for some people that that worked really well and then Gary said you know you might even prefer like a kind of an uneven tempo where it’s like one two one two in terms of like one stroke is a bit quicker second stroke is a little bit slower and particularly if you’re brave to one side that kind of timing can be quite useful so yeah different way and a lot of people said actually that worked really well for me felt that before so yeah just hearing things explained slightly differently can help it

can help it click let’s go on to number nine here so rhythm is this topical rhythm is everything rhythm is everything I would say you know in terms of the feedback from what we from what the swimmers gave us in terms of the different areas of the technique that we worked on the main thing that stuck out to them was the fact of that swimming should be some like a waltz which is very much what you said earlier I think some swimmers they tend to swim maybe a little bit more staccato or they’re lacking that flow so it’s more like stroke stroke stroke stroke but if you can just be mindful of the fact that ultimately you really want to be able to waltz through the water or ice skates I think that’s a reference that you used it will really it will really help you find a natural rhythm which is ultimately what we want to do we really want to be able to flow in the water as opposed to fighting the water so the queue like swimming

like a waltz is a really great way to think about swimming or another queue of just being able to do one two three one two three one two three just to really help find your rhythm that’s the way to go so I had a swimmer so he was swimming a little bit more staccato so he was swimming very much like it was one stroke then the second stroke then the next stroke and he explained that he had an aerobic base so he felt quite comfortable being able to maintain distance but he was more so struggling to maintain the pace over long distance so I think it was on day one I just explained instead of swimming very much stop start aim to swim like a waltz aim to find that rhythm that flow that one two three and it just clicked for him and he said it just made sense and so I think he ended up being one of the swimmers who swam around the island the most just because he was so keen on the fact that he was just saving so much more energy

now he wasn’t exerting as much energy with each stroke so yeah I think it’s so amazing that just you know that simple queue is just able to help swimmers see how to apply themselves in the water find that efficiency that we ultimately want to be aiming for and not fight the water as much yeah so that seemed like an important one for quite a few of the swimmers at camp yeah my feeling is they focus so much on the stroke and the technical details of it the catch making sure I’m getting nice and long that they were just missing that rhythm element to it and so when we really got them just keeping things I think moving in front we never want to stop and pause we’ve always got to keep that lead hand in motion but it can be it can take its time going through that front of the stroke then it’s almost like a little ice skating almost not like kind of falling or rolling into the next stroke rather than that stop start that you talked about

and it’s just so much easier and the way I like to kind of demonstrate this if we’re doing analysis is like if you stand up and you walk and you pause and then you take another step and you pause it’s like no one’s walking that way and we don’t want to swim that way either because it’s just it’ll take a long time to get from one end to the next so always making sure that we’re keeping things in in flow so that the one that I like is just keeping that lead hand in motion just making sure you’re always always keep that rolling through so rhythms everything now the 10th one here is practice technique on land first yeah so I think I mean I think we’re all a big advocate for this but this would be again at the top then terms of one of the most important things so technique it just can become so much easier to know what to do in the water if you can do it outside of the water first if you can get the feel that understanding

of you know where your arm should be if you are extending forward the depth that the arm should be in if you are doing for example recovery and you know we talk about this Albert lead recovery what does it actually feel like if you can do that on land and replicated there it’s going to be 10 times easier to be able to do it in the water and so I think a couple of examples that we gave to the swimmers was if you if you’re really battling you can even do the technique in front of a mirror just so that you can see what you are doing what you should be aiming for if you can do Thera bands especially for that high Albert catch position again just so that you can see what does Albert forward look like what does it feel like that’s slow to fast movement that we wanting to engage in with the catch through to the to the follow through the same thing there if it can just be replicated from the outside to inside the water it’s going to be

so much easier for you to to be able to do it will be easier for you to be able to adapt as you go at the same time then one of the ones where I saw a nice change from doing it out of the water to in the water was when we were going through we’re starting with the reach and the rotation so what I had swimmers do was standing up one arm up in front one arm by the side I wanted them to get used to their shoulder coming up to their cheekbone and then just that little bit of rotation as well and we’re really opening up through the underarm there and just getting them used to that movement because that’s where we want to get the start of every stroke and some of the feedback from some of the swimmers there after doing that and then going into some swimmers just the stroke felt longer so I think a lot of people are just they’re either too flat or this shoulder will just drop quite low and then the elbow is going to drop with it

so if they set themselves up in that like streamline or that base position there that’s it’s one of the main positions you want to get used to being in and so I saw a nice sort of correlation there from just practicing that while we’re standing first in the water and also the ferro band stuff too a lot of swimmers got it pretty quickly which was nice and I think a lot of swimmers have started to do this stuff already but there’s a few swimmers who it’s like you’re just pulling straight away with that elbow so let’s just slow it down, let’s get that movement now we’re starting to build that muscle memory and if you’re not doing it right out of the water there’s almost no chance it’s going to happen in the water so yeah I think it’s a really important one especially doing some stuff in the mirror because I mean I’ve looked at myself in the mirror doing swimming we’re talking swimming here I’ve looked at myself in the mirror with practicing some swimming stuff

and I’m like alright this isn’t actually what it feels like is happening here so it’s a yeah good one to do sorry I was just going to say on that note just push the ferro band I just want to advocate for it I know it can’t I was advocating for it I think I sold it so much that the swimmers were so keen on doing it and even now I’m doing like weekly check-ins just to make sure that they are doing it just because as you said like especially the high elbow catch one so there is that ferro band routine I think it’s on the membership but if you can just strengthen it outside of the water you’ll have a strong catch and pull inside of the water so just my PSA do that the ferro band high elbow catch love it number 11 use contrast drills

hey real quick in case you didn’t know we run swimming camps around the world from the Maldives, Thailand Japan with Sundays, Galapagos Islands plus a bunch of new locations for next year so if you’d like to join us at a future camp and improve your swimming and explore and experience some of the best locations to swim in the world then go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash camps we’ve got all the dates and locations listed there a question I get all the time is I’m not that quick will this camp be suitable for me we have a wide range of speeds and abilities come to the camps so as long as you can swim a kilometer there’s a very good chance that these camps will be suitable for you and if you’re not sure just get in touch with us and we’ll make sure that we do find you a suitable camp thanks for listening let’s get back to the podcast yeah so this is just a really really great way for so much to feel the difference with what

to avoid and what to aim for so I think we did it almost with every session especially when we’re focusing on body position and the kick and you can do it really with a lot of the areas of the technique that we’re focusing on but I would just encourage I guess some of us to do this because a lot of some of us found like a breakthrough moment in the sense of how challenging it can be if you are doing the incorrect technique and how much energy that’s required as opposed to when you are doing the technique that you know we should strive for how much less energy that’s required how much more effortless they felt in the water so one that comes to mind is with the kick right so we get them to do 25 meter kicking super wide super deep really big kicks from the knee and I think the guys found one length and they were like panting they were so out of breath and then on the way back we said okay change it we want to streamline

kicks kicking from the hips feet nice and loose and there were they the difference then in terms of as I said the effort and the energy level required it was so great for them to be able to see that because that allows them to recognize right what they should be aiming for and when they’re just something normal now they can then they’ll feel the difference that feeling that we’ve been talking about there will be able to feel now if you know that kick is now actually creating a lot of energy wastage that we don’t need and they can just kind of course correct it and you know kick streamline as we’d want them to do and I’d say aside from the kick exercise when we do the contrast drills the what because we wanted to go like from one extreme to the to the other like really really make it different on both things I really go to the extremes but more times than not what they feel like is extreme is not extreme yes however and a couple of years ago today

there’s like communications course run by a guy Vin Jang and we had to do a similar thing in terms of speaking so it’s like you have to speak really slowly and then really quickly and then you’ve also got to do the same thing with like pitch and tone and volume and when I was watching others do it and when I saw myself do it I’m like there is just such a little range that I’m operating within there yeah but it feels really big even though it’s like it’s not much so yeah what I’d like to try and do when we do those contrast drills is like just give them permission to like really go to the extreme because it’s probably much less than what you think for sure I think another great one was a body position like that’s another great one where or just you know head position while doing that too I was just thinking I think some swimmers when we asked them to swim quite forward with their head it wasn’t as forward as it could have been

right in terms of the range but then when we got them to really go for it their hips were like all the way down there and that’s ultimately what we want right with the contrast drills is as you said getting extreme version and then really trying to refine it on the way back now number 12, siding and pack swimming

so this is a great one to do I think a lot of the swimmers

would have saved everyone a lot of extra meters sorry go on next year we’ll just reorder the the way in which we do the camp but I think siding and pack swimming I think most of the swimmers were I would say like 80% did more open water and probably about 20% were more pool swimmers so it was a very important topic to do and the main takeaways there and it actually came from one of our swimmers so she was a type window champ and but she just gave such a great analogy with it in the sense that when she was fighting you really just have to be mindful of the fact that you are going to get knocked you are going to get hit and that doesn’t take you off guard, it doesn’t make you anxious it’s part of the process and so if you can expect it, brace for it you’ll then be able to adapt faster and feel more in control and as soon as she said that I think a lot of us are like that’s such a great way to think of it so with siding and pack swimming

that’s just a really nice breakthrough that I think you’ve mentioned before you know you don’t want to be a victim in this situation but in addition to that it’s inevitable that especially at the start when you’re going around the boys that they are going to be swimmers on top of you it is going to be uncomfortable it’s just is what it is and so if you cannot get shaken if anything like that does happen to you and instead if you can just expect for something like that to happen stay calm be prepared, allow yourself to be able to adapt stay confident and find your line you will be just fine in terms of navigating through that yeah it’s interesting listening to shout out to Fi she talking about that like when someone first gets into Taekwondo is when they get hit there’s that anxiety and it’s like all there’s that sort of shock but the more you do it and the more you expect it it’s just like you get hit and you just keep

rolling with it and it’s it’s no different in open water because you are going to get a few knocks you might get a might be like Abby and hurt your finger trying to try to make a break between two people like it’s just it’s just part and parcel with open water swimming but the more you do it and the more you just accept that that’s going to to happen the more you can just like just keep swimming and like one of the main things with pack swimming is just don’t stop just just keep going even if you get cut off or even if yeah yeah maybe gonna get a little bit a little bit hurt perhaps but just just keep swimming and that way you’re not going to get swum into the back of and you’ll you’ll keep with the pack and I think sighting too was a was a big one we would send people off we’d send three groups of five so we’d have five summers go and another five and another five and I mean in each script there’s usually at least one person who just

has a tendency to veer left or right so if they’re not sighting they’re just going across everyone and it happened every time and so there is a tendency for a lot of some is to just go in one direction and the reason that happens a lot of the time can be if someone’s crossing over and if they’re crossing over then they have to push out and when they push out they start to veer that’s one one of the reasons for it but whatever the reason is it’s just something that we need to be aware of and I think a good exercise is like what we did at the camp is swim for 20 or 30 strokes eyes closed try and go straight and just see where you end up and that can give you an idea of roughly where you would normally veer but the main thing is just sight regularly enough so that you do keep on track even if your stroke has a tendency to go off in one direction for sure and on that note as well so I think even with sighting some guys with some skew

and what what it came down to is the fact that and this sounds so simple and every time I say people laugh but it’s really what’s happening is you need to sight with purpose so some swimmers just lift their head because you’re saying sight but they’re actually not right they’re not actually locking in on their objects so just another tip that I would give all swimmers and I think with 10 you know it ended up working well with the swimmers was you go if you’re struggling to really find one particular object at least be mindful of the area that you’re wanting to sight and every time you lift your head just really try and clock in and then continue to swim you just because sighting is going to it is going to take a little bit more energy it is going to break your rhythm a little bit so if you are going to do it you need to do it with purpose otherwise there’s no reason to do it. Yeah it’s a great point it’s so how can you still be sighting in like

and going off in that direction because you’re looking forwards but not actually looking that’s just all part and parcel with learning these skills and becoming a confident open water swimmer Taz thank you so much for jumping on the podcast our next all these camp is going to be in August 2026 we’ve got one date added there’s only I think four spots left for that but I’m going to add another week before that so if that’s something that you’re interested in I’ll include the link in the show notes but we’ve got a whole bunch of other camps coming up next year as well and we are about to head off to Thailand for our whole week camp which is slightly more pool based with a little bit of open water but just a lot of fun and for anyone who loves swimming and loves pushing themselves how weak is a good chance to do it so we’ll see you there in a couple weeks time and thanks again for joining me on the podcast thanks Brent 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 12 Ways To Make Your Swimming Unrecognizable In The Next 12 Months with Brenton and Tas appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, I’ll show you the 5 key steps to swimming freestyle with ease, so you can save energy, improve your speed, and feel confident every time you dive in.

If you’re an adult swimmer or triathlete who gets tired quickly, this is a must-watch. You’ll discover how to finally relax in the water, connect your stroke together, and build a freestyle that feels natural.

00:42 Good Body Line and Balance

Join a camp:

FREE Freestyle Technique Checklist https://effortlessswimming.com/freestyle-checklist/

7-Day Freestyle Fix https://members.effortlessswimming.com/7-day-beginner

Courses Membership https://effortlessswimming.com/courses-membership/

=== About Effortless Swimming ===

=== Follow Us on Social Media ===

Watch on Youtube:

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.

If you’re going swimming is not necessarily speed, but it’s more to swim very comfortably, very relaxed, and moves through the water with beautiful technique. In this video, I’m going to share with you how to achieve effortless freestyle. And the thing about this is it can actually be very fast. If you’ve got great technique, you’re probably very streamlined, you’re probably very graceful, you’ve got good rhythm, and all of those things actually lead to swimming with good speed. So if you work towards these sorts of things that I’m about to cover, you might find that your speed actually increases for less effort. So let’s go through the five things that make up effortless freestyle. Let me know in the comments below which of these five you’re going to work on first. The first thing we need to do to swim with effortless freestyle is make sure we’ve got good body line and balance. Everything comes from being balanced in the water

and being streamlined and horizontal. If we don’t have that, it doesn’t matter how fit, how strong we are, we’re always going to be struggling and muscling our way through the water. So step number one is we need to find a good body line which is horizontal. And our aim is to have these three touch points of our head, our hips and our heels at the surface. And even if you feel like you are someone who naturally sinks in the water, it doesn’t mean that you can’t achieve this position. It comes down to how you hold the body. So how we need to set up our frame and build our body is we need to start with good posture. And good posture comes from being tall through the head all the way through to the spine and we’re getting the length through here. And when we do that, we also should suck our tummy in and squeeze our butt cheeks together a little bit. And that tautness through the body allows us to maintain this straight position.

Because if we just switch off when we hunch over like this, our body’s gonna move around a lot. So how we hold the body actually sets us up to have success and have that balance. So we’re tall, we’re proud, we’re sucking our tummy in and squeezing our butt cheeks together lightly. We don’t need to do that in any hard way. The second thing that we need with that as well is good head position. So where you look can determine how high your hips and how high your legs are sitting in the water. Now you don’t need to look directly down. There’s nothing wrong with looking slightly forwards. I like to teach anywhere up to about 45 degrees in front. But think of your head like an iceberg, 10 to 20% above the water, the rest of it below. Because your head weighs four, five, six kilos and if you’re holding the majority of that above the water, you are gonna find that it’s really hard to keep the hips and legs up. So looking slightly forwards,

top of the head just above the water. That way we’ve built our body line. So we’re straight, we’re horizontal and the other important thing to note there is a lot of your buoyancy will come from your lungs which are filled with air. So if you find it hard to keep your hips and legs up you should feel like you’re almost trying to press down slightly with your chest. Imagine you’ve got a set of scales below you that’s here and we’re just trying to add a little bit of weight to that set of scales as we’re leaning into the water. Again, not too much, not trying to be a submarine going underneath, but we need to lean on that somewhat to help keep our hips and legs up. So that’s step one to building our body line. The next thing that we need to be aware of is the setup of our catch position. Now when we talk about the catch, this is the start of it. When we’ve finished reaching forwards out in front. Now when it comes to reaching forwards,

if we feel like this middle finger here is being sent directly out in front, that’s gonna help us initiate some rotation to our body. And when we think of rotation it should be around the spine. That’s around this axis here. So we’re not trying to rotate where we’re going like this. We need to rotate around the spine. So we want to make sure that we’re sending this forward that’s gonna create a little bit of rotation on our side and help us set up our catch in the right position. Now what position is that? Well, we need to get fingers just below wrist, wrist just below elbow, and our fingertips should be about underarm depth as well to set up the catch. Because in that position, it’s very easy to then transition into the next part of the stroke, which is our catch, which is this movement from here to here. And then that’s the part of the stroke we’re actually gonna get a lot of our propulsion from. So if you can set yourself up correctly

to start the catch, what ends up happening is not only are you 10, 15 centimetres longer than if you weren’t rotating, but you’re also very streamlined at that point. And I’d like to think of this as our base position or our streamlined position. And as we swim freestyle, we’re just transitioning from that base position to the next position. Now there’s no pausing, there’s no stopping in that position. But if you can get there, that is actually when you end up traveling the fastest through the stroke. Because if you’re very streamlined, you’re gonna have lots of speed. And you’ve also gone from catching, pressing on one arm, and then you’ve also come from this rotation and the weight of this arm coming over the water into that next part of the stroke. So you actually get a lot of speed from that movement. So you actually traveled the fastest at that point in your stroke. So we wanna make sure that we’re setting ourselves up correctly there.

And it’s a big part of feeling like you can skate from one side to the next if you set yourself up at the beginning of the catch. Now, as we go through that catch position, we wanna make sure that we’re not trying to force it. And the way that we can do that is we need to make sure that we just tip our fingers down, we let our elbow slide out to the side, and our hand and forearm remains as this big paddle. Because then we’ve got all the surface area, plus a bit more up here as well that we can use to then press back and anchor in the water as we slide onto the next side. So if we set ourselves up correctly with the catch, the catch itself starts to become a lot more natural and we don’t have to force it. And in a lot of ways, we don’t have to think too much about it if we set it up in the correct way. Now, if you’d like help with this part of the stroke, if you can get video of your swimming, check out our effortless swimming coaching membership

where you can work with myself and our other coaches inside the membership where we do video analysis. So I’ll put the link in the description below. Now, the next, hey, real quick, in case you didn’t know, we run swimming camps around the world from the Maldives, Thailand, Japan, with Sundays, Galapagos Islands, plus a bunch of new locations for next year. So if you’d like to join us at a future camp and improve your swimming and explore and experience some of the best locations to swim in the world, then go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash camps. We’ve got all the dates and locations listed there. A question I get all the time is, I’m not that quick. Will this camp be suitable for me? We have a wide range of speeds and abilities come to the camps. So as long as you can swim a kilometer, there’s a very good chance that these camps will be suitable for you. And if you’re not sure, just get in touch with us

and we’ll make sure that we do find you a suitable camp. Thanks for listening. Let’s get back into the podcast. Part of swimming effortless freestyle is making sure that our recovery over the water is working for us, not against us. Now, over the water, this is not the propulsive part of the stroke, but it’s important to get it right, because if you do this wrong, then it can impact the propulsive part of the stroke. Now, a mistake I see all the time here with our recovery, which is this overwater part of the stroke, is that a lot of people are trying to do too much of a high elbow recovery. They hear the term high elbow recovery and think it means that elbow needs to be literally very high in the water. They end up coming very close to their body like this. That position is not great for your shoulder. It’s not very comfortable and it can really throw the balance of your body out. So what I’d recommend with this recovery is,

think about keeping a nice open underarm, have the elbow pointing mostly up to the sky and not behind you and we need to relax the wrist, relax the hand as we’re coming through. We don’t wanna be overly tense with it. So the way that I would picture that is, if you imagine you’ve got a piece of fishing line attached to your elbow, someone’s in front of you and they’re pulling that piece of string towards them. That is helping initiate that recovery and bring the arm over the top of the water. And we don’t wanna come too close. We don’t wanna be too wide, but we need to have the arm just out in a comfortable position here. And that way is we bring the arm over, it’s very easy and we’re using that rotation of the shoulder coming out of the water. We’re using that to help bring the arm over the top so that we naturally then just place it in front of a stair. Whereas if anything is really forced or too close to the body,

you’re gonna notice it. But if we can come over that way, then it means that you keep the rhythm of your stroke going and it’s not gonna get thrown out by doing anything weird or awkward over the top of the water. And one small important point there is we wanna enter with our fingers first, elbow up. If you can enter in this position instead of reaching out and landing elbow first, if you can enter here and you have that last little bit of extension happening in the water, then you’re gonna find that the stroke flows a lot better. If you are overreaching and you’re landing like this, then you sometimes feel like you’ve got nowhere else to go except for straight down with your arm. And it makes the catch really difficult to achieve if you do that. The fourth step to effortless freestyle is making sure we breathe in a relaxed way and in time with the stroke. If your breathing is out of sync with the rest of your stroke

or we’re taking these big gasps there and we’re struggling to regulate our breathing in a controlled way, then it’s gonna ruin the rest of your stroke. So we need to make sure firstly, when we breathe, we’re taking a sick of air and then we gradually exhaling as our face is in the water, not too much at any point, but just a gradual exhale, release the rest of the air as you’re about to get your next one. And we wanna time the breath so that it’s in time with our shoulder roll. So we wanna turn the head with the shoulders, back with the shoulders. And a way you can think of that is we wanna pull into the breath. So as this hand is coming past our shoulders, we pull into the breath, we start turning and then as we are finishing the stroke, we wanna start to get our breath in there and we bring it back as that same hand is coming over the top. So it should all go together. So if you feel at any point in your stroke

that when you take a breath, things just lose their rhythm or their connection, check the timing of your breath. And another important thing to note there too, we wanna be looking directly to the side. It’s really common for me to see people lifting up, getting the breath or looking up to the sky as they turn. Look directly to the side, keep part of that bottom goggle in the water and that way it will be almost like you’re breathing on a skewer. So imagine you’ve got a skewer through your head, neck and spine. Wanna turn that skewer to get the breath and then we bring the head back down with it. We don’t wanna break that line of a skewer by lifting up and looking in all sorts of different directions as we turn to breathe. Super common one that I see in probably a quarter of the people that come along to our clinics and our camps. Step number five is making sure we get our rhythm and our kick timing in place. Now if you are fairly new to swimming,

a good way to start can be to use a two beat kick. And a two beat kick is one kick per arm stroke. So as you’re doing the right arm, you’ll kick down. As you’re doing the left arm, you’ll kick down. So it’s one kick per arm stroke. That’s a pretty good way to start. But the important thing there is to make sure that we time the kick correctly. Now there’s a few different ways you can think of timing the kick. And I’m gonna explain two main ways you can think of it. The first one is when your left hand enters, your right foot will be kicking down. And you can think of this as kicking yourself into streamline. So your right foot will kick down and that will kick you into that streamline or that base position to start the catch. So with a two beat kick, it’s a lot easier to think of because you can almost have your legs just going one, two, one, two. And it’s easier to think of the timing that way. As you start to progress and you get a bit more

experienced, you might change the type of kick, a four beat or a six beat. I won’t get into that in this video, but you can click this video here to learn more about those different types of kick. But with our kick timing, it’s important to kick opposite sides hand entry and foot or another way you can think of it as well. And it’s the same thing, but just a different way is in your catch, that is when you’ll kick on the same side. So let’s say we’re coming through in this movement here. This hand is about to enter. So I’m gonna be kicking with my right foot and that’s gonna kick me into streamline. But if we look at this right arm, this right arm will be going through the catch at that same time. And so you can think of right leg, right arm, catch, going together, and it’s the same thing, just a different way of thinking of it. And I find some people prefer the first way, some people prefer the second way, it’s really just up to you.

But it gives you a couple of options to think about the timing of your kick. Now, if you are doing a six-beat kick, which is three kicks per arm stroke or a continuous kick, it can be quite hard to think of the timing of it. So that’s why I think it can be good to start with a two-beat kick, get the timing of that right first and then build up from there. And the reason that’s important is because in the water, we’ve got nothing to ground us. If we’re on land, if we’re throwing a ball, we’ve got that stable surface area that we can generate power from and connect up with. But in the water, we don’t have that. So we need something to ground us and to help us generate that power from and feel connection. And it’s the kick. And I like what Tracer Bownman says about, it’s almost like the press of the legs. The press of the legs is gonna help you rotate your body. And it’s not like we’re trying to kick up and down to move forwards.

We’re gonna be slightly on our side and it’s that press of the legs that’s gonna help you switch sides and feel like you’ve got something to brand yourself from. And that is when you feel like you are much more balanced and stable in the water. So we need to make sure with that kick that we’re not kicking too big and we’re not bending our knees too much but we’re keeping it relatively narrow, relatively long with nice pointed toes as we do that switch. So that’s the last part of effortless freestyle. Now, if that all sounds like a lot to you, I’d recommend going through our eight week faster freestyle course which I’ll link in the description below. It gives you a plan of what to follow for eight weeks to help you develop your freestyle and swim in a way that not only looks good but it gives you speed and allows you to swim for a long time without getting tired. If you enjoyed this video, let me know in the comments

what you’re gonna work on next and you can also check out our 33 minute breakdown of the full freestyle stroke in this video here. 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 Look (And Feel) Effortless In The Water appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Sam Short recently went a 3:41 for his. 400 freestyle. Let’s take a look at what he does really well in his freestyle technique and he uses a galloping style of freestyle. So let’s take a look at this style and how this kind of technique might benefit you. And I think it can be a very effective way to swim open water for a lot of people because in the open water you’ve got a bit more buoyancy with the waves and the chop.

This sort of technique can go a long way, and you do see this with a lot of the good. Triathlon swimmers, and a lot of open water swimmers as well. So let’s take a look from the underwater shot to begin with.

00:50 Head Position (Shoulders Near The Cheeks)

Get your NanoClear swimming goggles here and get 15% off your first purchase with code PODCAST15.

Grab the freestyle checklist here:

Work with us (stroke analysis coaching):

Join a camp:

Watch on Youtube:

Transform your freestyle in 33 minutes:

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.

Sam Short recently went a 341 for his 400 freestyle. Let's take a look at what he does really well in his freestyle technique. And he uses a galloping style of freestyle. So let's take a look at this style and how this kind of technique might benefit you. And I think it can be a very effective way to swim open water for a lot of people, because in the open water, you've got a bit more buoyancy with the waves and the chop. This sort of technique can go a long way. And you do see this with a lot of the good triathlon swimmers and a lot of open water swimmers as well. So let's take a look from the underwater shot to begin with. We've seen with Sam's head position. He looks pretty much straight down at this point. Now as he's reaching forwards with this arm, have a look at where his shoulder is. It's near his cheek. It's next to the side of his face. And we see that with good freestyles as they're extending forwards, they aren't going ear to ear to shoulder. They're going shoulder near the side of the face near the cheek, closing this gap a little bit in order to help them set up their catch. Now you don't necessarily need this shoulder to touch because that's probably going to be uncomfortable for you. But if it's near the side of the face, that can help you move the arm in a way to set up that high elbow. Because what happens at this point if you drop your shoulder is the elbow drops with it. And that means you've got to drop the elbow catch, which isn't very effective. So we see that with a good catch is the shoulder will stay near the side of the face near the

cheek as you go through that catch. Now you'll also see here that when he enters the water, he's in line with his shoulder, extends out, gets fingers below wrist, wrist below elbow, then points those fingers down, and the elbow comes out to the side here, where the elbow is the widest part of the arm. So if you look at your stroke, and your hand is the widest part of the arm, then you're in a weaker position than what you would be otherwise, because that is the position. Well, this is the position that allows you to use your lats, your back through your chest as well, through that movement of the catch and the pull. So it's common to see with all the good freestylers, they get to that position when their hand is moving under their shoulder. We call this the power diamond, right here. So the power diamond is the hands under the shoulder. It looks like half a diamond or a diamond if you've got both arms there. And we came up with a drill a couple years ago called the YMCA drill, which you can see here. And in that drill, we have some as kick for five seconds in four positions, those positions being the start of the catch, the high elbow position, and then the power diamond is the third one. And the exit is the fourth. Now it's a bit of a funny drill. And you might look a bit strange doing this at the pool. But we find a lot of swimmers do that drill. And then they've got a much better sense of where they should be through the stroke as they're swimming. And so they naturally start to move through these ideal positions in their stroke. So the three, the YMCA drill is a

bit of a strange one, but quite often do it at clinics. And a lot of people like to do that to help improve their catch and their pool. Now if you have a look above the water, this is that galloping stroke that you can see here. So Sam goes, he actually submerges himself under the water here. And then he lifts himself up and out of the water quite high over the top here. And then he comes over and goes back down very similar sort of stroke that you'd see with micro falps. He had a similar sort of style. And it just depends on what suits you best. If you look at Elijah Winton, next to him in this race, he stays pretty flat, he's pretty even, whereas this more galloping sort of stroke is what Sam prefers to do and works well for his style, how he's built and what he's developed over time. And it can be extremely effective. Now one thing that we see with this more galloping sort of free style is a difference in timing of the arms. So you notice on this side, his right hand enters the water, this hand is almost finishing the catch. So that enters this one's just finishing the catch. If we go to the next stroke, you'll see that he initiates this catch earlier, the right hand catch is going earlier. And when his left hand enters, which we have the best frame for that there, but you'll see that he's a lot further through the stroke. There we go. So his left hand has entered the water here. This arm is almost at his navel or his belly button

there. So he's a lot further through it. So the timing is actually quite different. One side is a bit more catch up. The other side is a little bit more sprint stroke. So it's a quicker on one side on the other. So that's what you see with that galloping stroke. So the side that you're breathing to is where you'll have a bit more catch up. The side that you're not breathing to is the one that will initiate that catch sooner. And that's where you get that lift through the stroke is just sort of driving yourself through, list you up a little bit higher through here. And he throws that other arm over the top of the water. And that's and then he also has to come down from there. So that's where he gets submerged under the water a little bit more. So this can be a good thing to practice in the open water, especially if you're going race pace, you can do this a lot easier, not so easy to do at slower paces. But if you are going faster, this is when you can start to work towards this sort of technique. Now it's not for everyone. It does require a relatively strong kick and effective kick. So if you're, if you much prefer like an easy two bit kick, and now you're swimming around sort of two minute pace, I wouldn't necessarily suggest a galloping sort of freestyle stroke necessarily, you're probably better off looking for that more even stroke. But just depends where you're at this can be a really effective way to swim at effortless swimming, our mission is simple, make swimming more enjoyable. Whether you're training for your next race, swimming for fitness or just love being in the

water, we're here to help you swim faster, smoother and with more confidence. And one thing that can make or break a swim is your goggles. If you've ever struggled with foggy lenses mid session, you know how frustrating it can be. That's why we created the effortless swimming hydro clear anti fog goggles for long lasting crystal clear vision. I've been using them myself. And the difference is night and day. I'm not the only one Deborah swam 36 kilometers down the Derwent River. And the entire time her vision stayed crystal clear. No fog, no frustration, just an uninterrupted swim. So what makes a hydro clear goggles different? It's all in the technology. Unlike ordinary anti fog coatings that wear off over time, hydro clear super hydrophilic technology is built into the lens material itself. Here's how it works. Instead of fog forming as tiny droplets, water spreads evenly across the lens, creating a thin film that prevents fog from even starting. And the result, consistently clear vision, swim after swim. And the durability, our lenses are CNAS certified. Test show that even after 2000 rubs with a wet cloth, under a 200 gram load, the lens stays fog free. No gimmicks just serious performance that last. Using them as simple. Just wet the lenses before putting them on, and you're set for a fog free swim. Ready to see the difference yourself. Get 15% off your first pair of hydro clear anti fog goggles with the code podcast at shop effortless swimming.com. That's

15% off your first pair of goggles with the code podcast at shop effortless swimming.com. We also have a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're not happy with the goggles for any reason, you can simply return them for a refund. Don't let foggy goggles ruin another swim, try hydro clear today and experience clear vision from start to finish. Now if we have a look from the side under the water, you'll see his catch from this side view, we get fingers pointing down, elbow bending a bit there. And it's a good catch. It's nothing extreme or over the top, but it doesn't need to be anything crazy. He's still getting a big paddle. And you'll somewhat see it here is he's got that elbow bent a lot on that side. So the left arm in the water there gets a really good catch. But it's not like we're going from 90 degrees. So sometimes people think, the more extreme I can make my catch the better. It's not the case. It's what's comfortable, what's sustainable and what suits you best. And you can say it's still a very, very good catch from that position. So there's some of the main things that we can see in Sam's stroke. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you would like to get a full breakdown of freestyle technique, click this video above. 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 This Stroke Crushes In Open Water appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

What does it really take to swim the English Channel or any marathon swim? My guest today, Craig Lewin, is a triple crown marathon swimmer and coach who’s helped athletes tackle some of the toughest swims on the planet. We talk about how to train for hours in cold, rough water. How to stay motivated over years of preparation and the mental tricks that can carry you through the tough times when you feel like quitting.

If you’ve ever wondered how ordinary people achieve extraordinary swims, this episode will show you how and if you’re already into long distance swimming. Myself and World Record Holder, Andy Donaldson will be running two long distance retreats next year. One in the Whitsunday is in June. And one in Tahiti in September.

So if you’d like to enhance your open water skills, learn from the best, and also have one of the best holidays of your life, this is a chance to join myself and Andy Donaldson on a long distance Swim retreat. I’ll include the link in the show notes below.

02:26 Starting Your Journey: The English Channel Swim

Join a camp:

Grab the freestyle checklist here:

Work with us (stroke analysis coaching):

Get in touch with Craig:

Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the swim, you know, but really boredom is probably the biggest one. Like, and you experience your training is like boredom. It’s it’s understanding. All right. I don’t feel great. I don’t want to swim anymore. I’m tired. I’m cranky. I’m hungry. Like you’re going to go through every emotion. You’re going to be irritable and it’s it’s perseverance. It’s great. It’s it’s dealing with that boredom. 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.

What does it really take to swim the English Channel or any marathon swim? My guest today, Craig Lewin is a triple crown marathon swimmer and coach who’s helped athletes tackle some of the toughest swims on the planet. We talk about how to train for hours in cold, rough water, how to stay motivated over years of preparation and the mental tricks that can carry you through the tough times when you feel like quitting. If you’ve ever wondered how ordinary people achieve extraordinary swims, this episode will show you how. And if you’re already into long distance swimming, myself and world record holder Andy Donaldson will be running two long distance retreats next year. One in the Witsunday is in June and one in Tahiti in September. So if you’d like to enhance your open water skills, learn from the best and also have one of the best holidays of your life. This is a chance to join myself and Andy Donaldson on a long distance swim retreat.

I’ll include the link in the show notes below. Craig, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for joining me on another episode talking just before the podcast you mentioned that a lot of people had found out about you beyond the breakers conference and what you do in long distance swimming. So it’s cool to hear that a lot of people found out about you through this podcast, but also I’m really candy jumping to some of the topics that I think you probably get a lot of questions about when it comes to marathon swimming, some of those challenges that people are facing, the questions they’ve got in their mind. So I’d really love to cover those things on this episode. So welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to the conversation. So let’s kick it off with someone who’s keen to swim the English Channel. It’s a fairly, I guess, common goal in marathon swimming where a lot of people will get

started with a big challenge and the English Channel is probably the most well known one. Where does someone start when they’re thinking about swimming the English Channel? Yeah, I mean, I think that is probably the most common email I get is I want to do the English Channel or I want to do it next year. And I think the big thing is education. A lot of what I do in the initial emails when I’m doing the back and forth is you need a pilot. So if you don’t have that pilot, you’re not doing this channel. They generally book two to three years out. So I always direct people to the Channel Swimming Association or the Channel Swimming and Pilots Federation for info on how to get on a list to book a pilot. And then those websites as well as my own, we have some good resources for walking people through the process of just getting signed up and really getting signed up is getting that boat captain, but even with finding the pilot,

there’s a whole positioning system around it that is important for people to understand because it’s not just, it’s usually four to five swimmers per swimmable tide and that position matters because person who has the first lot has the highest chance or probability of swimming and the person in the fifth slot is kind of a crapshoot depending on whether and how fast they get through the first four people. So, you know, the first first step is really just understanding the timelines behind the how long it will take just to get to the Channel and then after that it comes down to training and once you have the pilot, I’d like to say the training is the easy part, but even that’s not necessarily true. When you have two, three years, if you’re a newer swimmer even new to open water marathon swimming, that’s plenty of time to do the training to do the speed work to basically do everything to set yourself up for success.

So, you know, usually I like to do stepping stone swims. So if we have two years and they have no marathon swim experience or maybe a 10 K here they’re in warm water. I want to help them select swims that are, you know, working their way up that way. If they say they do a 15 mile or 25 K the year before the Channel and it’s cold or water and they’re like, that was way too much training and way too much swimming and I hate it. Then they’re not going to waste all that money

going through, you know, the English Channel and if they love it, then they know exactly what they’re setting for, you know, for year to year three of training and each year gets progressively bigger, but it doesn’t feel as far away because the previous year, if they are training for, you know, 25 K, well, we’re getting ready for a six to eight hour swim. And if they’re training for the channel, we only adding really four or five more hours to that. So they don’t feel like they’re going from no experience to 12 or 13 or 14 hours. They’re like, oh, I only have to go a few more hours of swimming and it feels a lot more achievable. But at the end of the day, it comes down to understanding the process behind getting a pilot and then once you have that pilot locked in, it is generally finding a coach or a mentor, someone who knows what they’re talking about. And after that, it’s coming up with a training plan, the nutrition plan and

just putting in the time and the effort.

And what does that look like in terms of a training plan? How much swimming would you recommend someone do each week as they’re building up to this swim? And obviously it’s going to be dependent on multiple factors, but what’s a general sort of plan look like for you? Yeah. So for me, the way I do it, it’s cycles, right? It’s like, it’s a triathlon. It’s like any long distance sport. You’re not just, you don’t have to go and swim 10 hours every Saturday. So for me and my athletes, it is more of a cycle where every four weeks will build on top of the previous four weeks. So we’ll do recovery week, speed week, build week, bulk week, bulk week is like the highest volume for the cycle. It’s where we do our long swims, but ultimately it’s, it’s, it’s more about the time than it is the distance. And I say that because if you’re planning your English channel swim, it’s 21 miles, but depending on how fast or slow you are, you may

nail it in 21, but realistically, you’re probably training for a 25 or 30 mile swim the way the currents work. So it’s really more about training to the time you think you’re going to be in, in a worst case scenario situation. And that’s, that’s, that’s how I train my athletes because I want them to be prepared for the worst. If they think they can do it in 10 or 11 or 12 hours based on their, you know, how fast they go. Maybe they get bad weather and it actually takes 15. I need them to be able to do it in 15. Like they need to be, keep, you know, be able to keep on going. So it really does depend, like you said on, you know, what’s your base leading into it? What’s your experience? What’s your speed? I think it’s anywhere at peak

between probably 12 and 20 ish hours of training in that very biggest cycle and then each cycle is working your way up to it. So you don’t go from, you know, 10 K of swimming to 50 K of swimming in a week, like overnight. It takes several months to build up to that safely and still get the speed work and still do all the things you need to do out of the water to stay healthy, to stay injury-free and, and, you know, make sure your body’s ready to get it done.

I listened to the, there’s a podcast called the exponential athlete and it had Bob Bowman on there and it was a great podcast listening to the differences between Michael Phelps and Leon Marchion and obviously like both swimming the same events, both incredible swimmers and two best in the world at those events, but such different people in such different approaches. But the thing that’s two things that you mentioned so far that Bob talked about was the first one being like preparing for the worst case situation. So it tells the story of a couple of years back. He accidentally stepped on Michael’s goggles and broke them before a race, turned to fly, I think. And he said, and Michael said, oh, my goggles were leaking during the race. I couldn’t see anything. He goes, well, yeah, how’d you know when the wall was coming up? He said, well, I just counted my strokes off every, off every wall. And so they always just prepare

for the worst case situation. Also in terms of visualization, like he said, Michael every day would visualize and he would run through every possible thing that could go wrong. So he was prepared no matter what hit him on race day. And the other thing there too is just eating an elephant one bite at a time. It’s just like just very gradual steps progressively building up and anything is achievable if you set this like a small enough initial goal. And for many people, I think that English channel might seem unattainable until they just start the process and they show themselves and prove to themselves that, okay, well, I can do 5Ks. I can do five miles in colder water. Okay. Well, maybe I can get to eight next time. It’s just that those small steps at a time and a two to three year window, which you’re likely going to have waiting on the pilots. Then you you’ve got enough time to be able to no matter where you’re at, you’ve got enough

time to to probably build up and be very well prepared for an English channel swim.

Yeah, no, it’s definitely true. I think the harder part is the motivation, how your goal is two years out, right? Like you’re an Olympian and it’s your job to swim. That’s not easy, but you know what you’re working towards and and I think for people who have lives and families and and jobs and this is like a hobby for them having that goal so far out. It is like you’re saying those small wins are important because that is what’s keeping people motivated and excited, you know, year after year until they actually finally get their opportunity to even get in the water. And even that is not a guarantee. You know, you get to the chick, you get to Dover and you’re riding the Dover coaster because you know what’s going on with weather and the captain calls you six hours before he says, All right, we’re going and then you get to the dock and he’s like, actually, we’re going in six more hours and go home and sleep and come back. And you know,

the weather can be bad. You can get pulled for a myriad of reasons and by keeping that motivation and that discipline for that long does take very committed serious athlete and finding those small wins helps you helps you get to that at least that start line if you will, which I actually call you know, if you get your chance to do the swim, that’s the victory lap. Hard parts, the training the same as itself is is just like the cherry on top. Yeah. How do you keep someone motivated if you’re coaching someone and they’re they’re struggling with that that motivation, they’re fatigued and they’re run down. Is there any thing that you come back to about the like the why why they sign up in the first place? Is there is a strategies that you’ve got when you you feel someone’s in a bit of a slump? Yeah, I mean, absolutely actually last year for the for beyond the breakers I spoke to Andy Donaldson and his I guess mentor and crew chief Jay

and that was a big big conversation we had was the why and understanding like reminding yourself why are you doing this? And when Andy would hit you know, tough patches and swims or training that was what Jay was you know, trying to bring him back to and I think the same thing holds true for me my athletes and anyone it’s it’s under going back to like well why are you doing this? Are you doing it for charity or doing it for yourself or are you doing it to prove something to yourself?

But at the end of the day there there needs to be that why it’s it’s too much time and effort being sacrificed and if it means nothing to you that you don’t get it done so for me it is reminding them like hey like you’re meant you’re supposed to feel like this it is okay to feel tired and run down you’re you’re a human and we might have to adjust training like their body may not be responding and sometimes all they need is like a week off and that’s not making a breaking training unless you’re doing it week after week after week sometimes it’s the best thing for you so you know, some of the strategies I’ll I’ll employ it’s it’s it’s going to be reminding them having them do journaling or reflecting on how far they’ve come I think something that we all lose sight of is where we started because I think social media does this I think we do this to ourselves as as people trying to achieve something really really cool and epic is

you only see what you have left you don’t see where you came from and you also don’t see who’s watching you and who you’re motivating by putting in this time and I think that’s a really important piece that does for me personally keeps me motivated is being reminded like yeah I’m not not Sarah Thomas I’m not doing a four-way channel crossing that’s probably not in the cards for me or some of these other epic swims that that go on like almost weekly it feels like but all I’m seeing is that so I almost feel bad about myself and and I think anyone going through channel training is probably seeing very similar things and thinking they don’t stack up so keeping that motivation of like well no you couldn’t even do a 10K three months ago and now you’re doing six hour swims no problem or you couldn’t even handle water that was you know 58 50 58 59 degrees Fahrenheit you three four months ago and now you’re doing all your swims in it

so I think it’s it’s reminding them like no you’re putting in the work you’re doing the right things like let’s just focus on the next long swim like you to be excited about your bulk weeks and your long swims because that’s that’s an area you haven’t been before think of all the things you’re going to learn we’re one step closer to that goal and and that’s really you know some of the tactics it’s it’s just keeping them achieving goals and staying excited about those goals it’s finding this if you’re two three years out having a swim to work toward every similar it is hard to just three years out be like I’m training for this so you need to have like those stepping stones swims and then yeah just remind like having them remind themselves like well why did you sign up why do you want to do this like what is fun about this because in training nothing’s really that fun about it you’re tired you cranky you’re hungry but when you remember

why you’re doing it it it does bring that motivation back into things that you know and you may have lost an event and that reminder is usually all it takes for a highly motivated person yeah and one small tip that I’ve I’ve seen so I had a friend training for the Capri Napoli swim and she just got some of the shocks open water headphones and that like that made a massive difference for her long distance swims because she was doing them pretty much all solo and it’s a long time in the water by yourself and just having some music in the background that you don’t like it’s not interfering with how you’re swimming because it just sits over is that made a massive difference for her and so I think even just something as simple as that can help get you through some of those boring times because I remember training for for Rotnest and it was just a lot of time in a 25 meter pool no one else is training for it. I was by myself

and it was just it was monotonous and so it’s just a grind getting through it and so if you’ve got something there to keep you a little bit more entertained that can that can help as well. Yeah, I did the same for my English channel training. The pool is just tough place for me when you’re doing five, six hour swims. So and I do the same thing I had I had a similar mp3 player for underwater and I was a little bit more harsh. I guess for me I was like, all right, if you get two hours in you get to wear it and listen to podcasts for half and basically use it as a reward to get through even the long swim. So I think it’s a really great tool to help you get through it. So it’s a great tip.

Now in terms of eating and fueling for long distance swimming, my feeling is that most people who you don’t come from that background they don’t understand the importance of fueling and how much they often need to be able to keep their energy levels through it through a swim and I say that from personal experience and I say that from seeing a lot of athletes that I’ve I’ve coached just under undersell the importance of fueling. So what should what should someone eat? How often should they be eating and what are some of the most common foods or energy sources that you see your athletes using? Yeah, I think we’ll figure out like as you know people listening to this the answer is it depends. It really depends on you know what you like as a swimmer and and what you’re training for you and hot water cold water, salty water, fresh water. So you know, I think generally I have a starting point for most athletes. I’m not a nutritionist.

I don’t claim to be I just take in it, you know anecdotal evidence for myself and and people I’ve learned from and trained and I found that you know starting at 30 minute intervals is a good starting point and basically you can increase or decrease from there depending on how your body responds. And I’m you know, I’m usually recommending somewhere around 300 calories an hour. So about 100, 150 per feed to start. Some people won’t eat as much. Some people will need more depending on stroke rates, sizes, water temperatures, but I generally find like that’s a pretty good starting point for for learning. And then some some people as they do their long swims and the whole purpose of the long swims is to figure out well, this is not only getting the body ready but is it is the nutrition plan working? Do I have to tweak? Do I bonk at a certain point? Do I hate a flavor at a certain point? So, you know, that’s where I’ll start.

And then in terms of foods, it’s it’s you know easily digestible foods. I think sports drinks, I think it’s more teens is a pretty popular one. Hammer nutrition. I’ve seen a lot with heat. I personally use gu roctane and carbo-carbo-pro. It’s basically I think Maxim. There’s a European version called Maxim and it’s like pure maltodextrous. It’s like eating a loaf of bread and in a bottle of water. No flavor. So it’s you know, it’s usually something that is heavily carb based and you can get down quickly. English Channel in particular and I think a handful of other swims getting the food down as quick for every, you know, 30 seconds or minute of of time you’re treading water. You’re getting pushed off. You know, you’re getting pushed by the currents in the wrong direction. So getting feeds and quickly is important. Getting that hydration and is important.

But that doesn’t work for everyone. So I think it is more about experimenting and that’s why having these long, you know, eight, eight, nine, 10, 12 month timelines where you can do these long swims every month and multiple long swims every month and you can test the different foods. So like the first month or two of long swims is just testing what you like. Does it settle well? Do you feel bloated? Do you feel like you’re bonking at the end of the swim? And I think people who do marathon swimming or new to it, they need to be observant of how they feel and write down what went well in the long swim and what didn’t and learn from it. So now I don’t always recommend solids, but I also know people who have been very successful doing English Channel eating jelly munchkins. So like there’s no, there’s no rules. It’s whatever works for your body, but I think it’s more, you need a methodical way to start and you need to be very observant of what you’re

doing, working with your coach and tweaking based on how your body responds. But when you’re two, three months out, you’re on those last long swims. Those can just be dress rehearsals for your A swim. Like you’re just literally, like you said earlier with visualization, you’re just doing the reps to beat it. And if you’re finding, hey, I’m so sick of this very flavor at hour 12, well, then maybe you, you have a similar fee type, but a different flavor. And these are only things you’re going to learn through experience. That one’s going to really be able to teach it to you because it is so personal and so dependent on you and what you need to get through your swims. But I think 30 to 30 minutes starting point, 200 to 300 calories an hour is where I start and then you increase or decrease, you know, from there, based on how you respond. Yeah, great, great starting point. And then you can adjust based on your own needs.

And you just, and you do find that, you know, maybe for three hours, you don’t mind this one flavor of jail or carbohydrate drink, but then you do start to get sick of it and that aftertaste and just the same thing again and again does. Yeah, you struggle to get it down sometime. So it’s, it is very, very personal. Now, in terms of dealing with the cold, I think this is one of the biggest issues that face people who are going to swim in the English Channel because as soon as body temperature drops too low, it can be challenging to bring it back up. There are ways to do it, but it’s, it’s going to be one of the biggest factors as part of your swim. So how do you approach this with people? How do you acclimatize them to the colder conditions? And do you look at weight at body fat percentage? Is that a factor as well? What are some of those things that you consider? Yeah, this is probably the thing that scares people the most

is probably the colds more than the distance. If you’re thinking this swim, English Channel and North Channel, there’s so many colder swims that I think people know about. There’s also a ton of hot swims that are totally different challenge and outside of my wheelhouse. But in terms of acclimation, nothing beats being in the cold water. Like the more you can train in like conditions is going to be how you acclimate. So I think the first step is, people need to educate themselves on like the signs and symptoms of hypothermia. Like if you don’t know what to look for, then you can, you might not push yourself hard enough or you might push yourself too far and put yourself at risk and that is completely preventable. So there’s a lot of different resources and articles out there

that at least educate you on like some of the warnings, signs and symptoms. Like if you get the claw, you know, that’s a common thing. People, their circulation,

their bloodstream gets colder, their hands kind of lose muscle, like the ability or fine motor motions to get like this claw. So it’s like, all right, well, I’m cold, but I’m not going to die yet. You get, you know, if you’re simmering in the water, that’s generally a pretty bad sign. If you are mentally just not coherent, that is like you need to get out immediately. So I think understanding these is really important. Once you have the education behind it, I think it’s pushing yourself to get out there. And I like when swimmers, they’ll swim down the season. So I’m in Massachusetts. It gets a little cold. I think the water temps get to like,

the cold that I’ve experienced was like 28 degrees Fahrenheit. So like negative something Celsius, I don’t know, negative five, negative 10. It’s really cold. So you’re not really doing more than most, most normal people like me have been doing more than a few minutes. Then you have like the ice somers who are freaks and they’re doing, you know, 40 minutes in that. But so we’ll swim down the season and then once it gets a little bit warmer, you swim up the season. So with a lot of my athletes, like especially in the New England area, like they put on the neoprene. Like I know it’s not our thing, but when it’s 35 degrees in the water and you can get an hour in, that is beneficial. And then as the water gets, you know, warms up, starts stripping neoprene down, but the more you’re in it, the easier it is to acclimate. I also have swimmers in Florida, Alabama, where like the water just doesn’t get colder than 70. So they have to travel.

They’ll travel around the country finding cold water and nothing really beats that, but there are cold plunges. And I think that is very beneficial tool. I did my channel swim during COVID. So I relied very heavily during my quarantine in England on literally just sitting in a cold bath. And I think the mistake people make is they think the coldest water possible is what they should be doing. When in reality it’s, you should fill your tub and let it sit at 55, 56 and sit in that as long as possible. Because that is more indicative of what you’re going to experience versus sitting in 35 for four or five minutes. That is not what you’re going to feel at hour 11 because if you did that, you’d be dead. So I think, you know, being cold as much as possible is incredibly helpful. Being advocated on signs and symptoms, but also listening to your body. Some days you get in and if you’re dehydrated, you can sleep well. Your body’s going to respond very differently

to cold attempts and you can’t let one bad swim get in your head. You can’t dwell on it and think, oh, I’ve never, I’m never going to get it. But really, I mean, getting in when it’s cold, getting in when you’re uncomfortable, building that time up over the several months. That is really where acclimation happens. And there’s some tough people who they don’t do anything and they just get in and can tough it out and it’s not a fun experience, but they do it.

But yeah, in terms of body weight, I think if you’re, you may, you know, if you’re low body fat percentage, you will likely need to gain five or 10 pounds. I think the average person is not necessarily going to have to do that. I think if they are doing the acclimation right, their body is going to adjust

because it’s a balance. If you gain 10 pounds, that’s 10 pounds more you’re pulling through the water and that’s going to affect your swimming. It’s going to affect your techniques and what if you gain too much weight too fast, it can cause shoulder injuries. It can cause different injuries because you’re now carrying a load differently. So I don’t generally tell people like gain weight unless they are an Olympic athlete. That’s like 4% body fat, in which case they have no chance. So I think that’s more of a, hey, I’m doing all the right stuff and I’m still having problems. At that point, maybe it’s a gain a couple pounds, but there’s no need to gain 20 or 30 pounds. Maybe it’s five, maybe it’s 10 max, but for England, I don’t think it’s required.

Maybe when you get to North Channel where it is much colder, packing on those pounds becomes a little bit more important. But as a beginner, it’s not something you’re generally going to have to do right out of the gate. Hey, real quick, in case you didn’t know, we run swimming camps around the world from the Maldives, Thailand, Japan, with Sundays, Galapagos Islands plus a bunch of new locations for next year. So if you’d like to join us at a future camp and improve your swimming and explore and experience some of the best locations to swim in the world, then go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash camps. We’ve got all the dates and locations listed there. A question I get all the time is I’m not that quick. Will this camp be suitable for me? We have a wide range of speeds and abilities come to the camps. So as long as you can swim a kilometer, there’s a very good chance that these camps will be suitable for you.

And if you’re not sure, just get in touch with us and we’ll make sure that we do find you a suitable camp. Thanks for listening. Let’s get back into the podcast.

Gotcha. Now, what about pacing? Such a long swim. Is that, does that come into consideration for the long distance swimming? It does.

I always tell like my summer’s and I was taught very similarly. It’s kind of like pool races too, right? You want to even split a negative split. You don’t want to go off fast and then completely die. I think this is an exaggerated version of that. If you go up too fast in hour one, you’re going to be hurt and come a lot, hour 11 in a real bad way. So a really aggressive pace up front is it can be very detrimental to swim. I have personal experience with that. I was competitive growing up and when I did my 20 bridges, it is very much, I mean, they have like a race component, but ultimately it’s everyone just trying to finish. And the second you put two people next to each other, they’re racing, whether they realize it or not. And I just didn’t swim my own day and I went out really hurt in the first two hours and it basically blew up the entire day. It took me like three or four hours just to feel normal again and recover from it.

So because it’s you’re using more energy than you used to in training. So now that impacts your fueling, you know, you’re changing the dynamics of the stroke. Maybe you’re doing things you didn’t normally do and now you have these weird pains that you don’t normally have. So it does become very important and I always tell, you know, my athletes like, what’s your goal? Most athletes are not going to break the English, you know, the world record for the English channel speed. Both are just trying to finish. And if that’s the case, it’s very easy to like get out there, take the first hour, just warm up, you’re not going to feel good. Like you’re going to be all over the place, especially if you’re, you know, going at one in the morning and it’s dark, you’re just trying to figure out, you know, how far the boat is, how to navigate in the waters, just the excitement of the day that’s finally here. So, you know, it’s that first hour,

just warm up, get to the first feed, feel good, get your feet under your belt, get to the next feed and then once you’re there, you’re in it and you’re really trying to get into that flow state more than you are trying to go in aggressive pace. So I always push for an even split or a negative split. If you’re feeling great, you know, the last hour of a swim, go to town. The problem with a swim like the English channel is that last mile could take you four hours if you get stuck in a bad current. And if you go out like a maniac in the first hour, you might not have the energy to finish, you know, a mile offshore. Like you’ve come this close to your goal, but because you made a decision very early on, you’re now not necessarily going to complete that goal when you’re as close to finishing as you possibly could be. But yeah, it’s more about that marathon swim pace, like just get in and feel good and, you know, build into the swim.

And that’s really the best advice I’ve gotten and I’ve found it to work really well with the majority of athletes I work with. And quite often when you back off the pace at the start, like you often have to go, I think, easier than what you think you need to go because even if you think you’re going, oh, this is, I can hold this all day, good chance of actually going that little bit too fast. And often you swim a lot better when you just relax. And like the feedback I get so often from people who I coach is that I like I went like in training, the first half of this set, I was just going really cruisey and I was hitting say 140 for example. And then I started to push it a bit more in the back end and I was going 145s even though I was trying harder. So often that more relaxed state that you’re in, you tend to swim faster. So it actually works in your advantage even more than just the energy conservation.

I mean, it’s really true. It’s you watch like the fastest athletes on the planet and they look like they’re more than 53 sellers. But, you know, those distance numbers, they look like they’re really putting any effort in and it’s impressive, I guess slow, it’s fast.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, what are some other challenges that you’ll want your swimmers to go through in training to be prepared for the big day? Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the swim, you know, but really boredom is probably the biggest one. And you experience, your training is boredom. It’s understanding, all right, I don’t feel great. I don’t want to swim anymore. I’m tired, I’m cranky, I’m hungry. You’re going to go through every emotion. You’re going to be irritable and it’s perseverance, it’s grit, it’s dealing with that boredom. And I think techniques like what you talked about earlier with using the headphones, using those as a tool, not making them a crutch but using them as a tool to help you with the boredom. The biggest thing is it’s not assuming you’re going to get a glassy day. You could assume you’re going to get some waves, you’re going to get some wind, you’re going to get some chop,

things are going to go your way. And I usually encourage anyone who reaches out to me where they work with me or not that they go out in challenging conditions. Now, that doesn’t mean being moron and, you know, go out in massive swell during a hurricane. It means, yeah, if it’s raining, it’s swimmable, it’s safe, but it’s raining, it’s choppy, there’s a little more swell. Today you’d otherwise look at it and be like, I don’t want to do that. It’s the day you need to get out there because that could be the day you have the day of your swim. So I think dealing with that is incredibly important because when you’re, you know, 12 hours, 10, 11, 12 hours into a swim and you’re almost finished but then the wind picks up and you feel like you’re going nowhere and then the waves, they’re not big waves but it’s choppy which makes it really hard to find that rit, like that swimming rhythm makes you do different things to breathe,

like staying calm under that and making sure that the day of your event is not the first time you’re experiencing it is that’s really important. So I think those are two things swimming in the dark. If you are going to do Catalina, if you are going to do English panel, if you’re going to do any swim that’s going to take, you know, more than 14 hours, you’re likely swimming in the dark at some point. So understanding like, well, how does your body feel at night? Are you scared of something in the dark when everything is just blackness? Do you know how to navigate in the dark? Does your crew know how to communicate with you in the dark? These are all things that I think are challenges that may be faced and training is about tackling those challenges. So the day of the swim, there’s almost nothing new. Another, you know, technique like you mentioned earlier is visualization. You’re not going to be able to simulate

every single obstacle you’re going to find the day of your swim. So visualization is a great technique for getting reps in where it isn’t the first time. Yeah, maybe it’s the first time you’re physically experiencing it, but you’ve gone through exactly how you’re going to handle that situation when it does occur. Those are, you know, some of the bigger ones it’s the boredom. The doubt is tough. I think that goes back to the motivation of like, look at all the things you’ve done. Look at where we are now. And I think the thing that’s carried me through almost every swim and a lot of my swimmers, my first coach was Dan Simonelli. He’s, he runs the around-corn out of swim now, but he’s like, he’s the Catalina guy. He’s an English channel, a bunch of other swims. And he always said like, just because you feel bad now doesn’t mean you’re going to feel bad in a half hour. So just, just ride it up, just keep swimming. I think most athletes understand

like the difference between like, all right, I’m uncomfortable and this is career ending. And maybe you don’t ride out career ending, but if you’re like, all right, my shoulder kind of hurts, my neck kind of hurts. I’m uncomfortable. Things just feel terrible. You just got to make it to the next feet. Just make it like the 15 minutes and a half hour to the next feet, stretch, re-evaluate. And more often than not, the pains like that you feel at hour four, five or six, like, are gone randomly, you know, a couple hours later. So it’s, it’s just riding out and staying tough. And I think that is the hardest thing to teach and that’s what the importance of those long swims. You have to do the long swims because everyone’s different and everyone’s going to find different tools that motivate them. And as a coach myself, you know, you as well and others out there, it’s, it’s about providing athletes with different tools for them to try.

And ultimately they’re going to come up with their own kind of mixed match of tools that work for them. And, and that’s, that’s as a coach of the mentor and that’s what I’m trying to do is help them develop that marathon swim identity because that is what’s going to carry them through. I’m a different person now, my motivated differently as is most people. So I think that’s, that’s the main goal is you need to get uncomfortable so that you can learn the tools to get through it and that’s just going to carry you, you know, carry you through more often than not, both in the water and under the water. And you only realize that when you get to that, that point in your training session or in your, in your swim and speaking to Andy Donaldson said that when he was doing these, these longer swims, they weren’t allowed to say the word cold. It was, if he was starting to get cold, he’d say to his, to Jay, to his team,

he’d say it’s a little fresh in here. And so then they would have their strategies to help him warm up with some warm drinks and those sorts of things. So even just word play, you know, just making sure that you’re using the right words just to help you mentally and even some phrases I find can be useful. Like even thinking, all right, get to the next feed or like when you experience that discomfort and that, that really hard challenging time. So this is where everyone quits. So, you know, this is where I need to get through. And I remember doing the, the right nest swim and I was getting so cold in 17, 18 kilometers in with a few K to go. And I just, I kept telling myself, you’re so lucky to be here, you’re so lucky to be here. Like, you know, you could be anywhere else in the world but you’re so lucky to be here. And that got me through the last couple of Ks where I was starting to get a little bit hypothermic.

So whatever phrases, whatever words, whatever you tell yourself, it’s individual but it’s, it’s those little strategies and tools that you collect along the way that might help you complete a swim successfully rather than make it halfway across. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the word play is so true. You start thinking about something, then you voice it and it becomes real. And then it just the cycle that consumes you where you’re not actually cold but you’ve said it so many times, you believe it. But yeah, I like what you just said. I used to do that with myself and with other athletes and remind them like you chose to do this. Like you’re lucky enough to do this. You’re physically able to do this. But at the end of the day, like you chose to do this. You chose to pay a ton of money to do this. So like, you know, just you’re lucky you get to do this. You have, you have a lifestyle that allows you to do really cool things.

So let’s make the best of it. You get one shot. So let’s go after it. And I think that does, that can be very motivating for people. And what about choosing someone’s first marathon swim? So what are, what are some common first swims that you see? We spoke about Ingers channel, obviously. But then how would you help someone navigate? Because there’s a lot of different swims out there, a lot of different months to choose, which is a mate, you know, which is a great problem to have. But how should someone decide on what to first do? Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on like what their ultimate goal is. Like is it a channel swim in three years or is it just to become, you know, a marathon swim or doing a 10K? And I think once you understand like what the goal is, you know, seeing people love the cold, some people want nothing to do with the cold. So I think the first swim is about getting a win. It should be challenging,

but it should be something they’re excited to do. And if someone is just dreading doing like, oh, I picked it because it’s the only one I knew and it’s freezing and it’s choppy and I want nothing to do with it. That’s going to be a visual experience and they’re never going to want to do another swim again. So I think the first one is about getting a win, getting one under your belt. And it’s like when you do your first triathlon, it’s a disaster. Like you get through it and you’re super proud. Most people don’t jump into an Ironman because they do their first sprint triathlon. And then they’re like, it takes them two hours or three hours, like, which, you know, that’s a sprint that can be a long time. And then they realize, oh, I made these 400 mistakes, but I had a great time. So now the next one, they fixed all the mistakes. Now, you know, they’re, they do it in an hour instead of two. So it’s the same thing.

It’s about having the good experience and wanting to come back. And when they want to come back, they can go for something bigger and bigger. But it’s really just understanding like what gets them excited, what’s a distance that gets them excited. And also what is a, given the timeframe that they’re giving you, if they’re saying I have three months and I don’t know how to swim, well, that’s going to be a very different swim than, oh yeah, there’s a pool swimmer. I’m just not super comfortable in open water, but I can swim, you know, a 5K or 10K easily. And I think from there, you can help them pick a distance that is reasonable, that’s achievable with some work, but also you’re not going to have to develop a ramp plan so fast that they’re going to get injured. So I think there’s a lot of different factors that go into it, but the number one is, what is exciting to them? What are they excited about? And what is their current starting skill set?

And can you get them to where they need to be for the swim that you pick? If you have someone who lives in Florida, they’ve never done a cold swim and they want to do some, you know, Boston light swim in 58 degree water, two months later,

maybe it’s doable, but it’s, you know, it’s not going to be a super fun experience necessarily versus, you know, doing alligator light, which is going to be, you know, four or five hours for them, but in warm water, in currents, it’s still a challenge and it can be done in the time period. So I think there’s a lot of things that hinge on it, but ultimately when I help people pick, I want them to have a success, not a failure on their first one. And I think when they have that, they get that bug and then they’re excited to do the bigger and bigger and bigger.

Yeah, that’s right. If you have, if you have that success initially, that’s where it can really start to build. It’s like going to the casino, winning that first hand, you know, that’s going to give you that, that bug and that feeling. One thing you said there was achievable with some work and what gets you excited. I think those two things really, really helped to give you that motivation to do what you need to do to do that successfully because you don’t want to be like, I could walk out the door and do that tomorrow. You probably want an event that’s like, well, actually I’m going to have to put in a little bit of work here because that’s what’s going to get you to the pool every week and do the training that you need to do. Yeah, absolutely. If you know it’s in the bag, you’re not going to treat it with the respect it deserves and who knows how it’s going to go for you.

You know, one of the other mental challenges we haven’t talked about, but I’m sure you get this question a lot, is what about sharks? And I think of my immediate family. They’re just, because I surf a lot down here and they’re always like, well, what about sharks? And I saw this on the news and but it just never really crosses my mind whatsoever because I’ve done it for 20 plus years. I’ve seen one shark out there, but I see a ton of, I see so much footage from even like Bondi where it surfers and swimmers and there’s sharks around same with, there’s a good Instagram account to Melibu artist who’s like, always like white sharks with swimmers and people. And so that’s actually helped me a lot to just kind of go, even if they are out there with me, I’m probably going to be okay. How do you sort of explain that to swimmers who are worried about that side of open waters for me? Yeah, I mean, it’s the common question.

Some places you’re less concerned and I think one it’s location-based like where you are, it’s probably much more sharky than where I swim. We get sharky in the center around the Cape and Nantucket, but attacks are pretty rare and I think one thing I do is I have my athletes, you know, learn about what they’re nervous about, learn about their waters are swimming and learn about shark behaviors. So, you know, at our event last year at the beyond the breakers, we had Dr. Greg Skomal who’s like a shark researcher and he focuses like on the Cape and New England area for the mass state fisheries. And he was explaining why shark attacks happen and not only how to prevent them because it’s usually more often than not a mistaken identity, but there are certain conditions that may or when, you know, are common to attacks. And I think when a swimmer understands this, then they can, I don’t want to say avoid it, but they can lower their chances and feel better

with by swimming in locations where those conditions are present. Like I don’t think I would personally swim where there’s, you know, thousands of seals and it’s literally what sharks want to eat. So if I’m swimming next to a seal, the shark doesn’t know the difference, but if I’m swimming where there’s no seals, there’s no food source, so the chances are less likely. So I think a lot of it, you know, comes down to education and, you know, like you’re saying, follow the Instagram accounts, like see where the sharks are. You can swim in other locations. They’re out there, it’s their home. They don’t really want to eat you. Like it’s usually mistaken identity. And I think when you understand the actual statistics, it does make the risk feel, you know, a bit lower. And, you know, focus on other things, partner strokes, think about technique. It’s the same with colds. Like, you know, if Andy’s saying, oh, it’s, you know, feeling a bit fresh

or, you know, whatever, whatever he’s saying, it’s think about something else. Don’t let the thought consume you. And, you know, you look at, I felt like, look at everyone else swimming where you’re swimming. None of them have been eaten or attacked yet. So I don’t think I would be too concerned with that. And, you know, if you’re looking for some peace of mind, there’s deterrent technologies like shark bands, which, you know, you can, you can wear and they actually help a lot with stingrays. So if there’s stingrays in where you live, can help with that as well dispersing them. But, you know, that can add peace of mind. Just getting it out of your head can be enough to keep you going. But I think education, understanding the true marine life in your area and finding places to swim where, you know, some of that is, is less, I guess, less in your face.

The, one other thing that helped me a lot to was the Ocean Ramsey documentary on Netflix. Have you seen that? I have, yeah. Yeah, that was, and I’m sure like a lot of it’s embellished to, you know, it’s, it’s Netflix, but that, like to me, that actually made a massive difference. Like to see this girl go out and swim with these huge sharks and this great white and like it was incredible. So that kind of put my mind at ease even, even more, just watching that. So I’d recommend anyone is afraid of sharks, like check that out. I feel like it would help. Absolutely. But again, just learn the behaviors and then you, you know, you know when, where, what to do and I think you’ll feel a lot more confident. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now to wrap it up, what about some ways that people can train safely in open water if this is a new thing for them? Because I know a lot of people, they have that fear of the open water. They feel like once I’m out there,

like I mean, if I get in trouble, then that’s going to be the end of me. So how can people, how can people ease their way into it and do this thing safely? Yeah, I think there’s some really easy safety tips. And again, not an expert, but one of my biggest ones is I never recommend swimming alone, even regardless of your ability. Sometimes it’s not feasible, but especially if you’re newer, like even if you don’t have someone in the water with you, someone on land is spotting you can save your life. It can be the difference. So I always recommend having someone spotting or swimming with the body, never really doing it alone is, it’s probably one of my biggest ones. Don’t, like just because you’re going into open water, I think you don’t have to go straight out. Well, I think a lot of people go in and they’re like, I’m going to swim out to sea. I never recommend doing that. Like I think a great way to do it is you don’t even have to be

over your head is just get into water that is swimmable. So maybe it’s waist deep, maybe it’s chest deep and you see the bottom and swim parallel to shore if it’s safe to do. So obviously if there’s huge, huge swells, breakers, you know, get past them or try to swim in a location that doesn’t have them. But really it’s swim in a situation, put yourself in a situation where you’re swimming parallel and if you have an emergency, you can literally just stand up or you can take two or three strokes and just stand up. So you want to fight that ego of, oh, well, all these, all these other swimmers are going out to sea. Let them, you’re not quite there yet, but you’ll get there. Personally, I would swim parallel to shore because you don’t know what’s going to happen and it’s just easier to have a good exit plan. So, you know, start there where you see it and then you can go deeper and deeper as you see fit, but you can get, you know, hundreds of miles of swimming

going parallel to shore. You don’t need to go to sea. And then in terms of gear, I always recommend a brightly colored swim cap and then a tow float, whatever brand you like, a brightly colored tow float. It makes your spotter on land easier. It makes it easier to see for the spotter on land. It makes boat traffic can see you a lot better. So water crafts, surfers, it’s just making yourself more visible to avoid problems. They’re not designed to safety devices, but if you get into a pinch, you can always throw your arm over it for a second, regain composure and then get going. So I think those are a couple, you know, pretty easy safety tips for someone who’s newer to open water. And then if you can summon a beach of the lifeguard, that’s great. We don’t have a ton of them in my neck of the woods. So, but when you do, if you’re newer to it, go up to the lifeguard and say, hey, you know, I’m newer to this. I’m going to go for a swim.

If you don’t mind just like keeping an eye on me. And even that, then now they know to look for you and you’re probably going to be fine if you’re doing all of these things. But if you’re not, you have eyes on you and someone can get to you quickly. And I think that is the most important thing for anyone starting open water swimming. It’s more about having a good experience and building a healthy relationship with the water and not thinking you can beat Mother Nature because it would win just about every time. So, you know, those are, those are some of the easy safety, you know, pieces of advice that I tried to, to give to newer swimmers. And so far we’ve had a pretty good track record.

Awesome. And if those are listening, yeah, if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably interested in or already doing some sort of long distance swimming or open water swimming. You’ve got an event coming up in November, beyond the breakers. I want to talk a little bit about that and who it’s for and what you’ll be covering. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, November 8th, we are doing a conference in right outside Boston, Mass. And we have a lot of different speakers coming. The premise of the conference is open water specific. So it’s not for anyone level. We have a ton of great speakers coming and we were talking about everything open water. So a lot of what we covered today, it’s safety tips. It is the strength training to be on daily coming to talk about the strength training you can be doing and actually providing a routine for people to, you know, to see like, these are the exercises I need to be adding in for successful open water swims.

We have Lenny Kraselberg coming for a time Olympic gold medalist to kind of give us his, his journey and some of the lessons he’s learned as an elite swimmer that he’s been able to apply from his, you know, to his own life. We have Sarah Thomas coming. So really hitting a lot of the big open water swimmers and she has so many learnings from her swims. Then we have tons of local coaches coming as well and the goal of the day is to have everyone who attends walk away with actual items to help them improve no matter where they’re starting. So whether you are looking to, you know, just get into open water the first time if you’re looking to do your first 5K, 10K, mile marathon swim, you’ll walk away with the, the reputable resources that you can trust and go to when, you know, you’re ready to make that step and you’re looking for more information and the day of the event, it’s going to be an action packed day. We got 16 plus presentations over 20 speakers

and we’re going to have a lot of fun. So website swimbeyondthebreakers.com and we hope to see you there. Awesome. We’ll include the link in the description and anyone who wants to get in touch with you for your advice, your guidance, perhaps being coached for open water swimming, what’s the best way to get in touch with you directly? So my website’s liquidtry.com and my email, trygetenduronswimming.com email me, give me an Instagram, Facebook. I’m always happy to answer questions. I think information to help you have a good experience is something I’m always happy to share. So any of those will work. That’s fine. Fantastic. Well, Craig, great to have you back on. Thank you for sharing all of your knowledge and I think those questions will cover a lot of basis for someone who’s interested in getting into long distance swimming because I know when I first started doing some long swims I had no idea and I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

So I think we’ve covered a lot of things there. So thanks for being back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post Navigating the Challenges of Marathon Swimming with Craig Lewin appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Recently, Australian swimmer Lani Pallister made history by becoming the third-fastest woman ever in the 1500-meter freestyle. In this episode, we’re diving into her stroke to see exactly what makes her technique so effective and what we can all learn from it.

00:25 2-Beat Kick

Get your NanoClear swimming goggles here and get 15% off your first purchase with code PODCAST15.

Grab the freestyle checklist here:

Work with us (stroke analysis coaching):

Join a camp:

Transform your freestyle in 33 minutes

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.

Australian swimmer Lani Palastar recently became the third fastest ever woman in the 1500 meter freestyle. Let's take a look at her stroke and break down what she does incredibly well. We can see from this front view that she uses a two beat kick, one kick per arm stroke. And you find a lot of distance swimmers like to go this two beat kick. It's much more efficient than a six beat kick much more sustainable over those longer distances. You can pick up your kick later in the event. A lot of swimmers like to finish the last 50 meters or sometimes last 100 meters with a six beat kick. But for those longer distances, a two beat kick is what a lot of swimmers prefer to do, especially those that are doing English channel and those sorts of marathon swims, two beats really popular. Now you'll notice with Lani as well, her head position is looking primarily down just slightly forwards. And what I really like here is her breath timing. One of the things that good swimmers do really well is they time their breath where as one hand is coming underneath the shoulder. So for her it's her left hand, she's pulling into the breath, her head turns nice and early there. And she gets her head off to the side as she's finishing that stroke. So the left hand is finishing, she's getting her breath. And the important part right here is that she returns her head with her catch. So her eyes are back down when this right arm completes the catch right here. The reason that's important, the reason we want

to get the eyes back down with the catch is you can get your catch a little bit easier when your head comes back in time. Because if your head stops the side and you're going through your catch, it takes away some of that power and control that you get in that position because of the position of your head. The second thing is from here, you're back into a more streamlined position. And then she can make sure that she's going through that propulsive part of the stroke that she can really drive herself through from there. So the way I like to teach it the way I like to think of it is pull into the breath. So you pull here to initiate that turn of the head. And then you return the eyes back down with the catch as you could see she does there. Now another thing to be mindful of there have the head turned in time at the shoulders. So we want the straight to be almost like a symphony. Everything's playing together in time with one another and turning the head in time with the shoulders and back with the shoulders is a really good way to do it. Now if we have a look at her greedy, you'll notice here she turns to the side to breathe. She looks primarily to the side here, part of that bottom goggles in the water. Now, only a part of it, she's not looking directly to the side that's slightly higher than that. And usually at that speed, she's swimming a 102 pace per 100 for this 1500 meter freestyle, which is incredibly quick. She has to turn that little bit further to be able to get that breath low. And you can see she's reaching around a little bit with her mouth, almost

like a sort of Popeye type breath. And then she returns it quite quickly as that hands coming back through. So that's really nicely done there. Now if we go back to this front one dude, let's have a look at a few other parts of the stroke. We can have a look at her entry position. So her right hand enters in line with her right shoulder, close to the center here. It doesn't cross that sense line, which is good. She extends forwards a little bit. Very quickly, she starts to bend at the elbow and point those fingers down. You can see what a great catch position. This is right here. Really good catch position. So one of the two things that we look for when you do the catches, we want to firstly reach forwards, but then point the fingers downwards. And you'll see the fingers point directly down. And the second thing is the elbow needs to bend or slide out to the side. If you don't get your elbow going out to the side, you can't get a high elbow catch position. A lot of a lot of consumers who make mistakes with that is they will pull through but the elbow stays narrow. You've got to get that going out to the side to get your catch. So if we look at that from the side view here, we'll see with with Lani on the side. So she reaches out and what we'll notice is fingers bow wrist, wrist bow elbow, which is where we want to be setting up the catch. Then we should point those fingers down, elbow slides out to the side and that creates our high elbow catch. So if we draw a line from the shoulder to the

fingers, you'll notice that the elbow is above that line. So that's a high elbow catch because she's got all this surface area here that she can use to press back on the water, which helps her move forwards, which is obviously the the goal. So really nice catch on that side and she presses back and you'll notice that the palm of the hand faces back behind her the whole way through. Now a mistake I see a lot is from about here, some people will let their hand turn in towards the body like they're slicing out the back and that means that their surface area of their paddle is about half or a third of what they used to have. So keep the palm always facing back from the time you've got your catch all the way back to there when you finish the stroke and she finishes the stroke near her upper thigh. So he hips there finishes near the upper thigh and releases and then comes back over the top of the water. On the right side, similar thing, you can see what a good catch that is there. That is extremely good catch. Now if you are tight and stiff through the shoulders, you may not be able to get that position like Lani's got because that requires quite good mobility and a lot of the adults that I work with don't have that same range of motion. But if you can get somewhere close to a high elbow catch meaning let's say your arm is this green line instead where your elbow is a little bit above that line, that would be more than enough. That is still going to give you a good paddle to work with and if you're extremely tight

through the shoulders, well at least we try and not drop the elbow. So work with him whatever you're comfortable doing there is a good thing to do. At Effortless Swimming, our mission is simple. Make swimming more enjoyable. Whether you're training for your next race, swimming for fitness or just love being in the water, we're here to help you swim faster, smoother and with more confidence. And one thing that can make or break a swim is your goggles. If you've ever struggled with foggy lenses mid session, you know how frustrating it can be. That's why we created the Effortless Swimming Hydro Clear Anti-Fog goggles for long lasting crystal clear vision. I've been using them myself and the difference is night and day and I'm not the only one. Deborah swam 36 kilometers down the Derwent River and the entire time her vision stayed crystal clear. No fog, no frustration, just an uninterrupted swim. So what makes a Hydro Clear goggles different? It's all in the technology. Unlike ordinary anti-fog coatings that wear off over time, Hydro Clear Super Hydrophilic technology is built into the lens material itself. Here's how it works. Instead of fog forming as tiny droplets, water spreads evenly across the lens, creating a thin film that prevents fog from even starting. And the result? Consistently clear vision, swim after swim. And the durability? Our lenses are CNAS certified. Tests show that even after 2000 rubs with a wet cloth under a 200 gram load, the lens stays fog-free. No gimmicks, just serious

performance that lasts. Using them is simple. Just wet the lenses before putting them on and you're set for a fog-free swim. Ready to see the difference yourself? Get 15% off your first pair of Hydro Clear anti-fog goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlesswimming.com. That's 15% off your first pair of goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlesswimming.com. We also have a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you're not happy with the goggles for any reason, you can simply return them for a refund. Don't let foggy goggles ruin another swim. Try Hydro Clear today and experience clear vision from start to finish. Now the next thing is the kit timing. When should we time and coordinate our kicks with the rest of our stroke? Well what you'll see here is that when her left hand enters, which is it's entering there, you'll see that's when her right foot kicks down. So left hand entry, right foot kicking down, which is what we're after there. You'll notice on the other side as well, you'll see the right hand will enter the water there and her left foot kicks down. So right hand entry, left foot kicking down at the same time. So the opposite there, right hand entry, left foot kicking down. Now I've also explained that another way. I will sometimes explain that as kick and catch on the same side. So if we look at this side view here,

you'll see she gets the right catch there and this, so left catch and left foot going together. So that left catch and left foot go together there. It's the same thing because that's essentially when the right foot's kicking down. If we go to this one you'll see that her right, oops sorry, her right arm is catching. So right arm's catching, right leg is kicking down. So similar thing, just a different way of thinking about it. So it really just depends on what suits you best when we think of the timing of the kick and catch. Alright, so same thing but just different approaches to it. Now another thing we can can look at here as well is the rotation. Now good rotation, I see is being 30 to 40 degrees through the back of the shoulders with the surface of the water. So with the landing there, if we look through roughly through the back of her shoulder, she's about 30 degrees at her furthest point of rotation, so 30 degrees from that angle. If she were to go beyond that to 90 degrees, she's probably going to have a hard time getting a high elbow catch and it's probably going to limit her stroke rate as well because it takes a lot longer to go side to side if we're going too far. So 30 or 40 degrees, maximum rotation through the back of the shoulders with the surface of the water which you can see there. Now what you'll notice with her hips, her hips are rotated about the same. So if you're doing anything more than really like 50 meters sprint,

maybe 100, your hips, torso, shoulders, they should be rotating about the same amount. We want to work it together and keep them connected like you'll see here. So imagine that you're rotating around your spine, head stays still unless you're turning to breathe and you're rotating around that spine and that rotation, this is the important part, that rotation comes primarily from the reach and extension forwards. So don't figure out trying to twist under your side and roll onto your side. Good rotation will come from a good reach and extension forwards like you can see here and you'll see the hips shoulders going together. So she enters the water fingers first, extends forwards out in front, begins the catch, then she starts to rotate back onto the other side and just kick out the back here, helps her rotate onto that other side as well. Similar thing here, she enters on the right, extends forwards out in front and then kicks down and that helps her initiate that rotation back to the other side. So she's just so streamlined through here and there's no delay, there's no pause in her stroke. She's got a quite a high tempo, quite a high stroke rate and she can do that efficiently. Sometimes when people come to me and they've got a very low stroke rate, might be 45 strokes per minute, which is just too low for most people, they think, ah, if I increase my stroke rate, my heart rate's going to go up, which can certainly be the case until

you get efficient at it and get used to it. But often with a light kick or a two beat kick, then you can actually maintain a relatively high stroke rate for not too much effort, especially once you do get used to it. Let's have a look at the recovery of the stroke. The recover is when the arm comes over the top of the water. So you'll notice that Lani releases the water at the back here and when she pushes back, she's still got this little bit of bend remaining in her elbow. She's not pushing as far back as she can, locking that elbow out. If you do that, you're going to have a hard time getting over the water comfortably. So releases the water out the back, brings the arm over. See how this shoulder is out of the water. You've got to have enough rotation where the shoulder's out, then the arm can come over comfortably and this elbow's pointing up. So if you're thinking high elbow recovery means this, it's not the case. It means elbow pointing mostly out to the sky as you bring the arm through, but it can be out here. It doesn't, it shouldn't really be here. Let it be out to the side in a more comfortable position. And then as she comes through, she goes to enter there, fingertips first, and she slides the hand forwards into the water from there. Similar thing on this left side as well. And she does get that little bit more rotation here on that breathing side, which is pretty common as well. So you see that entry, fingers first, elbow slightly up, and she slides it forwards. So this is a really nice stroke that I think a lot of people can start to work towards, especially people who prefer that two-beat style of kick. Now you may notice in the front

view, it does look like she comes pretty close to that centre line, maybe crosses it slightly there, but she does correct very quickly. And it's in line with it. It's not crossing it necessarily. So I, yeah, I think that's, it's fine to be in that sort of range. And I've seen that with quite a few longer distance from us. You look at Gregorio Paltrenieri, he does a similar thing. Now not that we're trying to cross the centre line with our hand, but if we get close to it, that is okay. The time where it becomes not okay is if it's impacting your catch. If being across the centre is stopping you from getting into a high elbow catch, because it's staying there through the movement of the catch, that is not what we want. So then we'd look to come out a little bit wider to make sure it doesn't impact our catch. So I hope you've enjoyed this breakdown of Lani's stroke. If you would like to get our free style technique checklist, where I go through all these things in detail and what order you should focus on them in, click the link below and you can get that for free in your inbox today. Thanks for watching. If you want to see my full breakdown of free style technique with even more detail than this, click this video above. 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 This Stroke Looks Calm…But Flies Past Everyone appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

How does an Olympic medalist take 19 seconds off her 800 meter time and nearly beat Katie Ledecky? In this episode, I’m joined by Jaimie Fuller from EO Labs, the creators of the Swim Better Handsets, a company I’ve worked closely with since their early days to share how this breakthrough tech is transforming performance from helping Paige Madden make that jaw dropping improvement to giving triathletes a way to measure swim power in Watts, sync with training peaks, and use AI to pinpoint exactly where they’re losing speed.

EO is changing the way we understand the swim leg from Olympic podiums to your local pool. This could change the way you approach every stroke.

00:00 Introduction to Elite Swimming Technology

Grab the freestyle checklist here:

Work with us (stroke analysis coaching):

Join a camp:

you might look at your data from from the EO swim better and it might tell you you’ve got three things. You’re generating too much downward force. You’ve got too much lateral force and maybe you’ve also got hand drag or upward force at the back end. You can only change one thing at a time and you’ve got it and the whole point about the system is being able to not just make the change but measure the outcome of that change. 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. How does an Olympic medalist take 19 seconds off her 800 meter time and nearly beat Kader Ledecky? In this episode I’m joined by Jamie Fuller from EO Labs, the creators of these swim better handsets, a company I’ve worked closely with since their early days to share how this breakthrough tech is transforming performance.

From helping Paige Madden make that jaw-dropping improvement to giving triathletes a way to measure swim power in watts, sync with training peaks and use AI to pinpoint exactly where they’re losing speed. EO is changing the way we understand the swim leg. From Olympic podiums to your local pool this could change the way you approach every stroke. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. We’ve got a return guest back on. We’ve got Jamie Fuller from EO. Welcome back, Jamie. Thank you, Brenton. Lovely to see you. It’s great to hear about some of the updates going on at the elite level of swimming and how that trickles down to amateur athletes, weekend warriors, I guess people like myself and to hear how some of the bestomers in the world are using some of the tech that you guys have got available. There’s new updates that you’ve got through EO which I’d love to chat about today because it’s really cool to see this

stuff evolving and where the sport’s going to go in the future. I’d love to chat about that stuff today. Where do you think would be a good place to take it off? Yes, mate. So we’re at a really interesting point because we’ve spent the last, primarily we’ve spent the last two to three years focused on pure swimming. And by pure swimming, I mean the swimmers at the elite end specifically in swimming as opposed to triathlon. So when we launched and for the last couple of years, it’s all been about working with Olympians, working with Olympic teams and federations, working with NCAA colleges and similar organizations here in Australia and Europe and Asia too, about exploring the technology, understanding what it means, because this is new. This is not stuff that’s been around for years. This is stuff that we’ve frankly created slash invented and innovated. And so it’s been a massive learning journey, not just for our customers, but for us as well. Because if I look at,

if I look where we are today, I had no idea when we started this journey that we’d be where we are. So we’re now at this really interesting point where we’re ready and where we’re now not transitioning, but we’re stepping and increasing our focus now, particularly into triathletes. And so whilst there was so much work done around the Paris Olympics and continued to do work, even with the world championships that have just finished in Singapore and at that very elite level, where this system fundamentally makes a huge amount of sense is in triathlon. And that’s for a couple of reasons, apart from the demographics and the economic aspects of it, because let’s face it, this isn’t like a $50 gimmick set of product you buy. This is a serious piece of care. When you’re dealing with triathletes, you’re dealing with a cohort of people who spend a lot of money. They’ll spend 10, 15, 20 grand on a bike. They’ll go and spend 40, 50 grand going to Germany to do an Ironman or

Kona. So in the first instance, there’s a preparedness to invest in equipment for what they do. Secondly, they’re already very, very, very comfortable dealing with data and dealing with digital devices, electronics to collect that data, especially around power. Because when you look at cycling, so much about cycling performance is driven by the amount of power that you’re driving through your legs into the crank and measuring that power and understanding the application of that power and how it relates to performance. Now, until literally last week, our system has been presenting force or pressure in kilopascals. Now we’ve transitioned from there into presenting power in watts. So what’s really great from a triathlete perspective is they’re able to look at their cycle data, their run data, and discuss it in terms of output in watts. And now they can do exactly the same thing with their swim. So the ability to not only measure

how much power you’re pushing and then to apply the technique lens that we bring, which is what direction is that power going? Because over time, you hope to get stronger and to be able to push more power, but then critically, you want to make sure that that power is being pushed in the right direction. Because unlike cycling, where on cycling, you’ve got a two-dimensional plane where literally your feet are just going around like this, not only are we dealing in water, but we’re also dealing in three dimensions. So it’s pointless of you getting stronger and increasing that power, but then pushing it in all the wrong directions and not pushing it in the propulsive direction. So there’s this really interesting point now where, and I know that triathletes, I hear this all the time from triathletes and platforms. We’ve got all this data in run and cycle and we’ve got nothing for swim. When can we have something for swim? Well, guess what?

As of right now, it’s available. And so that data will tie in with, say, someone who’s using training peaks. They can basically just upload it and it syncs with their training peaks with their training stress score, their watts. What are some of those numbers that are coming through to them? Yeah, exactly. Right now, with our product, you can go into your account on the platform and you can click a little link that says connect to training peaks. And that’ll pop up a training peak screen and you enter your training peaks login details, username, password. And from that moment on, every bit of data that you collect on here will automatically populate into your training peaks account. And precisely, as you said, you can look at your run data, your cycle data, and your swim data. And so not only can you see your intensity factor, training stress score, because the idea is you wear these for the whole swim session. Literally, you start recording at

the beginning of the session, you wear them for the whole session, you stop recording. And when you download the data, assuming you’ve already logged connected to your training peaks account, which is like a 10 second step, it’s nothing. Once you’ve done that, then automatically your data will populate into the training peaks. And so, like I said, not just your intensity factor training stress score, it’s also got your total power that you’ve or your maximum power, your average power, it breaks it up into the different phases across the session. You’ve also got your normal information that we collect with respect to, you know, the time taken, the distance one, your distance per stroke, or, you know, what I call the boring stuff. But also, we also calculate, we’re able to tell you accurately exactly what your work is in kilojoules. So you can measure exactly how much work you’ve done in that session.

And where this now becomes really specific for a workout for a triathlete is up until now, when you’ve been doing sets, you’ve had to stop and start recording for each set. And so you might do a workout which has got six sets in it, and you then download six files at the end of it. Well, not anymore. Now what you can do, you can start recording at the beginning of the session, you stop recording at the end of the session, you’ve got one file, and that file will upload. And what it’ll do is it converts your whole recording. So your session might go for 40 minutes. But within that 40 minutes, you might have 32 minutes, 30 seconds of swimming. So what our processing does now, our algorithms, is it kicks out all the non-swim time. So where you’re taking a recovery break at the end of the lap, and where you might be doing some weird things with your hands, and by weird things, I mean, sculling, you know, your hands

might be going in and out of the water whilst you’re not swimming. It might be technically collecting data. Well, now the system has been upgraded and improved so that we can sense those times when you’re doing that weird stuff, and we can exclude it and take it purely down to your pure raw swim component and present it as such. So the ability to track all that, the ability to look at it, as I said, in exactly the same language as your bike and your run, which is language that triathletes are very comfortable with. And you know, they’re always going to be, you know, we see this in cycling, you know, the whole my dick’s bigger than your dick routine, because I’m pushing, you know, 320 watts and you’re only pushing 285 watts. Well, you can play the same games now with your swim. So what my, my objective here, particularly in triathlon, because we know that the vast majority of triathletes come from cycling and running.

We know that a lot of triathletes do the swim because they absolutely have to, and they hate it, right? You know, it’s not something they want to do voluntarily. And for a lot of them, it’s not fun. This thing can change all that. This thing can literally gamify it because the data that you’re getting becomes so interesting and so fascinating, where you’re able to not just interrogate it and see what’s going on, but track it and look at how you’re evolving over time, implementing the changes that are being highlighted. And I’ll get to how those changes are highlighted in a minute. But now it’s, I think it’s going to drastically change the approach. And in very blunt terms, I think because of all the data I see and lots of triathletes that I’ve worked closely with, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to improvement. Because, you know, traditionally swimming, and it’s filtered through into triathlon

as well. It’s had this mantra of if you want to be faster, you’ve got to swim more. Well, there’s no more about that because the improvements that can be generated through technique change are huge. With a little bit of focus and some energy. And what I think you’ll find is that triathletes are going to be looking at this stuff and wanting to get back into the pool more, there’ll be more motivated, more incentivized because they’ll see some big improvements. Even just the not having to start, stop it after every 100 or 200, whatever you’re doing, that in itself, I think is a really big one. Because if you’ve ever done testing with athletes with the swim better devices, we want, you know, we’ll work on some different things. We’ll try breathing to the opposite side. We’ll try changing the stroke. So without needing to start and stop it, you can just, you can make those changes, see what the difference is in

their power, their direction. That I think itself is a really important one. I actually had a swimmer who did a follow up filming session in Sydney two weeks back and he wore his swim better devices and recorded that while we did this filming session. So it was really interesting just going through his footage, looking at his data, seeing why he wasn’t as propulsive on his left side, which is all the stuff that his devices have measured for maybe two years now. But it’s just, it’s just so good to see the numbers behind what I see in the, in the video. So in terms of how this data is presented and how you continue to improve that aspect of things and simplify all this data that the devices collect, do you want to pull up a, maybe a share screen and just show some of these latest latest stuff? Sure. And just before I do, I’ll flag one more thing. Because you know, Brenton, with, with this things, you need to, you need two things.

You need the handsets themselves. And you also need a membership. And the membership is really important. You’ve got to have the membership to be able to analyze your data properly. Without a membership, you can still see some data, but it’s very high level. You need a membership to be able to interrogate it. And what I’m going to show you is captured in all the membership stuff. Now, I know that there’s an element of sensitivity for some people who say, well, Christ, I’ve got to pay a thousand bucks for these. And I’ve got to pay you something every year. We get that. We, we understand the sensitivity that comes with that. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s an expectation as to why should I pay more after I, after I pay a grand for these, why should I continue to pay? Very, very fair comment. The reality is this is a cloud based processor. So the data is not stored on your computer. It’s not stored in the app.

It’s stored only whilst you’re collecting it on the handset. And then it’s all sent to the cloud. And so there’s all sorts of costs associated with hosting it. There’s also video integration. So you can upload video through our platform, sync it to the data. And you can see beautifully exactly what’s going on with the hand on the video. And you can see what’s what the implications are for the fours.

There’s constant innovation that’s being performed, constantly bringing out more functionality, more information, better targeted. Because as you can appreciate, this thing collects a lot of data. And part of the secret here is number one, how do we make it simple to understand? And number two, how do we distill it? Because just presenting a whole heap of data is not the answer. It’s a question of how do we go through it and bring out the stuff that is most meaningful. There’s what we call the so what factor. Because I see this with a lot of a lot of device companies that just produce a lot of and you get it and you go, well, so what? I don’t understand what it means to me. And so we are paranoid about that so what factor. And what we estimate at the moment that what’s collected on here, we’re using about 40% of it. So there’s a lot more to come through and a lot more work that we are doing and will need to do to be able to continually

refine it and improve it and offer bigger and better representation. The goal being that we want the user to get as much insight in as short a time as possible. It’s pointless if the user’s got to spend an hour and a half every time digging through and trying to understand all these different components. So I guess where I’m getting to now is the big change that’s happened with the implementation of power and with the connectivity with training peaks is you can get all your training peaks data, what I call the effort related data, not the tech. There’s two, there’s two pieces. There’s effort and technique. And on our platform, we’ve got all the techniques on training peaks, you’ll get all the effort stuff. I mean, the effort stuff is on our platform too, but you’ll be able to go into the training peaks platform and look at all your effort data, your power, your work, your IF and TSS and all that stuff. And you don’t need a membership. So if you choose, I don’t want the

membership, I’m just going to buy the handsets. That’s it. No problems. You’ll get all that effort related data on the training peaks platform. You’ll be able to have it there with your cycle in your run. Happy days. What we would encourage people do is also to subscribe to the EO platform to get their technique data, because that’s when it’s not just a question of how much power am I pushing, but where am I pushing it? And where am I losing it? You know, you can see in data quite clearly, you can easily see where you’re losing your propulsion at what part of the stroke exactly where it is in the stroke. And you can see exactly why you’re losing your propulsion. And invariably, it’s one of two things. It’s because that hand is rotating. And the moment you rotate that hand, not only does the power not go back towards your feet, but it goes laterally either inwards or outwards. But critically, the moment you rotate that hand,

you lose the hold on the water. And I think even like high level NCAA swimmers

at times don’t even fully grasp that basic swim physics 101 concept. It’s all about putting the hand in the water, grabbing the water and advancing the body. It’s ideally we don’t want that hand physically moving back. We want that hand staying there and holding there as the body advances. And the reality is to do that, that hand needs to be positioned like this and not like that. Because the moment you position like that, you’re knifing through. So it’s all these things bringing it together and making it available in the ultimate view, which is the effort based stuff on training peaks and then the technique stuff. And so what I’m going to share now, I’ll share my screen and we’ll have a bit of a look at, let me go to here. So hopefully, Brenton, you can see this. This is, please ignore the quality of the data. This is my swim on Sunday. I haven’t been in the water for 18 months, I had shoulder surgery. And this is the first time I got back in the water.

And you’ll see here it was like, it was a total of eight minutes. But this was an 18 minute recording. So it kicked out all the non swim time when I was doing all sorts of other stuff. And what you’re looking at here are the eight laps and the orange and the blue shows you the power that I’m driving through the orange is my left hand and the blue is my right hand. And you can see that I’ve got it automatically, I’ve got an imbalance between my right and my left. I’m pushing considerably more through my right than I am through my left. And you can see here the darker colors, they represent the propulsive.

So we’re not only, we’re not just showing you total power. We’re also giving you a visual reference of your propulsive power on each of those laps to start with. And if you want, you can click into here and you can see this data for every stroke in that lap. And same story, you know, total power and propulsive power on the first stroke of the right hand and so on as you go through. And then along the top here is the stroke rate. So the stroke rate, as you can see, you know, varied a little bit across the eight. Pretty basic, pretty straightforward. Where we go into the first key metric, which is where are these powers, this power being directed? Now you can see here that we’ve got the six directions. And not only do we show the six directions, we can also tell you what your goals should be. And I can tell you from a distance women’s perspective, we want this propulsive number to be sitting more 70 to 75%. And before I had my

shoulder surgery, I was, I was sitting at about 68, 67, 68%. Now that I’ve had my shoulder surgery and I’ve lost my form completely from not getting in the water, you can see it’s declined.

So this is important is understanding the allocation of where those forces are going. And again, I can turn each hand off and we can say, we’ll show me the right hand. You know, the right hand is 60% propulsive and 25 down. Whereas the left hand is 50% propulsive and 38% down. So automatically I can see that I’ve got what’s going on with each hand independently of one another. When we look at hand path, we can have a quick look at the consistency and we can see here the path that my left and my right hand goes through. And there are two things that I’m looking at here. And this is every stroke in that lap, as you can see, selected. This is just lap one, every stroke. And the two things we’re looking for is how tightly bunched those lines are. And secondly, we’re looking for symmetry or balance between the two. And I’m pretty straight on my right hand. My left hand’s got a little bit tiny, a little bit of an S. I’ve got a bit more depth on my right. So you can start to

have a look at what’s going on. Then when we go for what we call our power versus time, this is where we’re able to look at every stroke and what’s being generated in the amount of propulsive power on each of those strokes as we go through. And the beauty about this is I can also add my vertical force, my vertical power, sorry. And so you can see this is a right hand stroke and a left and a right and a left. And you can see where I’m generating the downward power in conjunction with my propulsive power. And one of the objectives of every distance swimmer is to get through that downward phase nice and early so that then they can be as propulsively as they can be for as long as they can be. So we look at this point right here where my downward is in conjunction with where I am in my propulsive phase, which is very early, which is exactly what I want to see likewise on this stroke here. What you don’t want to see is you don’t want to see this point of maximum downward

corresponding with that point of maximum propulsion. You want to see it happen nice and early in the phasing. And then finally, this is where we bring it all together. And where I’m able to say, for example, pop my lateral on here and I can pick a stroke. Let’s pick a right hand stroke and we’ll look at the overhead view because I’ve got my lateral on here. And the one thing that you’ll notice here, Brenton, that you might have seen before is this green line. And that green line is where we map the hand speed. So you can see now we can look at how fast the hand is traveling in conjunction with what propulsion is being generated and what there’s only a little bit of lateral there. So what I can do is I can move that red line anywhere so I can put that red line right here because that’s my catch. That point there where I’m starting to generate propulsion, that’s exactly my catch. And you can see my hand has traveled from the end of the glide down to

there. It’s traveled all that distance or side on. It’s gone from this point all the way back to there for no benefit whatsoever. That’s a problem or it’s an opportunity because ideally we want the catch to happen as early as possible at the end of the glide. So the quicker we get that accelerating back from here, the sooner we get into the catch. And you can see that I’m not catching to here. So if I could have got my catch here, I would have had all that time you know from 0.34 down to 1.34. That’s a whole second that that hand is set off the day.

And that’s reflected in the hand speed. And you can see here now the hand speed is kicking up and as it kicks up we now get that propulsion generated. And you can also see that little bit of inward force that’s being generated. That’s happening as that hand is physically tracking inwards. You see it physically tracks inwards in that point in the middle. And as it tracks inwards, it’s generating a little bit of inward power pushing inwards. So the ability to bring all that together and see what’s going on and summarize it in here and understand okay, what my numbers should be because we can show you and we can tell you what the numbers your goals are. And that’s the last piece of this puzzle too by the way is we’ve now got artificial intelligence data analytics. So if I think I’ve got to stop sharing and reshare, let me go back to here and I’m in a reshare by screen mate because I’ve got a different

screen for this and here we share. And so now I’ll show you I’ll show you in a bit you can click on a button that says EOI or EO intelligence and in less than 60 seconds you’re presented with a report like this which gives you the charts and then we start at the top and we give us that you just got a little thing at the top because this is in beta testing. So this is coming out around the 20th to the 25th of August. So we’re only a couple of weeks away from this being live for everybody. And you see we get a report of when it is, what was swum, the basic data that’s coming through. And then we get some commentary. And as you can see it says here that you’ve got a significant bilateral asymmetry with your right arm generating 30 to 40% more power than your left. And if I go down to the screen you can see exactly in here that right arm is generating a lot more power than the left. Consistent power declines across the laps suggesting impact from

fatigue. There’s a double peak pattern appearing in your strokes and the power versus time which indicates interrupted force application reducing efficiency. Plus you’ve got high downward force combined with excessive lateral movement compromising your forward propulsion. So it’s a great snapshot to tell you what’s happening and then it breaks it down including where you’ve got excessive downward force with hand drag indicates an elbow drop during the strike which is probably happening during the glide phase. High lateral forces driving energy away from your propulsion. And then a list of things to work on including links to products can potentially help you as well. And then furthermore our ability to include some video drills so that we can diagnose the problem tell you where it’s occurring and how it’s occurring what you need to change and some things to work on and potentially some videos as well for some drills as to how

to change it. That’s cool. Wow. This is really I think this is that’s a really powerful component for people to be able to literally do their do their do their swim just to show you on here.

This is this is what you’d see in the as you get your data here and then there’s this little button up here the little blue button the EOI. So you’re able to click that button

like I said it takes probably about 45 seconds and not only will you get the report on the screen but it automatically saves a copy in word to your downloads folder. And so what you’re able to do then is you’re able to go into your downloads folder. In fact I’ve probably got mine up here I can go into my downloads folder I can see it’ll be one of these in here these downloads try this one not that one evidently might be one of these yeah there you go download so I can I can open it up oh you probably can’t see that yeah it’s not showing on the share screen sorry yeah but I can I can go I can go into it I can then edit it and I can then save it and if if I’m an athlete I can save it for myself or if I’m a coach I can forward it to my athlete with potentially some comments from me as well. Wow that’s cool I remember sitting down a couple years ago and that getting to that point or this point is where I thought this is this is where it will be really useful for

for somebody who’s just using the devices on their own so that’s that’s cool cool to say like it’s a great way just to summarize all that data in a practical and applicable way for people to know what to work on and let me tell you mate we’re we’re only in the first step I mean we’ve been working on the AI for a long time because it takes it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to train the system because you’ve got to I mean AI doesn’t automatically know everything you’ve got to teach it so we’re just at that very first gate where it starts with the basics information once we get further down the track. Hey real quick in case you didn’t know we run swimming camps around the world from the Maldives Thailand Japan with Sundays Galapagos Islands plus a bunch of new locations for next year so if you’d like to join us at a future camp and improve your swimming and explore and experience some of the best locations to

swim in the world then go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash camps we’ve got all the dates and locations listed there. A question I get all the time is I’m not that quick will this camp be suitable for me? We have a wide range of speeds and abilities come to the camps so as long as you can swim a kilometer there’s a very good chance that these camps will be suitable for you and if you’re not sure just get in touch with us and we’ll make sure that we do find you a suitable camp. Thanks for listening let’s get back into the podcast. The ability of this thing to look at patterns with respect to your breathing pattern you know what the consequences of the impact is of your breathing to both the shape of the hand as well as the power that’s being generated and the direction that power is going the ability for us to then take something like your power versus time curve and apply them one on top of the other and turn that into a consistency

metric because we know what we’re trying to do here is as athletes I shouldn’t say we because I’m not an athlete but what athletes are trying to do is not only get more efficient and more effective but you want it to be repeatable you’re looking for to create the best technique you can and to do it over and over and over so the our ability to take that data and convert it into a score and to and this is where I’ll use the word I don’t particularly like the word but this is where a sense of gamification comes in and I say I don’t like it because it’s got the connotations of game and but really it’s about me being drawn into it and becoming more focused better understanding and more incentivized to improve that number and it’s just it’s just psychology I mean that’s the way it is the more you can measure it and the better you can get the more you’re likely to get involved and this is when I come back to

some of my original comments about the way that triathletes treat the swim leg you know it’s I do it because I have to I don’t do it because I love it I occasionally see somebody a triathlete that comes from the world of swimming it’s very rare the vast majorities come from from cycling and running and the swim is really it’s not done because they want to it’s done because I absolutely bloody have to do it but I dare this system has got the capacity to change that whole dynamic for them which again can unlock some huge benefits I was with a guy last week an elite triathlete here in Australia and this guy’s come from swimming so he always gets out of the water first that’s his always out of the water first and somebody asked him the question what does he think this can do for triathletes he said I’ll tell you exactly you’ll you’ll go from being a one minute 50 down to a one minute 30 you’ll say you’ll you will find with without a huge

amount of effort involved you’ll be able to improve by 20 seconds per 100 meters because the standard of swimming amongst triathletes is generally pretty poor I’m looking forward to seeing what this goes Brenton it’s it’s all about how do we take all that data and over time get smarter and better at training it and understanding it and the system being able to see things that even I’m the super user I’m the guy that does the the data analytics with the Olympic gold medalists and the best coaches in the world right I teach them how to interpret that data but this system will absolutely smash me eventually it’ll know way more than me and it’ll see things because it’ll be able to look at all the underlying data very quickly and see patterns and then when we do get to feed more controlled data sessions and by controlled we’ve got a program pretty much devised to work with elite athletes to collect their data anonymized so it’s not a question of taking

kyle charmers and saying here have a look at kyle charmers data everybody but it’s a question of being able to take that anonymized but that data secured under controlled circumstances so that you know we’ve got the same pool dense distance it’s at race pace west west where everyone is starting with a dive not with a push off so that the time is super accurate to a hundredth of a second and comparable from athlete to athlete and then being able to look across all of the different metrics and work out exactly which metric is contributing to which part of of improvement and then the and this is the beauty about ai to be able to interrogate that and spot those patterns and spot those correlations and those relationships and then being able to feed it back in and then turn that into advice for swimmers like me not just you know gold medalist and an Olympic medalist but turn it into advice for people that are rubbish swimmers who want to swim better

that’s not you want to go into no question and the thing that i’m one of the things that i’m like probably most excited about and i only saw this a little while ago we’ve been talking about bringing other sensors in and synchronizing to the hands so for example we measure at the moment hand velocity the speed that the hands moving through the water we’re not measuring the body velocity so the hand velocity is really important for measuring power so the power that we present today starts with a basis of pressure and if the pressure is you know how much pressure is my hand pushing through that water through that pressure sensor in the oh that’s the the base level then you go up a step and you include the surface area of your paddle and this is my paddle my hand is my paddle so when i take my pressure and add into the surface area of my hand i can now calculate the amount of force in newtons that i that i’m that i’m pushing

so now i’ve got forcing newtons then the last step is i include the speed of my hand and it doesn’t matter what direction it’s about the speed that my hand is moving and that then takes me from pressure to force and then to power and now with surface area and hand speed and pressure i can present power but it’s only the speed of the hand what i really want to know is the speed of my body because everybody when they swim they accelerate and decelerate through the swim itself and the very best swimmers have got a lower level of acceleration and a lower level of deceleration an olympic swimmer their velocity would do that if you look at mine it does this right and then jit swimmers have got high acceleration high deceleration so what is really critical is that we can map and synchronize the speed of the body but not only that so we want a device that can sit at the base of your spine that will measure

your body velocity as you go but not only that it can also measure the rolling of the hips and the timing of the hip roll in conjunction with the hand and not only that it can also measure the pitch of the chest and if your hips are doing not just this but this that too can be measured then you put a device on each foot and then you’re talking about one timing of the kick and two effectiveness of the kick and the kick effectiveness is really important too as you know I mean a lot of it comes down to the flexibility of the foot and the ability of the foot to be able to generate propulsion with your feet so if you bring all those together you’re now able to suddenly map the whole ecosystem and then you’re able to show how the hand relates to the hip roll relates to what’s essentially the drag an increase in the drag component of the body and in relation to the kick as well and then you can present that so you can take two athletes

side by side and you can present them and overlay them and you can play one off against the other and see exactly where one is improving over the other and vice versa and then they can learn from each other so one of the one of the key one of the key principles mate that we should be take very seriously is let’s learn and understand what’s happening in other sports and this is probably the biggest issue with swimming and swimming is is very behind everything else the application and the acceptance and the embracing of data and technology in all other sports is way more advanced part of it’s because swimming has not been able to come up with products like this that do the stuff that we’re talking about that holds it back so one of the key probably the most advanced sport in the world is formula one and there’s a reason it’s because of money right and the amount of money involved in formula one is the same

thing with football you know some of the things that are coming out of soccer football are huge but if I go back to formula one you’re able to look at two drivers in the same car I’d say an F1 team with their two drivers and you can map exactly what’s going on not just with acceleration and brake but gear changes steering wheel adjustments all through the context of time and speed and you’re able then to look at and this is what these drivers do in the in the one team is they look at their data together they look at each of their data and what that does is it lifts each one it gives that more information to each side of the garage that helps both of them improve and that’s why teams have got two drivers because they need to be able to do those comparisons for improvements to be able to apply it in the race against all the other teams that they’re racing against and it’s there’s no question why it can’t be the same

thing when we’re talking about Olympic level federations and Olympic level teams to be able to say you know this is the stuff that you need to be able then you can do this with a back striker or two backstrokers or two butterflies or whatever where you can analyse this data very very minutely and see exactly what’s what’s making one swim faster than the yeah sure so I think it most people know we’ve got a partnership with Kyle Charmers and Kyle’s been on board since very very early on I went and met with him in his coach and this was not about a commercial type transaction this was about us helping him getting onto the podium and you know he got a gold in Rio a silver in Tokyo and then you got a silver in Paris and so Kyle we’ve worked very closely with Kyle and again in Kyle’s context or certainly after Tokyo you know his his goal was to try and find seven or eight hundreds of a second like less than a tenth of a second

now that’s because that’s what he lost the gold to Caleb Dressel buy in uh in Tokyo now we know in Paris it was a different story it was like over a second to uh to the chinese guy Panjama and after after the Paris Olympics after the race in Paris it was literally the day after the 100 meters and I was you know obviously rooting for Kyle and don’t get me wrong super pleased that he meddled in three consecutive Olympics I mean that in itself is mind blowing but you know tiny little thing in the back of my mind you know pity he didn’t get the gold and it was the next day that I got an email from the chinese national team saying we want to thank you for the technology that you’ve produced because it was instrumental in Panjama doing what he did in the 100 meters which was not only winning by over a second which hadn’t happened for a hundred years but also smashing the world record and he literally smashed the world record

though because I’d sold the system to the chinese like a year earlier but I had no visibility into who was using it and they even sent me some some of his data too which was remarkable so we’ve got Pan we’ve got Kyle in the 100 then you’ve got in the 50 you’ve got Cam McAvoy I’ve worked with Cam McAvoy and Ben Proud you know Ben got the silver medal and I worked very closely not just with Ben but with Ben’s performance coach based in London and Ben was training in Turkey and he was getting his data was being looked at in London by his performance guy and me here in Sydney and we were sort of collaborating a little bit on that so from an Olympics perspective that was remarkable there and then added to that is a young lady in the United States called Paige Madden now Paige was an Olympic medalist from Tokyo so we’re talking about a really a high level high quality swimmer and then sort of I think something like

10 months before she started using it and she wasn’t using it specifically herself it was being used by a mathematician out of the University of Virginia a guy called Ken Ono and Ken started using the handsets and looking at the data because he was bringing mathematics and science to the UVA team and this is a team by the way that’s just won the women’s NCAA title for the fifth consecutive year in a row working under under coach Todd Dissobo and Ken put Paige through a number of different training drills and one of them what he did was is he put two male NCAA swimmers either side of her so put her in a lane put put a bloke on the left and a bloke on the right and gave them clear instructions of when to kick and she had to follow and when she did wearing our handsets immediately they could see what was going on as she accelerated she lost her form when I say lost her form she went from having a propulsive number of something like I think

from memory it was like 62% or 60% dropped down to 43% or 42% because instead of her maintaining her form her hand path suddenly stopped going straight and went laterally and so the power that she was generating was not being pushed backwards it was pushed to the side and she also started leaning more and pushing more down so her propulsion plummeted as a percentage and all they did was they sat her down afterwards and they showed her the data explained what was happening brought her back the next day undertook the same same protocols did it exactly the same way but this time she knew what she was doing before and the beauty about page and you see this with some athletes is they’ve got this remarkable connection between the brain and the limb I don’t have that right I can I have it to a degree and I can concentrate and I can change some things but sometimes this is where drills come in and this is where accessories and paddles

and other things come in to try and help you implement those drills but page has got this ability to be able to say okay I’ve got to make sure that I maintain my technique and she did and in doing so she was able to keep her propulsion up there in the the low 60% and not dropping it down to 42 the upshot was and this is remember this is this is an existing Olympic medalist she took 19 seconds of her 800 meter swim time and she won the bronze medal in the 800 in Paris and she was that far away from Arnie Titmus in silver and I think about a second away from Katie Ledecky in the gold and she she told me afterwards she said even Katie Ledecky had said to her my god what on earth have you done how can you possibly find 18 seconds now don’t get me wrong she did other work she was working with great US coach Bob Bowman and she did other like you know her training regime it’s not everything down to EO swim better but it’s the

understanding that she was able to get what was happening and and what forces she was and power she was generating and where she was able to change her change and improve her technique and and lop off the 19 seconds and there’s a couple of things as you know Brent and you can only change one thing at a time you might look at your data from from the EO swim better and it might tell you you’ve got three things you’re generating too much downward force you’ve got too much lateral force and maybe you’ve also got hand drag or upward force at the back end you can only change one thing at a time and you’ve got it and the whole point about the system is being able to not just make the change but measure the outcome of that change because it’s the outcome that’s that’s critical because you don’t want to be making change and and not knowing whether it’s working and once yeah you measure it and it’s where you want to be

you’ve then got to rinse and repeat until it becomes muscle memory once you’ve got that point then you can move on to the next thing and I’ll just show you one more thing because I think this is this is also something that is really become critical I mentioned that we’ve learned a lot over the time we’ve been doing this and this is this is a perfect example of what good looks like so here are our six directional numbers you can see this going to Brenton on the screen yeah right here are our six vector direction numbers so this is the distribution of power in those six directions and then over here on the right these are our goals and so we can see laterally both left and right we’re looking for these numbers left would and right would direction to ideally be less than four percent in freestyle we’ve got hand drag and upward and as you can see ideally we want both of those to be at zero regardless of whether

you’re a sprinter or a distance swimmer we want four percent maximum left and right we want zero upward and hand drag and if we can achieve four four zero zero that leaves us 92 percent out of the 100 to be applied between propulsive and down these two numbers here propulsive and downward and this is where we have to separate it depending on whether you’re a sprinter or a distance swimmer now we’ll talk primarily about distance because I think you deal with a lot of triathletes and a lot of distance swimmers so a distance swimmer what they’re looking for is to get that propulsive number up north of 70 percent and their downward force to be you know somewhere between 17 and 22 call it 20 percent so the idea is that athletes not only can measure where they are but they can also understand where they want to get to yeah then the fun stuff happens and the fun stuff and I’ll tell you the the vast majority of them are carrying too much

downward force right so it’s not unusual to see a distance swimmer carrying only propulsion in the 30s about 37 percent propulsion and downward at 50 okay I’ve got too much downward force and I’ve got insufficient propulsion generally it’s because they’ve got a that they might have a dropped elbow but they’re not using their high elbow catch right so how do I get my elbow higher how do I get from a position at the end of the glide where my hand can very quickly go from the end of the glide into the catch that’s our goal right to go from here into here how do I implement that well I’ve got a you know watch some videos listen to my coach try using a forearm paddle do whatever and try and try and make that happen and then where we do see hand drag and downward force invariably that’s an indicator of a dropped elbow in the glide so as the hand’s coming in you see a lot of athletes they scoop and the moment

they scoop like that the elbows dropped the hand pops up they’re pushing at the water in front and what it means is that hand has got to travel down a long way before it gets into a propulsive position which is takes longer than it should and it’s wasted energy pushing down instead of going over the barrel and being propulsive so it’s a it’s not just about where you are now it’s about where you should aim to get to implementing changes and measuring the outcome of those changes and again this is where it becomes a much more interesting concept than just logging yourself up and down that bloody black line all the time and as you said with triathletes it’s not about the engine the engine’s built from the run it’s built from the cycle the engine’s great it’s all about how do we how do we implement these technique refinements yeah so the numbers that I just showed you they don’t come from a five-year academic study they come from all the contact

I have with the best swimmers in the world and looking at very closely at their data and understanding it so there’s definitely an element of gut feel from me but I can tell you that the freestyle numbers are absolutely bang-on I’ve got backstroke numbers that are really good to my butterfly is more of a guess and breaststroke I have no so we have fly back and free available in the format that I just showed you for people to be able to say okay it’s one thing knowing where I am it’s about where I want to get to but breaststroke is breaststroke is a whole new animal we’ll get there it just needs some time yeah thanks Brenton eolab.com eolab.com and you can get all sorts of info in there there’s a support email address for questions that actually come to me so I I look at those every day so I’m very responsive on those so contactable and the other thing mate is I do data sessions with people even with the AI and

even with everything else you know people still sometimes need their hands being held a little bit so I’m available to do virtual data reviews with people so we can look at it together and they can better understand. Thanks buddy. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlessswimming.com www.effortlessswimming.com

The post The Latest Swimming Analysis Tools Are Getting Wild with Jaimie Fuller appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

This episode is taken from our latest Feedback Friday video. We have a triathlete from Sydney who holds 1:30/100m on his Ironman swims. Let’s take a look at his strokes and see where he can find additional speed.

Watch on Youtube:

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 Feedback Friday. In this video, we've got Gilly from Sydney. He can hold around 130 per hundred in his half Ironman swims. Let's take a look at his stroke and see where he could find some additional speed. Yeah, you'll notice here that he's swimming really well. If you're swimming 130s, it's pretty quick for your triathlon swims. So you've got to be doing a lot well to be swimming at that sort of pace. So we do see here that head position is quite nice. He's looking slightly forwards top of the head's just out of the water, which looks great. And he's timing his breath where he pulls into the breath to initiate the turn of the head gets a breath relatively early and he brings the head back down with this catch here. So the timing of his breath looks really good. Now there's two things that stood out here that I think will help him increase his speed. One of them is body position. One of those is what happens at this moment here. Let's dig into this one first. So what you'll notice at the finish of his stroke is that the back end of it pushes up towards the surface of the water. So from here you'll see the direction that this palm is going upwards and then that hand gets drawn out of the water

in that direction. What we want to do instead is keep the palm of the hand pressing backwards all the way through, come out on the way back and then come over. So to me that indicates it is just not finishing his stroke as well as he possibly could. So he's going to lose a little bit of that propulsion through the back end of the stroke and it also means that his recovery might be impacted as well. So he might be losing 5-10% of his propulsion through the back end of the stroke. Now that might be the symptom of something else that's happening in the stroke. At Effortless Swimming our mission is simple. Make swimming more enjoyable. Whether you're training for your next race, swimming for fitness, or just love being in the water, we're here to help you swim faster, smoother and with more confidence. And one thing that can make or break a swim is your goggles. If you've ever struggled with foggy lenses mid-session you know how frustrating it can be. That's why we created the Effortless Swimming Hydro Clear Anti-Fog Goggles for long-lasting crystal clear vision. I've been using them myself and the difference is night and day. And I'm not the only one. Deborah swam 36 kilometers down the Derwent River and the entire time her vision stayed crystal clear. No fog, no frustration, just an uninterrupted swim. So what makes a hydro clear goggles different? It's all in the technology. Unlike ordinary anti-fog coatings that wear off over time, hydro clear super hydrophilic technology is built into the lens material itself.

Here's how it works. Instead of fog forming as tiny droplets, water spreads evenly across the lens, creating a thin film that prevents fog from even starting. And the result? Consistently clear swim after swim. And the durability? Our lenses are CNAS certified. Tests show that even after 2000 rubs with a wet cloth under a 200 gram load, the lens stays fog-free. No gimmicks, just serious performance that last. Using them is simple. Just wet the lenses before putting them on and you're set for a fog-free swim. Ready to see the difference yourself? Get 15% off your first pair of hydro clear anti-fog goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlesswimming.com. That's 15% off your first pair of goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlesswimming.com. We also have a 30-day money back guarantee. So if you're not happy with the goggles for any reason, you can simply return them for a refund. Don't let foggy goggles ruin another swim. Try hydro clear today and experience clear vision from start to finish. And I think it's a symptom of his reach and extension on his left side. So if you look at his right hand, this one enters nicely. He reaches out, gets good rotation, and you can see this link through the body here. This looks good to me. On his left side, he enters there, which is our, and then when he reaches forwards, he doesn't extend out quite as much there. And I think that he could go for a little bit more

reach at the back. And that, sorry, out the front. And if he reaches forwards a little bit more, that will help him rotate the hips slightly more. And that will also help him keep that palm facing back behind him. Because what can often happen there is that if you cut yourself short with the reach, then it's harder to get the hand out. And if the hips are flat, it's harder to get the hand out. So I think he could get a little bit more extension in front before he goes down. And that will help him rotate a little bit more through the hips, which can help him finish that stroke with the palm facing back. So we want to look at the cause, not the symptom. And to me, that's probably the cause. Now he did mention in his note study has been trying to go a little bit deeper, a little bit earlier, with this arm, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. So you can still go a little bit deeper if it feels like it helps. Slightly deeper than the shoulders are extending forwards. But I think he's just missing out on a little bit of that reach and rotation and rotation through the hips, which is stopping him from finishing his stroke on that right side as well as he could. All right. So that's the first thing. Now that kind of can lead into body position as well. So in terms of body position, at least from this side view, there's room to bring the hips up and the legs up ever so slightly. So looking at this here, you can see how the hips and legs are just slightly lower. And what I'm thinking is that that could be from not extending and reaching out

quite enough. Now if we were to get really picky with some things, another thing he could do over the top is on this left side, when he enters the water, his hands at a little bit of a funny angle there. So it's almost at this sort of angle, as you can see, where it's kind of entering like that. And he's sort of pushes forwards with it, eventually gets to a really good position. But what he could do instead would be get that middle finger going in first and extend straights out in front. It will reduce the drag ever so slightly and it can make that proper extension and reach a lot easier to achieve. So it might just be these either trying to relax the hand a little bit too much where you need enough tension in the hand so that you can enter correctly, but he might be keeping it too relaxed where it's coming off to the side there. So that would be one other thing which may help him with that reach and extension. Couple things that I like here, like his catch. This is really good with the catch there and the power diamond underneath. So that's a big part of his propulsion and his speed. He does that so well. Similar thing, like the left side as well, he gets a good catch on this side too, where we see the fingers pointing down, elbows out to the side and it's quite a nice angle with that catch too. So he's very good at those propulsive parts of the stroke and again I think that's why he's able to go that 130 pace. So at this speed, this is typically where we're trying to refine a few parts of it. We're trying to make sure we've got the right rhythm and tempo

and we're looking to work on race strategy as well. So if you want the full breakdown of how to go from 230 down to 115, watch this video above and if you'd like the freestyle technique checklist where I have got dot points of all the things that you need to be doing in your stroke, in what order, click the link below. 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 Break 1:30/100m | Stroke Analysis appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Have you ever walked away from a swim thinking,

You’re not alone. Most adult swimmers struggle with the same few challenges—again and again—and it’s usually because no one ever showed them how to fix it the right way.

In today’s episode, we’re diving into the most common mistakes adult swimmers make—and more importantly, how to finally fix it.

Let’s get started.

00:17 Mistake #1: Holding Too Much Tension

04:07 Mistake #2: Looking Forward the Whole Time

06:12 Mistake #3: Over kicking or Stiff-Leg Kicking

07:38 Mistake #4: Beginning Your Catch Before You Finish Reaching Forward

09:28 Mistake #5: Rushing the Breath

7-Day Email Course for beginners:

Grab the freestyle checklist here:

Work with us (stroke analysis coaching):

Join a camp:

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. What are the most common mistakes adults must make and what should you do instead? The first mistake is holding too much tension. Quite often when people start swimming and they go to the pool, they have this uncomfortableness with being in the water. They might feel like they’re unsafe, like they’re going to sink to the bottom of the pool and they carry this tension and these nerves with them. But if you still have that while you’re trying to improve your swimming, you’re going to be restricted and you’re probably not going to be able to get much better until you can get over that anxiety. So how do we get over that anxiety about being in the water? Maybe we can’t stand up in it because it’s quite deep. There’s a number of ways to do it and a lot of it begins with starting

to get our breathing under control and knowing that we can actually float. So what we do at clinics is we get people to float in a ball. They take a breath in, they hug their knees and they float in a ball for about 10 seconds. Now everyone in that position can float. I’ve never had one person go into this ball with a big breath of air and sink to the bottom. So you can float in the water because your lungs are where most of your buoyancy will come from. So it’s like having a balloon that you push down, wants to come back up and so that’s what your lungs provide. And the thing is when we have this tension and anxiety we start to panic and when you panic and move that way actually sink a lot more. So you kind of have to just trust that the water is there to support you if you can relax and hold your body correctly. So after we go from this ball float, we get them to take a breath in and then try and float horizontally.

Their arms extended, their legs extended out behind them. Now if you’ve tried something like this before and sunk, what I’d suggest is firstly try and soften your neck, your back, your shoulders because if you tense you’re going to sink a bit more. And the next step to that is when you’re extending your arms and legs out, your chest will have to be the lowest part of your body. So I want you to open up through the chest, bring your arms up and behind you slightly and bring your legs up. So you have to use your bum and your hamstrings to bring your legs up and out behind and so it’s almost like this is going to be the bottom of your of your boat. So it’s got to be the lowest part and that way you can float a lot better. Now not everyone can float in that position. Often guys will be a bit heavier through the through the legs and they will sink through the hips and legs a bit more. But you’ll find that you can be somewhere

in that kind of position when you hold it like that. So after we have them do that process, I then get them to think about being long from the head to the toes. This length through the body can help you be taught through the body. Taughtness mean a little bit of rigidity to it. So you’re not moving around like a needle. When you’ve got this taughtness through the body, then you’ll find it can float a lot better. So I have them swim 25 meters trying to keep this long line through the body, leaning on the chest slightly because this is where your lungs are. So if you lean on this slightly, you’ll bring your hips up and your legs up and then I get them to swim as easy as they possibly can for that 25 and usually the swimmers that are rushed and tense and trying fighting the water. They’re the ones that tend to really move a lot better. They move a lot freer and they sit higher in the water. So if you can get rid of

some of that tension and anxiety around being in the pool, then that’s a first step to progressing. Now if you’ve got a really deep fear of being in the water, it might take some lessons with a coach who can help you with that because it is something that if you’ve had something happen in your childhood or you’ve just got something really deep down that you need to work on, you might need to get a little bit more assistance with that. Mistake number two, looking forward the whole time. We want to see where we’re going when we are walking, when we are running and often when we’re swimming, we want to see what’s coming up in front. But the most efficient and the most streamlined position for you to be in is not with your eyes looking straight forwards. So we have to go against our natural urges to want to see where we are swimming. So when I’m teaching freestyle head position, looking straight down to about 45 degrees in

front. So I would suggest for most people to actually look about 45 degrees in front. Now not just thinking about where you’re looking, but also how your neck is. Think about extending through the back of your neck, almost like you’re trying to get rid of the wrinkles there and a slight tuck of your chin as well. I don’t know what it is about it, but a slight tuck of the chin brings your hips up. If you stick your chin forwards, you normally find that your hips will sink a little bit more. The other part of that is making sure that your head is like an iceberg 10 to 20 percent above the rest of it below because your head weighs about 6 kilos and if you’re holding that up above the water, you’re going to find your hips and legs sink. So making sure that you’re not trying to see where you are going, even though that’s the natural instinct when you first get in the water. Hey real quick, in case you didn’t know, we run swimming camps

around the world from the Maldives, Thailand, Japan with Sundays, Galapagos Islands plus a bunch of new locations for next year. So if you’d like to join us at a future camp and improve your swimming and explore and experience some of the best locations to swim in the world, then go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash camps. We’ve got all the dates and locations listed there. A question I get all the time is I’m not that quick. Will this camp be suitable for me? We have a wide range of speeds and abilities come to the camps. So as long as you can swim a kilometer, there’s a very good chance that these camps will be suitable for you. And if you’re not sure, just get in touch with us and we’ll make sure that we do find you a suitable camp. Thanks for listening. Let’s get back to the podcast. Mistake number three over kicking or kicking with very stiff legs. When it comes to kicking, most people think that to move forwards, I’ve got to kick

themselves forwards. So a lot of beginner swimmers will be kicking so hard to try and keep their momentum up and to keep their legs up when in reality, once you get better at swimming, it is there more for support and balance and not so much for propulsion. So if you were trying to kick yourself forwards as you’re swimming freestyle, you’re going to be wasting so much effort that you’re likely to be tired after 25 or 50 meters. So what we need to do instead is make sure that we’re not kicking too big. So a lot of people will kick like they’re riding a bike, lots of hip, lots of knee bend, and that is going to create more drag out behind you because your quads will be facing that uncoming water, creating drag, slowing you down and actually making things harder. So with your kick, think about the legs has been nice and long out behind you almost like a ballerina. You got long legs and you’re just going to have this narrow

kick almost in the size of a bucket out behind you. We don’t want to kick much bigger than that. The other part of that too is keep the kick light. No more than a two or a three out of 10. That’s how much your kick should give us. How much should give in your kick if we’re thinking about the effort side of it. If you feel like it is a six or seven guaranteed you are going to get tired after about 50 meters. Mistake number four, beginning your catch before you finished reaching forwards. When it comes to getting the length in the stroke and getting our balance, we need to enter the water fingers first, then slide the hand forwards in front of the shoulder until you get to 30 or 40 degrees rotation on your side. That small step to reach the extension. That is key to being able to relax when you swim. So many adult swimmers enter the water and go straight down and begin their catch and pull without ever extending forwards in front of

their shoulder. I run freestyle clinics every single month here in Australia and every single clinic there is at least someone who is coming in going straight down with their hand as soon as we get them to extend forwards. Not only do they get faster, the heart rate comes down, the effort comes down because they’re not having to work so hard to move forwards. The thing is when you enter and you’re reaching forwards, that movement through the stroke, that time in the stroke cycle is typically when you’re traveling fastest because you’re most streamlined there. So we want to take that little bit of time to move through this very streamlined position as we’re extending out. And the benefits of that too is that when you finish your extension and you’ve got a bit of rotation, you can use these bigger stronger muscles underneath your shoulder around your back. You can use those muscles through the catch and pull. Whereas if you enter and go

straight down, you’re often a bit flat and you don’t get to use those muscles nearly as well. So you end up being slower for that reason as well. So if you can make sure you have a little bit of extension or reach before you begin your catch, that can really make a huge difference to your speed, but also the amount of effort that needs to go into your swimming. Mistake number five is breathing like it’s your last breath ever. When it comes to swimming freestyle, we want to try and get the breath directly to the side, get it quickly and get it relatively low. A lot of people will lift their head up, throw it to the side, look up to the sky and then come back down and they’ll do it in a way where it’s like this will be their last breath ever. It’s this big gas for air and then they will bring the head back in the water, but that is just not a sustainable way to swim. So if you look at the best ones in the world, it’s almost like

they’re taking this sip of air. It’s like a inhale and then a bit of an exhale as they go underneath. They’re not going for these really big breaths in, really big breaths out. It’s this normal standard sort of way of approaching their breathing. So we want to make sure that when we turn to breathe that we imagine we’ve got this skewer through our head, our neck and our spine. And when we turn to breathe, turn the skewer, turn the skewer, get your head to the side and then come back. That is a much easier way to breathe and it’s much more direct as well. An indirect way of breathing would be that lift up turn and then getting the breath there. So if you can breathe like you’re on the skewer, you will find that it comes easier and that way you can actually get this little bow wave happening around your mouth where you get this little pocket of air. So you can get that relatively low breath as well. If you enjoyed these tips,

grab our seven day email course for beginner swimmers to help you swim easier. You can get that in the link below. If you want to get a full breakdown of the freestyle stroke, click this video above. 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 Most Common Mistakes Adult Swimmers Make (And What To Do Instead) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Why Your Kick Is Slowing You Down And How To Fix It

Most swimmers think a harder kick equals more speed. But for adult swimmers and triathletes, it usually means more effort and less progress. So, if your legs feel heavy, your breathing feels rushed, or you’re constantly tired after short swims, it might be your kick that’s holding you back. Let’s fix it.

00:32 Mistake #1: Kicking From the Knees

02:33 Mistake #2: Too Much Kick

06:16 Mistake #3: Stiff Ankles

08:29 Mistake #4: Using It For Propulsion

09:15 Bonus Cue: Fishtail Feet

Most women think a harder leg kick equals more speed, but for most adults and triathletes, it actually equals harder and slower progress and being more exhausted at the end of your lap. So if your legs are feeling heavy and your heart rate's really high at the end of each lap, let's take a look at these main reasons why your kick might be slowing you down and what you can do about it. 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. Mistake number one is kicking from the knees. Now what does this mean? You've probably heard the term before. Kicking from the knees really implies that you are bending at your hips and your knees too much. If we look at your body line, so where your body is in the water, if your quads and your knees are coming much below that line, that's kicking from the knees. That is going to create a lot of additional drag with your body in the water. And when you're kicking harder, it's actually going to be slowing you down and causing your heart rate to go up. So we want to make sure that we're not kicking like we're trying to kick a soccer ball or ride a bike. This is something I see quite often when we run our freestyle clinics and when people send in their videos for our analysis inside of the Effortless Swimming membership. What we want to do instead is have the thigh bones, think of the thigh bones at the top here, moving slightly back and slightly forwards from your hips. That will create enough of a movement of the legs that it's not going to

break your body line. It's not going to come outside of your torso there, but it will still give you a little bit of propulsion, but it will help you with your balance and your timing. So that is the biggest mistake we see with people's legs, kicking in a way that's actually slowing them down if you're kicking from the hips. Meaning you're kicking where your thighs and your quads and your knees are coming below your body line. One way that we actually get people to help make that change, we start them off by doing 25 freestyle with a really big kick, an exaggerated kick. And you will likely notice that you are exhausted at the end of that lap. Then we get to do a little bit of vertical kick where you're vertical in the water. You can hold on to the wall or the lane right with the hand just to keep you upright, and then we get them to just move those thigh bones back and forth from the hips ever so slightly. And that will help you feel the correct movement of the kick. Then we go on to 25 freestyle with that smaller narrower kick, and you'll likely find that the speed goes up, the effort goes down. Mistake number two, kicking too much. Often people will kick small, which is good, but kick really fast and a lot in order to try and keep their hips and their legs up. And this is a mistake because yet uses more energy and it's not actually going to support you at all. The kick is then dominating the stroke, which is not what we want. So if you feel like you're doing small kicks, but they're very rapid and very fast, then you're likely kicking too much. A lot of swimmers, especially those

that are somewhat new to the sport, they can go a long way with just a two-beat kick, which is one kick per arm stroke. Not to say you can't do a what we call a four-beat kick or a six-beat kick, but a lot of swimmers will have enough speed and balance to have a good two-beat kick which keeps the effort level down. So if you're kicking rapidly and it's causing you to tire, or it's even like a 12-beat kick, which would be six kicks per arm stroke, that's just too much. So don't let the kick dominate the stroke. If you can learn how to hold your body well in the water, so long through the body, you lean on your chest a little bit to let those lungs support you, you'll find you'll be horizontal in the water and you can be well balanced when you do that. Then the kick can just help you rotate from one side to the other and that's kind of all you need from the kick, because the upper body is the thing that's actually going to move you primarily forwards. It's that 20% of the stroke where 80% of your propulsion comes from. So let the arms be the things that move you forwards, not your legs.

At Effortless Swimming, our mission is simple. Make swimming more enjoyable. Whether you're training for your next race, swimming for fitness, or just love being in the water, we're here to help you swim faster, smoother, and with more confidence. One thing that can make or break a swim is your goggles. If you've ever struggled with foggy lenses mid-session, you know how frustrating it can be. That's why we created the Effortless Swimming Hydro Clear Anti-Fog Goggles for long lasting crystal clear vision. I've been using them myself and the difference is night and day. I'm not the only one. Deborah swam 36 kilometers down the Derwent River and the entire time her vision stayed crystal clear. No fog, no frustration, just an uninterrupted swim. So what makes a hydro clear goggles different? It's all in the technology. Unlike ordinary anti-fog coatings that wear off over time, hydro clear super hydrophilic technology is built into the lens material itself. Here's how it works. Instead of fog forming as tiny droplets, water spreads evenly across the lens, creating a thin film that prevents fog from even starting. And the result? Consistently clear vision. Swim after swim. And the durability? Our lenses are CNAS certified. Tests show that even after 2000 rubs with a wet cloth under a 200 gram load, the lens stays fog-free. No gimmicks, just serious performance that lasts. Using them is simple. Just wet the lenses before putting them on and you're set for a fog-free swim. Ready to see the difference

yourself? Get 15% off your first pair of hydro clear anti-fog goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlesswimming.com. That's 15% off your first pair of goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlesswimming.com. We also have a 30-day money back guarantee. So if you're not happy with the goggles for any reason, you can simply return them for a refund. Don't let foggy goggles ruin another swim. Try hydro clear today and experience clear vision from start to finish. Mistake number three is stiff ankles. If you have run since you've been a kid and you've developed these stiff ankles from running, it can be good for running but it's not so good for swimming. Now mobility takes a long time to make changes to for most people but you can improve on your ankle flexibility or your mobility. So it's important to be able to point your toes. One way that you can not fast-track that improvement but you can make some better changes to the way that you kick, if you point your toes and turn your feet slightly inwards almost like a little bit of pigeon toad that can give you a bit more flexion in your feet because something that I see fairly often with adult swimmers and a lot of guys have a tendency to do this I think more so for balance. They'll point their toes but then occasionally when they're kicking their foot will turn outwards and that outward turn of the foot creates a lot of drag

on the outside of their body with the top of that foot and even though it doesn't look like much surface area it is killing your swim speed. So a good approach for that point the toes turn the feet slightly in and it's okay to have your big toes brushing past one another at least to develop that way of kicking. Now I don't want you to point your toes so much that you're cramping in your feet and in your calves that's not sustainable that's no good. So we need to keep the ankles loose and floppy when we're doing that kick so it's all within reason. If you want to improve on that ankle mobility there's a number of ways you can do it sometimes wearing fins something like a damn sea fins some good fins or the fins that we've got you can point the toes with those and it will actually give you a little bit of a stretch there you know if you're kicking because you've got that extra weight or extra resistance of the fins that will force you to stretch a little bit through that movement. You can also sit on the top of your feet that can help stretch it a bit and there are other exercises some with therabands as well that can help you with that. So if you want those comment below and I can link you to a video with those exercises that you can use with the theraband. Mistake number four is using your kick for propulsion. Now if you're trying to kick yourself forwards instead of when your arms move you forwards then you are going to be fatigued after 25 or 50 meters so remember the kick is not to help move you forwards but more to keep you

balanced and help you with your rhythm in the stroke so don't try and use it as the primary method of propulsion let the arms do that. So you've got to work on good body position first so eyes somewhere down, lung through the body and a small narrow kick and lean on your chest a little bit to let the lungs help keep you up in the water then you can let the legs kind of just do their thing and you can have that easy two beat kick after that. Now bonus tip here is fishtail feet so imagine that your foot is this fishtail at the back when you kick down it's like this whip of the foot or this flick of a fishtail that lets you get that little bit of propulsion and lift from the kick so if you're trying to be very stiff and rigid with it it's not going to help you we need to have that looseness and floppiness through the feet. Another good analogy that I heard is it's almost like you're trying to kick off a sock so if you've got this movement of trying to kick off a long sock off your foot that's a similar way of how you should kick in the water. If you enjoyed these tips grab our seven tips in seven days how you can swim easier over seven days I'll send you an email every single day with a small tip that you can try next time you go to the pool and this can help you relax more in the water be very comfortable and start to increase your swim speed as you're going get that in the link below if you'd like to get the full breakdown of freestyle click this link above. 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 Why Your Kick Is Slowing You Down And How To Fix It appeared first on Effortless Swimming.