Effortless Swimming

What if the secret to crushing your next open water swim isn’t just logging more miles, but learning to embrace the chaos, drafting like a pro, taking the occasional hit, and then surging ahead with confidence. Today on the Effortless Swimming Podcast, I’m joined by Damien from Flow State Swimming it’s premier open water coaching squad.

Damien didn’t learn to swim in a pool. He learned to survive and thrive in choppy conditions. Mastering tactics from course recon to aggressive positioning so that you never have to feel like a victim out there. In this episode, we’ll dive into the mental shift from passive paddler to assertive racer.

While your catch and glide sweet spot might unlock explosive speed, exactly how to build the suffer tolerance that makes hard efforts feel effortless. Hands-on coaching hacks for feeling the water and finding flow. And whether you are gearing up for your first triathlon or hunting a personal best in an open water race, stick around.

By the time we’re done, you’ll know how to swim hard, swim smart, and swim free. Know what’s required. Let’s jump in.

I personally find that the people who can swim really hard and really well are the ones who actually know how to suffer in the water and are comfortable doing it. I'm sure you've seen people when you say, well, we want you to swim in a top end effort and they come back in, faces aren't red. There's no real heavy breathing, but they're saying, oh, that was really hard. And you're saying, no, that's not hard swimming. You have more in you. And they say, oh, actually, yeah, I could go again. So the idea with the hell set is again, referring back to that swim literacy to put people in a position to suffer in a similar way to how they would when they go racing so that they know how it feels. They know how and when they can push them and what they're capable of delivering on. 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. Not if the secret to crushing your next open water swim isn't just logging more miles, but learning to embrace the chaos, drafting like a pro, taking the occasional hit and then surging ahead with confidence today on the Effortless Swimming Podcast. I'm joined by Damian from Flow State Swimming Island's premier open water coaching squad. Damian didn't learn to swim in a pool. He learned to survive and thrive in choppy conditions, mastering tactics from course recon to aggressive positioning so that you never have to feel like a victim out there.

In this episode, we'll dive into the mental shift from passive paddler to assertive racer. While your catch and glide sweet spot might unlock explosive speed, exactly how to build the suffer tolerance that makes hard efforts feel effortless, hands on coaching hacks for feeling the water and finding flow. And whether you're gearing up for your first triathlon or hunting a personal best in an open water race, stick around. By the time we're done, you'll know how to swim hard, swim smart, and swim free. Know what you're required. Let's jump in. Right, there we go. Damian, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So, Damian, you're coaching out there in Ireland, working with a lot of open water swimmers and triathletes. And today I want to dig into some of your coaching strategies, coaching philosophies, how you like to approach things so that people can become stronger more assertive swimmers. And maybe just for those that are listening, if you want to give a bit of background on flow state swimming, which is your squad, your coaching business, and kind of what you stand for. Quite like that when you mentioned that off air before. Yes, flow state was really born out of just a low first competing the open water. I don't come from a pool swimming background. And the competing that I did do was always based on the open water and the bit that I always really liked. And that I was kind of surprised that people didn't pursue more was the real tactical side of open water swimming. So something as simple as reviewing the course before you swim,

understanding how you want to approach a turn, approach dealing with groups, drafting, all that sort of things. And what flow state is trying to do is prepare people for the open water. And when we talk about competing, it's not necessarily that we're looking for people to win races, whether that's at the top end or age group level. But it's just for people to be as competitive as possible, even with themselves. So we look at everything from people swimming at the right paces, we're working in the right zones, but when it comes to courses, how they're navigating it and put them in a position to race strong. But I suppose one of the things that I see also as being or a separating flow state from a lot of other coaching groups is that we're we're kind of actively pursuing people to swim hard, swim strong and in some cases aggressively really impose themselves in a course so that they can put themselves in the best position to perform as well as possible and that they're not subject to, I suppose, the circumstances that appear around them, but that they can kind of control the environment that they're in and put themselves in the best position possible to perform as well as they can.

Yeah, I love that. And one of the the models I've had in open water swimming that that I got from someone else was was don't be a victim. You've got to be assertive. You've got to be aggressive if you want to do well. And and it really like it open water swimming lends itself to that style of swimming rather than just being passive because you've got to you're going to be around other people. You're going to be dealing with challenging conditions. So if you can have that kind of mentality, even if you are outside of the pool, you might be very kind, very nice. You can still have that that dog attitude about you when it comes to racing. And I see that with like a lot of the if I've worked with any pro triathletes, lovely, lovely people out of the water. But I see it like you see it in their eye. You can see it when they get into competition that like they they want to win. And you need that about you if you really want to want to do well. So I think it's a really good sort of attitude to have once you get into the open water. I think even though, as you said, some people are great for others aren't like open water swimming is a full contact sport. And so if you want to get in the mix, you've got to prepare to take a hit. You have to prepare to give a hit if it comes your way. And I think unless you're willing to accept that that's there, you are more than likely going to have to fade back away from that competition because you're not going to impose yourself on those scenarios. We do a lot of race simulation work where we'll set up very short courses, open water, and we'll try and put in three or four turns. And we might kind of handicap our stages. So we've saw our swimmers first, faster swimmers coming through.

So we're forcing people to draft on the quickest line. The message always is if you want to get in the mix, prepare to take a hit. If not, go wide, avoid scrum, leave that go. But like that, some people absolutely love it. And we tend to find that the more people get comfortable with it, the more they actually pursue it. I think there's nearly more of a mental block that people just don't want to be in there. I think there's all these fears that they're going to get buried under the water and never resurface again. Whereas they realise that it might just be a bit of jostling few shoulders, few elbows, and they move on under the clean water again. So it's a great way of learning and a great way of prepping people for racing. Absolutely. Now, I want to get into some of the some of the ways you like to coach some of the key aspects you'd like to to teach the athletes you're working with. One thing that you mentioned before we jumped on this call was the propulsion versus the glide, like just finding the sweet spot there. So what sort of stuff are you saying with the athletes you're working with there? And what's the message you're trying to convey to them with that?

So I think generically, what I would see in a lot of the other people who are competing or getting into the open water is there's a lot of people who are either coming to swimming quite late. They may have never done it as a child or we get some kids who maybe and this is a more recent thing who were impacted by Covid who spent had spent time out of the pool and they're kind of coming back to it again.

That tends to be quite well drilled. They've de-sinformed, they know what they're doing. But for the most part, people who are coming to it later, they don't tend to have the understanding as to how they need to move to make it feel easy to get through the water. A lot of them may have come from, say, a traceman background where there's running or biking where as a basic premise to quick your legs go the faster you're going to go, that transfer of understanding to swimming just doesn't work because, yes, you're out of moving quickly, play a part in allowing you to move fast, but for the speeds that these people are moving at, that doesn't translate. And so what we're trying to do is bring people back to a center point of trying to have equal focus on streamlining as well as propulsion so they get that benefit of the drive through the propulsive phase and allow themselves to glide. And once that penny drops where they actually feel they can produce pace but also do it without feeling absolutely gassed, now you have someone in a position where they actually can start improving time significantly because their pace isn't reliant on cadence. It's reliant on propulsion. And then naturally, if you are propelling yourself, if you increase your arms and maintain the same shape, you're going to travel quicker. So that's generally where our swimmers start and what we're trying to move them to. It's such a key thing to get across and understand. One way that I've found it to get that point across, if I'm doing like an example video on the on the iPad, showing them the different positions that we're going for.

And when you think of someone at the top of their stroke, like they're on their side, they're reaching out, they're about to begin their catch, that position. I remember saying on a race club video where they had the velocity, they're like they had the velocity. The thing that measures velocity. And they showed that the fastest point in the stroke or it's equal to another part of the stroke, but the fastest point in your stroke is at the top of it. When you've finished pressing back with your hand, when you've reached out onto your side. And one of the reasons that that's the most fastest point in your stroke is because you're most streamlined at that point. And so like I say to them right here, this this is the fastest point in your stroke. So if you're coming in and just going straight down, trying to get your propulsion going immediately into the catch without extending out, you're missing out on that fastest point in the stroke. So we want to make the most of it and not make the most of it where we're just hanging out all day and just gliding and losing our speed. But we need to be patient through there. So we hold that streamlined for at least a little bit to enjoy the the fruits of your work with your catching your pull through. Well, and with that point, we've actually one thing that we do like to do like in addition to working on that front end because what we find is that it's out of sight, out of mind. As so many swimmers are focused on just kind of what happens immediately within their range of vision. So once that lead arm goes in front of the head, but they might have had a clean entry, once it goes beyond that point, you see that kind of soft elbow on the weak wrist and things start to slack off very quickly.

So once we get into a position where we have people holding that front end really well in that streamlined position, what we try and get them to do is feel that spike in acceleration but also the drop off to get them to catch and drive on the opposite side. So we get them to focus on that peak and trough in terms of pace, say, OK, you're fastest where you start to slow down. And now we look to start balancing out, find that middle line where you know that you can drive into into your streamlined position, feel that pace. But now where do we have to pull to allow yourself to carry that pace forward and feel like you're moving at an even speed across an entire length? And again, once swimmers start feeling that, I think there's a big transformation in their stroke very, very quickly.

And how do you go about getting them to feel that?

So we usually try and over exaggerate the positions on the proposal phase. So it might be someone just putting paddles on. In a lot of cases, we just try and eliminate the requirement for the head turn predominantly because if they get into a position where they are actually propelling themselves with that speed, breathing becomes so much easier. But if they aren't allowing themselves to feel that pace, the head turns problematic. So a lot of the work that we would do is snorkel on and focus on the floor and make sure the head position is right. And if we get paddles on or fins on where when they drive themselves into that streamlined position, they can actually feel themselves kind of cutting through the water. One aspect we do like to play with is actually where that strike, that strike position enters to. So when your hand comes over and enters into the water, that we're not aimless in that that our hand just doesn't kind of enter high or too low. And so even something as simple as fins on, rotate a position, snorkel on. As we kick through, you raise and lower your arm on the front end. So you can feel the resistance on the top of your arm. You can feel it coming through a streamlined position and then how your shoulder hinges at the top end. And they try and find that spot in the middle. And once they have that position, that's their strike point. Now we added the arm where I might just be to put on a paddle so that we over exaggerate the catch and propulsive phase. And once they drive through, stay streamlined on the opposite side, they can feel spike in pace and then as it starts to drop off and there's a rotation where they catch and drive on the opposite side. But it's really kind of focusing on a gear assisted catch up

that focuses as much on the streamline and rotation as it does on the propulsion. And because it's so segmented, people tend to be able to find that position relatively quickly. And can you go into a bit more detail about

how you get people to explore the finding that sweet spot where they're not gliding too long and they're not gliding at all? Because that's one of the things that I find a lot of people, it takes a lot of practice to get it. If someone is either, say, doing too much catch up, OK, just getting them to back off that catch up so that they keep their momentum in the stroke. And then obviously on the other side of that is someone who's just spinning the wheels and they've got no reach and rotation and there's no there's no patience in front. But particularly those that are doing catch up, I find for them, it's like trying to get that trying to get that continuity in the stroke. So would you have an approach for that for someone who's say doing full catch up stroke and we want them to ease off that catch up? Yeah, so we the way that we approach our swim and again dealing with the group that we're dealing with rather than go kind of drill specific, we like to work on progressions. We work on a single aspect of the stroke. And for the sake of this, we'll talk about streamlining. And we go through five or six steps that carries through a series of progressions that bring us back up to our full stroke. The first movement could just be as simple as again, find that streamline position on the front end, lead arm, making sure that we have our shoulder rotators.

The rotation of the side point, I think is a funny one because it's that differentiation between the twists of the body as opposed to a rotation that happens as a result of your extension through the stroke that naturally has a shoulder to come back. So once we have that position found when we have people moving through their stroke and we generally do swim in that catch up position, I think people find that quite robotic. So what we tend to try and do is when we have that robotic position, but we can see the glide, we can see the propulsive phase, we then just ask people to focus on a slightly more natural cadence where it feels a little bit smoother in terms of how it fits in with their their movement of what they feel is being normal. And then something as simple as that, just their timing, so trying to count in their heads. So we might say, look, we're looking for you to try and maybe achieve 12 to 14 strokes per length. That's what your aim is. So we're looking to pull it back from catch up, slotting your natural rhythm, your natural cadence and allow that to carry you with a balance between propulsion and streamlining. I suppose when you say it like that, it still sounds like a very complicated process. And both when we go through those four or five points, it tends tends to bring people along. Having said that, we always have those people who either stay and catch up too long or dropping too too too quickly. And in my experience, it's not something that's fixed in one session. It tends to be kind of over two, three, four sessions where they might start finding patches in their stroke across

maybe five, six, seven meters where they find that glide, they find that rhythm and then maybe they lose it because all habits kick in and it's just then trying to string those together. And so we have a lot of back and forth, a lot of dialogue with swimmers to make sure that they're finding the right positions and then focusing on the correct ones to benefit off the hard work that they're putting in. I find exactly the same thing. It's it takes quite a while to find the right rhythm for those streamers. Like it's several sessions. They'll get glimpses of it here and there, but it's certainly not fixed in one session. No, and we have with our clinics, like we do small, small group clinics. So it's only six people across two lanes. But before we ever get in the water, you kind of highlight. Look, this is in the case where we're looking for you to produce 100 meters of flawless swimming at the end of the clinic. If you're swimming and you're finding that you have patches of anywhere between five and 10 meters where things click golden. That's exactly where we want to be, because you know the feeling that you're striving for. So the next time you're in the pool, you know what you're looking for. You've seen the drills that we've been using to get you there. And then it's just about stringing those patches together and trying to make it as consistent as possible. And the key thing you mentioned there is that's the feeling we're going for. He's we're always in our head, you know, especially as we're going through through these drills and these key points. But it's the feeling. If you can just go get more of that feeling within your lap, then that's where the magic happens is when you're in that flow state. Like, I think it's a good name for a business.

It's like you just feel like things are flowing well when you're swimming swimming well and you're out of your head. So that's what it's all about. I think, though, unfortunately. Like it's kind of like a double edged sword. We've never had so much access to information. You can train as close to a professional as you want to as it stands with all the information that you have access to through your watch or through coaching systems. And the watch has caused such a huge issue then because if you're trying to get people to work on the rhythm and flow, but every time they leave the wall, the press and start. Every time they come back into the wall, the press and stop. And once the watch is there, there's a fixation on pace and people think it's kind of like a minimum time they have to be hitting regardless of what they're doing. And so all of a sudden, what should be a progression or drill set? People start losing sight of percent. Oh, my times are slipping. I need to kind of speed things up here. So the the watches, again, fantastic. If you're kind of doing distance and you're trying to track pace, but very problematic if you're looking for people to just swim consistently and steady with no distractions where they're literally just focusing on tiles in the bottom of the pool and that feel for the water. If I forget to ask people at a clinic that we run to take their watch off, quite often I'll see them doing like we might do our first drill progression and then we'll do like some fifties of swim, just trying to implement those things. And I see them check it every every fifties. Like, oh, that wasn't faster than what I normally do.

Oh, that wasn't fast and what I normally do. We go through the next one. Yeah, maybe they get a 50 where it's like, oh, it wasn't too bad. But then it's like the next one, it's the same or slower. Yeah. And so it's like, don't worry about your pace. Like don't worry about what time you're doing right now. We're going for a certain certain feeling. We got we're not looking at pace. Like it may improve if you improve these things. Like it may improve straight away, but there's a really good chance that it's not going to because you haven't quite got that timing and that that rhythm. So yeah, get if they can get rid of the watch, especially in anything tech technique related, you will like you'll just be so much more present in the water. And I find the same thing. If I ever wear my garment when I'm training, like there's that fixation on it. So if I do wear, I try and just not look at it whatsoever because then I end up trying to force the speed a bit much. And I find that my effort level goes up, but the the times don't really change with it. Whereas when I'm just I've got rid of it, I can generally go faster for for less effort than if I'm trying to force it. Yeah, yeah. And I'd see that as well, that people don't necessarily understand that correlation between pace through technique driven swimming. As opposed to pace through panic, time chasing swimming. So like that, we go through sets where you might have people who swim kind of steady state and then you ask them to ramp up the pace. And they find that all of a sudden the difference in time between their steady state and their higher effort is quite minimal. You're you're now ignoring technique. You're focusing on turning because you're equating your pace

to turn over as opposed to form. We want the propulsion. We want to streamline it. Yeah, I think exactly what like you said, there's that distraction from your form and your feel for the water when the watch is there, because you just feel like you're chasing time. I think the art of being able to read a pace clock and just count your lengths is very, very undervalued, particularly when you're just trying to hold form. I like to refer to something to swim literacy where people understand they're swimming. Like, I know if I was swimming well, I knew once I left the wall, if you're swimming hundreds, I knew what a 130, 125, 120 effort felt like. I may be plus or minus a second, but by the time I came in, I knew I knew how it felt so that that transfers the open water really well. You knew where your efforts sit. Whereas when we get people to remove the watch and maybe do efforts without the watch, the understanding of pace is quite limited and because they're so reliant on what's on the wrist to dictate how they should be moving, I think it's very different for people to gauge effort. And if you want to swim hard, the last thing you're going to be doing is checking your wrist to see what pace you're going. You're just going to be watching who's around you to see how hard you can go and whose toes you need to chase. 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.

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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. Yeah, and let's talk about some sets and maybe like the recent hell set that you you did that I saw you posted on on Instagram. I think that's a really good way to to get people to to get off the watch and to to kind of see the results of their effort that they're putting in. So could you explain that the hell set that you did?

Yeah, so the hell set is what it sounds like. It's an hour or 45 minutes of pretty much suffering. But what we have to do is you're you're talking to make sure that people have the ability to swim at a sustainable pace, but then spend significant amounts of time in the red zone. I personally find that the people who can swim really hard and really well are the ones who actually know how to suffer in the water and are comfortable doing it. And I'm sure you've seen people when you say we want you to swim in a top end effort and they come back in, faces aren't red. There's no real heavy breathing, but they're saying, oh, that was really hard. And you're saying, no, that's not hard swimming. You have more in you and they say, oh, actually, yeah, I could go again. So the idea with the hell set is again, referring back to that swim literacy to put people in a position to suffer in a similar way to how they would when they go racing so that they know how it feels. They know how and when they can push and what they're capable of delivering on. So the set starts out relatively tame and it's a little bit deceiving because we would have go to a warm up, go through some progressions, make sure people are kind of targeting the water right and they're getting a good feel for the water. And then we go through just 10 by 100. And it's all of a very achievable pace, like all of 145, maybe all of 135 for the quicker group. So it doesn't feel in any way strenuous. It's just attritional because we're going through a kilometer.

Then we do 500 meters on paddles and fins just to build up a little bit of fatigue in the shoulders and then they get hit with a five by 100 best effort. And they only have 10, 15 seconds between each one. And this is where you start seeing whether or not people have the capacity to suffer and hold that pace. And you get people start having realizations during the session as well, where we some guys who are well able to swim, but maybe only doing one max two sessions a week and they come to something like this. They might only be covered in less than five K, but because of the intensity of the swimming, they go from maybe hitting like a one, say like a 110, 111 per 100 on that max effort. And then it slides right back to like a 117, 118, 119. How not having that fitness is a bit of a sore spot for them. So I go, OK, that's that's the weak spot at the moment. But we move on from them. We one thing in particular that I like doing, I call them Cat and Mouse one fifties, where we match you up with a similar pace swimmer. So say if me and you were swimming and we know that over the course of two, three hundred meters that you probably have 10, 15 meters on me by the by the time we get to that kind of 150, 200 meter distance mark. And so we say, OK, you're going to give me 15 to 20 meters on the first length. And I have six lengths to stay away from you. You have six lengths to catch me. And you'll never see people swim as hard as they do in that just full gas chasing them.

The effort was monstrous. But it's good fun as well, because you don't.

Yes, you are being chased, but there's a bit more purpose behind us. In terms of what you're trying to achieve as part of the overall set. And then when we move on from that kind of really real red zone, heavy work and seeing people hit max paces we get to what I think is probably the most interesting part of the set where we did and there's a series of sets in between this in terms of volume and kind of sets with equipment on where we do three, three by five minutes, unassisted efforts. So no watches. So people have no idea of what pace they're doing that to go purely or feel. And what we're looking for is they go fast, faster, fastest. And so in the first one, they kind of set their benchmark. If they've gone out too hot, they're going to suffer pretty badly in the next two. If they go too low, you'll call them out because, you know, they should be covering a bigger distance. But we had a big mix. We had one lane that pretty much just hit 12 lengths for all three. And it came back to that thing of people just not understanding their pace, maybe thinking that they're going hard, but they're just swinging their arms quicker as opposed to propelling themselves faster. We had two other guys in particular who whose increments were spot on like we went from, I think it might have been say 13 and a half lengths crept up the 14 lengths and 14 and a half. So they were gaining those increments as they went across those five minute markers.

But yeah, really interesting set. Fortunately, a lot of the same people are looking to do it again. So they haven't been completely put off. But a great way to learn how to suffer, which I think is probably something that a lot of people don't spend time doing. Yeah, I totally agree. It's a skill that you'd need to practice to really get to be able to suffer. And obviously some of that comes down to your experience and how long you've swum for, like somebody who's swum for a year probably doesn't have the ability to suffer for long periods in the water. But if you're getting a couple of years under your belt, then yeah, we want to be seeing something like that. Not a it's not a similar set, but a set where we have people suffer when we go to to Thailand for our how we camp. It's become a bit more like heaven week. It's not like hard training for seven for seven days. But we have some harder sessions in there. But one of the sessions is it's I think it's nine fifties dive walk back on about five minutes. So it's just max effort, essentially max effort fifties. And we do it as though first one's not not a warm up. But first time we just kind of do second one, we get the time. And then it's whoever is furthest away from that second time gets like gets out of the competition, but they still have to do it. But they're out of competition for the prize at the end. So I think we lose about three people per 50. And so a lot of people haven't done all out fifties from a dive and backing that up with lots of rest. Like they might have done fifties on the minute, fifties on one fifties.

But when you have a lot of recovery time that lactic acid builds up, it hurts, it hurts a lot. And so I really enjoy seeing people push themselves and suffer through that set. And we've had a few surprises, like people who I thought wouldn't do really well at that set actually actually came out on top and did really well. But that's like something like that is very, very challenging. And it's like it just sort of pushes you to that next level with your swimming. So yes, that's like that. I think a great it gives people the confidence that whether they get there or not, you know, but it gives them the confidence and the ability to go, yeah, OK, I'm actually like I can suffer here. I can actually push a lot harder. And I now see myself as this next level of swimmer. And if you keep doing that over years, then you find yourself doing some some pretty incredible things. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I think the there's a tendency, particularly, I think with the open water work because for the most part races, you're looking at a minimum of 750 meters that people tend to target the longer distance sets. And they don't really spend the whole lot of time in that anaerobic zone where they're really putting themselves into the red zone where they're struggling to breathe by the end of it. Like you're saying, lactic acid is building up and they're feeling an absolute joker by the time they come around to do the next one. But having the confidence then at the end of it, where they realized, well, I felt brutal, but I've actually managed to turn out some relatively decent times after maybe peeking on the first or second one. I think, like you said, people start having that confidence

and realizing that that kind of strong swimming, seeing the benefit and how that actually transfers into the open water work so that if you do have to chase the set of toes, if you're accelerating onto the boy or off the boy, that you have that capacity strength wise to put in those big digs, but then come back down to that kind of race pace effort and just kind of hold that. So I would find there's huge benefits in that anaerobic work that again, a lot of the kind of distance or open water swimmers I think tend to veer away from. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's the other part of that, too. The other thing that I like to do a lot of in training is an example we did this week was it was one hundred and fifty.

Was it one hundred and fifty strong like front end race pace? So what would be about a two K swim? Five or ten seconds rest and then we go on to two hundred and fifty recovery. That recovery is just like moderate effort, but like as quick as you can. Get that heart rate under control, keep good form and and then the next one is one hundred and fifty strong and then one hundred and fifty recovery and then fifty one hundred and fifty strong and then fifty recovery. And then we do that twice through. So like just being able to go hard, get the heart rate up, quickly recover, but keep your form that gives you the ability to shift gears when needed as you as you as you're racing there. Like it's that's a bit of an important skill for a lot of people to have. Yeah, I think it's something again that's probably underestimated. And we we we would do something similar and that we try and get people to spend a lot of time in that red zone. But then bringing it back down to that sustainable, maintainable race pace so that even though there might be fatigue, they can still find form. Inevitably when people race, I think they let fatigue get the better of them. And the first thing that they do is that lead arm starts to drop. And so we try and bring things back to a really simple point that when they get tired, like just think about your fingertips because your fingertips can't be engaged if your wrist isn't strong if your elbows are engaged, your shoulders not in the right position. So once you maintain that length rule for streamlining, at least whatever proportion you're putting into the water, you're going to benefit from it. But if our lead arm drops and you're trying to propel yourself,

now you're missing out on both aspects of the stroke. So going back to what you were saying with those sorts of sets where you have people who are fatiguing over the course of being on that upper end of their pace, but then coming back to swimming that kind of distance, that race pace and just learning how to hold up form, develop that strength and capacity for maintaining that position and holding the technique to the water is hugely beneficial. I'd love to jump into any story or example of someone you've worked with recently who you've seen make good progression, because I find that sometimes, and I know this personally for myself, is like, if you hear a story of someone who's gone from, say, to 20, down to two minutes or something like that, it's like, all right, yeah, it's possible. And just kind of having that belief that it is possible. Because I find sometimes people get stuck in their own head and they become their own worst enemy where they're like, oh, it's just tried so many different things and nothing's happening. And I'm just stuck at this one pace and I just don't know if I can actually get any faster. But we see it all the time. They have people to improve, often quite to pretty incredible speeds over the course of several years. So is there any examples that come to mind that people you've worked with recently? Yeah, we're quite lucky. We have a very broad demographic in terms of people that we're dealing with. And we've we've a very broad mix of backgrounds that people are coming from. So like with some people who have been very high performers and other sports that are coming across, they tend to do quite well because they're so aware of their biomechanics that it's easy.

They can take so much more information on and wouldn't go that they tend to adapt to it much easier. The point you're making at times, that thing of people being in that kind of north of 210 to 20, then making those big strides and bring it down to that two minute mark is very achievable with a few small adjustments. It's when you get kind of to the narrow end. So I always find that kind of sub 145 paces, really, where people start struggling to make some big inroads. We do have there's a couple of couple of cool examples. One of the guys Rob, who is currently training for the Ironman World Championships in Nice, he wishes it was Kona, but he's he's got to go to Nice. And he we ran like an athlete development program last year. And the idea was that we wanted to just try and engage a couple of athletes who are maybe performing quite well in certain aspects of what they're doing, but the swimming isn't where they needed to be. And Rob was one of the guys that we took on. And the swimming is probably up. He was probably doing well to be sub two minutes kind of around like maybe north between 155, two minute mark.

And we were working with Rob kind of remotely and things are moving along relatively well. He kind of got down south of like low 150s, high 140s. But over the last since Chris was there, we've actually had him in our lane training. And the lane training were very lucky because the group that are in that kind of buy into our ethos and the ethos being like swim hard, push, push each other, be aggressive when you need to be. He's slotted in there. And over the course of a couple of weeks, we've kind of seen those times drop to where he's posting like kind of sub 130s effort kind of swimming consistently. And we kind of have him down what should be sustained via sub 140s high 130s lowies. So where previously his target across the course of his Ironman swim would have been like if he could get sub two minutes. Whereas now we're saying we reckon like 140 pace, he should be out the hole. But if he gets to if he is a decent ready on him, if he gets onto a good pair of set of toes and if he navigates the course, well, there's definitely a few more seconds there for the taking. So it's been it's been great seeing that progression, especially with people who are who are hungry first. Like it's one thing to have someone who just wants to swim better because they want to swim better. That's absolutely fine. But I think then when you have somebody else who is training for a specific goal and they have specific targets in mind and you can see their confidence building in their swimming and they get more comfortable in the water, pace wise or starting to tease out a bit better. That's always really interesting to watch. Another cool one that we're working on working with

paratrooper athletes and Donica is fully blind. Donica lost his sight at 10. He never saw anybody swimming properly. And so like this guy is competed on the international stage. He has a guide and is swimming. It's actually incredible to get into a 50 meter pool with someone with absolutely no vision whatsoever and watch them swim up one side, come back down the other. He's cut all over his hands because he kind of navigates using the rope. But your coaching approach in that scenario has to be entirely different because his reference points are so different to what you're used to dealing with. And so when we got into that scenario, we're saying, OK, how do you actually teach someone who's never seen someone swimming before and you have to rely on your explanation to them as to what they're doing in the water so that they understand it. Because video analysis is obviously out the window, which is such a huge crutch. It works so well for people. But with Donica now, we've been working over the last couple of months. And I think even the last day, like we just had, there was one session in particular where Cross, I think, is set of hundreds. All he's looking for is for him to kind of hit consistent times at a steady pace. And I think we got him down to like a one thirty eight and he repeated that about four times in a row. And by the end of it, again, the comment was that he was able to produce that and it didn't feel overly taxing. It felt much easier than he had been swimming before.

So those sorts of gains are huge. It's fantastic to see that, particularly when the coaching environment is so entirely different to what you're used to. Can you give me an example of how you had to perhaps rephrase something that you would normally say to someone who can sort of knows what they need to do by some of what they've seen to work with that athlete?

So one of the big things that Donica would have been that kind of slightly struggling with was his catch. So engaging the water on the front end, like super early, as you've seen, that there's loads of people that catch the water really late, like almost under their chest. But it's trying to find that extreme position on the front end where we've like shoulder to cheek and we're getting fingertips pointed towards the bottom as early as possible.

And a lot of that I find comes down to people actually getting a feel for the water and understanding the creation of that leverage and really holding that water in the arm as they drive through. So I was looking and saying, OK, how do we actually explain the catch position properly? And a lot of it actually I find comes down to more tactile work. So I find that I get him to kind of put his fingertips down into my elbow and my fingers to then open his elbow and I get him to start leveraging back and forth, putting pressure through that. We then transfer that maybe to just fingertips on the wall and you're looking to just kind of leverage through the fingertips and get the elbow nice and high and then transfer that straight into the water. You use paddles and stuff to accentuate the feeling and make sure that it's a little bit more exaggerated, but simple things like that where you maybe have to kind of move him into position a bit more and be a little bit more hands on. But it definitely works. The flip side of that is it's incredible to see someone's ability with no vision to take on these pointers and put them into practice.

Choice, choice, my legs are a 50 meter pool. They're ice loaves. It's just it's it's an incredible, incredible drive and determination and incredible focus that you could see. You can see someone fatiguing over time when they're having to concentrate that hard on particular movements and aspects of technique. Yeah, well, that's that's a great, great story. It's it's good to be challenged in those ways to be able to have to figure out different ways to coach and get your point across. And yeah, it's that's really exciting. Well, Damian, I really appreciate you being on the podcast and sharing your expertise for those that are listening. What's the best way to follow you, get in touch with you? And yeah, and hear more, especially if they're in Ireland near Dublin. Yeah, so best place to get in touch is probably Instagram at flowstateswimming and otherwise website flowstateswimming.ie and all the contact details are through there. And look, we're we're we're just stoked to try and work with people who are looking to push themselves in the open water. We're we're very fortunate Ireland that we have some fantastic distance routes like the North Channel, the Fastness, Go Away Bay. But there's also the aspect where people want to race and we want to help people race and pursue times, push themselves and get into a position where they feel comfortable to be aggressive and push hard in the water. If that's you, whether you're a tracelier or open water swimmer, please feel free to get in touch

for a whole load of different types of sessions that people can get involved with. Yeah, great to meet new swimmers. Thank you very much for having me on. It's been great to chat through these bits and pieces and get your perspective of what we're doing. Yeah, likewise. Thanks, Damian. Great to chat. All right, thank you very much. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you'd like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post How To Be Assertive And Kick A$$ In Open Water with Damien Wildes appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Andrew Sheaff—coach, educator, and the author of A Constraints-Led Approach to Swim Coaching. We dive into one of the most important skills for adult swimmers and triathletes: learning how to self-coach.

Whether you’re swimming solo, training without feedback, or stuck on a plateau, Andrew shares a practical roadmap to finally break through. You’ll learn why progress isn’t about doing more drills—but choosing the right ones. We talk about how to create built-in feedback loops, what to do if you feel like nothing’s changing, and why slowing down and being intentional could be your fastest path forward.

Andrew also shares one of his favorite drills—“power pulls”—and how it reveals exactly what’s working (and what’s not) in your stroke. If you’re someone who trains alone, or you’ve been working hard without seeing results, this episode could be the turning point.

If you enjoy this conversation and want to dive deeper, Andrew’s Stroke Fundamentals course is a fantastic next step. It breaks down the key elements of freestyle technique in a simple, actionable way—and as a listener of the podcast, you can get 50% off. Click this link to get Stroke Fundamentals for 50% off

—> www.coachandrewsheaff.com/effortless

you know, skills take a while to improve, especially if they're, you know, they're the big skills that really matter. Like people are working on them their entire career. And so that can be, you know, I think another mistake is if you bounce from thing to thing every week or so, you're never going to really, you know, spend enough time on something to really make a difference. So I think that's probably the other big thing that we didn't really discuss is you got to be consistent with what you're trying to improve. Because if you jump around, it's like, you know, whatever the chase two rabbits catching on that saying, it's, you know, it definitely applies here to welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here's your host, Brenton Ford. What if you could become your own best swim coach? In today's episode, I'm joined by Andrew Shaff, coach, educator, and the author of a constraints led approach to swim coaching. We dive into one of the most important skills for adult swimmers and triathletes learning how to self coach. Whether you're swimming solo, training without feedback or stuck on a plateau, Andrew shares a practical roadmap to finally break through. You'll learn why progress isn't about doing more drills, but choosing the right ones. We talk about how to create built in feedback loops, what to do if you feel like nothing's changing, and why slowing down and being intentional could be your fastest path forward. Andrew also shares one of his favorite drills, power pools, and how it reveals exactly what's working and what's not in your stroke. If you're someone who trains alone or you've been working

hard without seeing results, this episode could be the turning point. If you enjoy this conversation and want to dive deeper, Andrew's stroke fundamentals course is a fantastic next step. It breaks down the key elements of freestyle technique in a simple, actionable way. And as a listener of the podcast, you can get 50% off. Just check the link in the show notes to access the special offer. Let's get into the episode with Andrew Shaff.

So Andrew, one of the topics I want to cover today is how can someone who doesn't have a coach giving them feedback on deck to be able to give them feedback on how they're swimming? How can people make changes and self coach so that they can actually make improvements in their swimming over the course of several weeks and several months? Because I coach a lot of adults and they're not getting feedback from a coach on deck, so they have to become their own coach. So I want to get stuck into some of those topics there. In terms of what you see and the people you're working with, is that something that's really common, not being able to get feedback? Yeah, I mean, because even if you're in a coaching environment where regardless if it's a club swimming program, a master's program, or a collegiate program, there's going to be one coach working with a group of athletes and that group might be as small as five people, but it could be 30 people. And so a coach has one pair of eyes and even if they're doing their absolute best to interact with everyone and provide feedback to everyone, there's limits to what they can do. So the more that anyone can get better at kind of facilitating the change process, that's going to be really important because you do 25 meters, you're taking minimum 10 strokes and so each one's an opportunity and unless the coach literally has a microphone in your ear, which is not too common, they can't tell you what you're doing in every single lab or even every single stroke. So I think it's something that's really important and it's definitely a skill set that people can learn. And so I think, and it's not, you know,

anyone can get better, anyone can change, it's not tied to someone's talent, it's just it's kind of a process that people have to learn. Yeah, absolutely. And from the feedback from, say some of the clinics that we've run, when we've done something like wrong way, right way, with it, let's say a drill or a way of swimming, that has been like a good first step for people to be able to recognize when they're in the wrong position, when they're in the right position and building up that self-awareness. What are some of the other strategies and tactics that people can do to actually build this ability to self-coach? Right, so I think even before that step, what's really important is that you have to have a clear goal in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. And so, you know, you'd frame the question in the terms of making progress over, you know, three to four weeks. And, you know, you can make a lot of change in your skills in that timeframe, but you can't make a lot of change in all your skills. And so it can be really, really important to start off with, what do I want to actually improve? Because if you're not really clear about that, and like, you know, a pretty bad goal is, I want to improve my skills, or I want to, you know, improve my technique, like that doesn't mean anything. And so being really clear about that is really important. So, you know, like something like breathing, that's a really concrete skill that that's pretty, you know, specific, and you can make a lot of improvement with that, because it lets you know what type of activities you're going to want to do, because if you're trying to improve your breathing, it doesn't make sense to be spending half your time kicking like

they're not related. So I think that's probably the most important thing. And then once you have a clear goal of what you want to accomplish, it's picking activities that are going to help you get there. But more importantly, like picking activities that do have some sort of feedback built into them. And so, you know, certain drills make it a lot easier for you to feel what you're doing and how you're being effective. And when you do them poorly, you know that right away. And so like, like you used the example of kind of right way wrong way, and that's an awesome way to help people become more aware of what they're doing. But some drills have that built into it. And so like, you know, one of my the textbook example that I like is you've shown a paddle on your head, and you mess up your breathing, that paddle is coming right off. And in that situation, you don't need a coach to tell you, hey, that wasn't, you know, that wasn't effective because you know, as soon as it happened, I think being clear on the goal and then trying to pick the activities that make it easiest for you to feel the key skills is the next big step. Yeah, that's great. So let's set the goal, choose what you want to work on, and then prescribe the drills. And actually, one of the things that going through one of the courses that you've put out there, there's like, I've picked up a lot of good drills to show or to help identify that. And one example is in the freestyle section of your stroke fundamentals, the power pools drill. And so just to explain the power pool, actually, I'll let you explain the power pools and how that can be effective at giving you feedback on your catch and pull effectiveness. Right. Because I've started using this and it's, I love it.

Right. So, so basically what you're doing is if you're familiar with breaststroke, it's just a pull with both arms over the head, and you're just pulling down to the feet, you're on the surface of the water. And it works well if you use a pool buoy so that you don't really have to worry about kicking. And so what it can be really useful for is, and also if you're having trouble visualizing, it's like a double arm freestyle pull at the same time or a butterfly pull. And so what you can do is, the only way to move forward is to be effective with your arms. You're not using your legs. And because you've got a pull buoy in, for the most part, your body position is going to be pretty good. So that's not really going to be a limiting factor. And you're not going to be able to change it. So what you can do is, is now you don't have to worry about the recovery. You don't have to worry about the breathing. You don't have to worry about the timing. It's just kind of a pure pull thing. And so what you can do is you can go, I'm going to go 425s and I'm going to try to take less strokes each one. And so the only way you can do that is by being better at setting up your stroke, setting up your catch, holding it through, getting more out of each stroke. And what's valuable about the numbers is that, you know, I'm just making them up. So you took 15, the first one, and you took 12, the next one. Well, whatever you did, it was better. Something positive happened. And then, then it's just a matter of figuring out what, what changed. And so if you go 15, and then you go 12, and then you go 15 again, well, whatever you did, you stopped doing it. And so it's a, it's a matter of figuring it out. And that's really clear feedback. And you don't just have to use stroke counts. You could also just see, can I go faster each one? And so both either, whether you're using stroke counts or speed,

they're both giving you feedback about how well you're, you're, you're creating propulsion, but the feedback is a little bit different. And it's a slightly different aspect of, of, of the skill. And you could even go crazier and you can, you know, try to combine the speed and the stroke count and try to keep them both as low as you, as you can. And so there you're, you're in a situation where the only way to be successful is to use your arms effectively and you're getting very clear feedback about what, what works. And so it becomes much simpler to try to figure out what you're doing wrong, what could be better. And then you can just kind of play with that.

Yeah. So we do it in most of our clinics now is, there's one of the final drills that we do. And there's so many different areas that you can, this one, it can adjust to get further with each stroke. And obviously, like the catch is the most obvious one, you know, we want this good high elbow catch. We don't want to drop it. That's one. But then also where and how much power you apply. So a lot of people tend to just go for broke at the start and they muscle the catch. And that means that they're not like, they just don't get into as good a position and they're not set up to be pressing back yet. So we have them just think of it as smooth through the catch, strong through the back. So smooth to strong. And they find that like with sometimes almost half the effort they get just as far, if not further, compared to when they're going too hard at the start. And that's how a lot of the swimmers that I coach would typically swim. Like they're just trying to enter the water, pull straight back and just apply too much power. So getting them to experiment with that, where their arms are through the, like the path of the hands through the stroke, a lot of people are too wide at the back of it. So make sure that they're coming in through the center a bit more. But all these little things we're getting to experiment and feel how far are they traveling with each power pool that they do. And it's just so good at like ironing out some of those details because they've got the feedback of, they can see how far they're traveling, they can count how many pools it's taking them. So like even just something as simple as that, I think can be such good feedback, but the swimmer needs to be able to

just go, okay, like for this lap, like I'm just, I'm going to tune into the feeling of this. Because I know that a lot of their triathletes I work with, they just want to get to the pool, have a hard workout and, you know, get the fitness aspect of it. But if you can just slow things down and put that awareness into it, it makes such a big difference to the technical side of your swimming. Right. And a good point you brought up was that you're in, like, you know, a lot of times our instincts are wrong. And so it feels right to just apply pressure right away. And like you said, how could it be that it's half the effort, but you know, twice the effectiveness. And that's where it can be really valuable to have the concrete feedback. Because if you only rely on your feelings, a lot of times they're going to be misleading. And that can cause a lot of problems. And so like, when you can see, wow, I literally traveled twice as fast, but I, but I wouldn't have believed it based upon it how it felt. That can be super valuable because you need the proof that what you're doing is effective, because what your body is telling you is, is effective is not. And that's where, like, the feedback is really helpful, because it allows you to be like, all right, well, I wouldn't have thought that that would work, but it did. And I was able to repeat it. So it's not just a fluke. And then that helps you, you create change. That's, that's interesting with, like, what we think we need to do is often very different than what we actually have to do. Right. Right. So much with that, with the, with the catch, because a lot of times people feel like they're getting more out of it because they're putting more force into it. And if

they're pushing down or dropping their elbow, they feel like they're connecting with the water. Well, not connecting, but there's pressure there pressure. If you go through that, yeah, if you go through the catch, well, sometimes it can actually feel like you're not getting as much purchase initially, because there's less, less force on there. But yeah, if you're setting up, well, well, then you're going to actually have it going in the right direction. So it actually feels a little bit easier and lighter in a way when you do it.

Yeah. And like the name itself is in some ways misleading because it implies that you're trying to like, you know, do something forceful and like hold on to the water when really it's just kind of a simple repositioning. And then like you said, then you start applying pressure after that. And that's where people can get, can get messed up because it doesn't feel right. No, that's, that's it. And I can't remember if I bought this up last time, but I heard this from a coach and I don't know even if it's, if it's necessarily true, but I like the concept that's, you can only put six kilos of force on the water before you start to slip any more than that. And you're going to be ineffective with that extra power. It just doesn't go to actually moving your forwards. And so I think that concept of like, all right, I've only got this certain amount of force that I can apply. So I'm just going to sort of operate just below that. Then people find that they don't actually have to muscle their way through the, through the water and they're better off just having that, that more balanced approach. And that's why you see like really good swimmers, they just, they're not having to work that hard. It's like they've got good body position. They're very streamlined and then they're very effective with the movements that they're making. They're not pulling necessarily harder than the average person. It's like they're just much more effective at it. So just trying to go for that sort of approach is, is, is what we want to work towards. Yeah. Yeah. And I think to kind of build on what you said, like I think there's, there is a limit to how much pressure you can apply to the water. And at the same time, the more patient you are with applying pressure, you can usually apply more towards the, like, so the more patient you are, the higher

amount of pressure you can get to, but like, but if you try to rush it, like you said, or you try to go too fast, then, then you kind of lose it. And so it's like, it's, it's hard because we want to go, but like, we have to be patient with it. And we have to be like almost, like almost as hard as we can, but, but not quite. Now let's, let's go into some other sort of ways or drills that you'd, you'd use with people to give them the ability to know how they're, how they're going with these stroke changes.

Let's say perhaps it's, I don't know, maybe like rotation is, for me, like a big one, a lot of swimmers that I coach, they come in and they're very flat and they, they struggle to get the correct amount of hip and, and torso rotation. And so we want to just develop their ability to, to rotate side to side, but not go, not go too far. What are some things that people could do to help improve that and know how they're going with it? This episode is brought to you by Pillar Performance. Our new sponsors Pillar are a sports micronutrition company. And the easiest way to describe it is that while hydration and carbohydrates products will take you through to touch the wall as fast as possible, Pillar's mission is to get swimmers to the starting blocks in the best condition over and over again. I recently started taking Pillar triple magnesium after a friend had recommended it. And it's been a game changer for my sleep and recovery. I take one scoop 30 minutes before bed each night in the same way that you might start your day with a coffee. I finish it up with a magnesium and recover better for tomorrow's session in the pool. Pillar performance is used by some of the biggest names in swimming and triathlon, including Zack Stubbulty Cook, Jan Frodeno, Ben Canute, Ash Gentle, Taylor Nib amongst the host of other well-known swimmers and triathletes. Where Pillar differs from other micronutrition you may have taken before is both the quality of the types of magnesium and the tangible results that I see on my garment each morning. If you'd like to try Pillar today, head to pillarperformance.shop and enter code effortless for 15% off. That's effortless

for 15% off all first-time purchases. Or for anyone in North America, enter the same code at thefade.com. Right. So specific to rotation, one thing that I'd like to try to do is to keep people within the rhythm of the stroke or the timing of the stroke as much as possible. And so rather than you can have people just rotate all the way to their side and onto their back, I like to have them recover their arms under the water because that makes it easier to focus on what they're doing from a rotation standpoint and the timing tends to be pretty good. And that allows them to explore ranges of motion. And so what's tough about the amount of range of motion is, like you said, it's difficult to know how much you're doing and whether it's enough. And also it's probably a little bit different for people too based upon their buoyancy, how flexible they are. And so it's not like there's a magic number that you're trying to hit. So with the underwater recovery, what you can do is you can do something where like kind of going back to the stroke count. You can try to take less strokes, which will force you to rotate more and to be longer. And then you can alternate that with some where there's less, or excuse me, there's more strokes, which will cause you to be a little bit flatter. And by kind of exploring the extremes, that allows you to be more aware of kind of where you need to be. And so if you, if you tend to know that you need to rotate more, then exploring more at like really low and really trying to stretch it out. And then, you know, you can do some where it's a little bit tighter and you're more likely to find a

rhythm that feels good for you. And kind of going back to what we talked about earlier, you can start comparing that to some times too. And that gives you more awareness of, hey, if I exaggerate the rotation, what feels like exaggerated to me, I noticed that I can go a little bit faster and it's easier. Well, then that's, you know, that means you're on the right track. But let's say, you know, you really try to exaggerate the rotation, but you go significantly slower and it feels really labored. Well, then that's probably not going to be the right choice for you. So kind of exploring the options and then trying to get some measurement in terms of what's effective and the effort part is important too. Like we talked about earlier, if you can produce the same performance for less effort, that's great. And so that can be valuable too.

Yeah, for people to just go, okay, it's actually okay for me to go between these two extremes because quite often what feels extreme for someone is not that extreme. Like when they're, yeah, if they're too flat and then they try and go for a lot of rotation, it's very rare that they actually have too much. So like we, when we do our freestyle clinics, in the last filming that we do, I have them pick one thing to focus on. And I ask most of them to exaggerate that change a bit in order to actually see a change. And then they look at it and look, sometimes it's like it's looking really good, but still sometimes people just need more exaggeration of the change. So it's just, yeah, it's very unlikely that people actually go too far with it. So yeah, just being willing to stretch what an experiment and just try different things and operate within, yeah, these really two big changes will help you find that sweet spot. Yeah, somewhere in between. And I like in one of your videos I saw a little while ago, you're just talking about rotation for freestyle. And you mentioned like how much you need to rotate in freestyle. Well, number one, it's enough to be able to get the arm out comfortably, right? Because if you're flat, then our shoulders don't work very well. And then in the catch, well, it's enough to be able to get into a high elbow catch, use these bigger, stronger muscles through here. And if you go too far, well, you're not going to be able to hold your catch. And if you're too flat, well, you can't really use your lats and so on. So I think that I found that is a really good way to explain how much rotation we need, like enough to get the arm out, enough to get into a good and a strong catch position like that. Just simple, simple thought for me was good

to be able to convey that to other people as well, when we're explaining how much we need. Right, right. Because more is not necessarily better, because like you said, you're going to get out of like, you know, your elbow is just going to be your arms going to be out of position. And then two, it just takes more time. And so if your stroke rate is up by 50%, is 50% slower, because you're taking all this time to rotate, and you're not even you're getting in worse positions, like it's just not going to be helpful. And so, yeah, it's about finding the optimal. And so like, if you feel like you can recover smoothly, you feel like you can set up your stroke well, then you probably don't need to change anything. But if you know that you're just kind of like robot recovering, and you're not setting up your stroke well, then you need to explore. And that's kind of going back to the underwater recovery in the stroke counts. That's why I like putting a number on it too, is because, like you said, people think they're changing, but they're not. And so if you say to yourself, I'm taking whatever 12 strokes of the underwater recovery, I want to get down to eight, that's going to force you to really explore that range of motion, because you might think you're changing, but then the stroke count hasn't changed at all, because you haven't actually changed. And so anything you can do to like, make yourself do something different is going to be really valuable, because our tendency is any deviation from normal is going to feel really weird, and it's going to be like, I'm changing so much, but really not much changes happen at all. The kind of leads into the next thing I want to cover here is that someone who has been trying to improve or get faster over, say, six months or 12 months,

they've been working at a few different things, and they find themselves in the same spot. They were 12 months ago. Why could that be? And then what could they do to make sure that the next six months don't follow that same pattern? And I'm talking more about more like adult swimmers and triathletes. Right. So a lot of times it's not solving the right problem. So basically, if you're so in freestyle and your breathing is problematic, whether it's just you're pulling out of position, it's just slow, the timing's off, it's very difficult to improve anything else, because if every stroke, your head is getting pulled out of line, well, your body's going to be out of line, and if your body's out of line, how are you going to do anything with your arms? If they're just moving all over the place, they're not going to be effective. So making sure that you're addressing the right problem is really important. And two, with a lot of adult swimmers, spending all your time on your kick is probably also not maybe the best use of your time if your breathing's really bad, if your body position's really bad, if your timing's really bad, if your arms aren't really bad. It's not that kicking can't help, but if these other things aren't in place first, it's not going to make that much of a difference. And so

breathing tends to be the, you need to breathe. There's no way around that, you're going to have to do that. And so if you can't do that well, that's typically the first place to start, because every other skill is dependent on that. You can't manage your body position if you're pulling out of alignment every time you breathe, and you certainly can't pull. So once you get your breathing locked in, then it's a matter of can I swim with pretty good body position and pretty good alignment, because swimming's just so much harder if you're dragging yourself through the water, and you're going to get exhausted, and it really, really kills speed. And so that's probably the next thing to think about. And then if you have those things ironed out, then really go into town on what your arms are doing and the propulsion you can create with them is the next big step. So really a lot of times it's about finding the limiting factor for you, because if you're working on something that could be important, but will never be fixed because of some other problem, then you're just going to spin your wheels. And so that can be, it can be really valuable to, you know, one, take a step back and really think about what could be the problem or two, it's like ask someone for help that maybe has a little bit more experience, because, you know, all the work in the world, the best drills or strategies in the world aren't going to overcome working on the wrong problem. Yeah, that's such a great answer that. And with the breath timing, the two like really common ones I've seen the last couple of months, and I guess probably forever since I've been coaching really, but a late breath for triathletes. So for adults like just turning their head too late. And what

I try and teach at clinics is think about pulling into the breath. So as one hand is coming under your head, that's when you should start to turn. And so your head will start to turn as this hand is coming underneath. You want the mouth out of the water just as you're about to exit with that same hand. And then the most important part, I feel is that like the head comes back in, the eyes come back in towards the end of the catch there. So the eyes are back in as this hand is about to pass underneath the head again. Like that to me is probably the more important one. But if you get it right at the start, it's a lot easier obviously to, you know, to get that second part right. But yeah, breath timing, I had a clinic the other day where I think there was three of them that their breath time was just too late. Like they're either lingering with the head, so it didn't come back early enough. Or they just were just turning much too late. And it's like, if you're breathing every two, that's half your strokes where it's going to be thrown off. But then that second stroke where you're not breathing, well, it's everything's out of place anyway. It's out of sync. So that's a big one. And then obviously like lifting the head or turning too far. So yeah, that's, I love that answer because yeah, if you're working away at the wrong, the wrong problem, it's like you're in the same, the same place there. Right, right. And then, and then so once you do identify, go ahead, sorry. No, sorry. So once you do identify the right problem, then it's like, all right, what strategies are going to really make a difference here? And so like if you're working on your, your arm pull, it's like, there are things that are going to be pretty helpful. And they're ones that aren't. And so it's identifying the strategies that are going to be most, most useful for, for that particular problem. And then once,

once you do, once you find those, and that, and that, you know, that might take some time. But again, it's like there, there are resources out there, you know, most of them for, for free, just kind of have to do a little work. The second mistake I see is that rather than changing something that you know works or sorry, rather than sticking with something that you know works, people will change what they're doing because they either get bored or it feels like it's not working anymore. But what I found to be the most effective thing is if you find a drill or a strategy that you really like, change how you do it, rather than changing from strategy to strategy. And so like, you know, with the breathing thing, like just we talked about earlier, the pedal on the hat, on the head, if that works for you, don't do something else, keep doing that, but, but maybe add some speed to it. Maybe you start doing it with fins, maybe you do it with your, your hands closed so that it's harder to, to, to balance yourself when you breathe. So there's lots of different ways to challenge whatever drill or strategy you're doing, because just because you can do it, you know, using, using the breathing, just because you can breathe well in a drill when you're going slow, that's got nothing to do with, you know, your thousandth stroke in a race when you're, you're tired, people are swimming on top of you, you're in the waves, like those are two totally different skill sets. So you have to learn how to do it well. And then you got to keep challenging it because it's not going to get better if you don't continue to challenge. And I mean, if you think of Olympic level swimmers, they still do drills in their, in their warmup and in their session. And just to, to refine some of these, these aspects. And I think

what I've seen, like most of them for the, for the freestyle is a lot of them, like single arm freestyle, bred into the opposite side, other arm by the, by the underwater recovery freestyle or long dog is a really common one. And obviously scaling and those sorts of things like fairly simple drills, but there's a lot of ways that you can either challenge that drill or it actually takes a lot to do that drill very well, especially single arm, bring to the opposite side. Like that's, yeah, that's a very challenging drill for most people. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, I think for the athletes, I work with it triathletes, adult swimmers, if I really like that drill because there's so much that we can work on with it. And so, you know, people might be choosing drills, but yeah, just make sure you've got the, that specific, specific focus. So for the timing, if they're doing single arm, bring to the opposite side, I just, I want them to actually try and get that breath very early, like to even encourage it to be earlier than what it needs to be. So when the hand enters, we want to start to turn the head and then bring that eyes back down even before they start their catch, just to overdo it a little bit, just to try and get used to that sort of timing. So eyes come back in before they start the catch and then they can, can pull through. And then obviously, like that will feel very extreme and it is, but then when they go to swimming, they're going to start to be able to, I think, move closer to that sort of breath timing. Can you talk, talk to some of the other ways that you would increase the challenge of some of the drills or how you would, you would shift them as someone gets better at it? Yeah. So, so like you said, some of them have a lot of different

points of mastery. And so kind of like we were talking about earlier with the, with the power poles, there's a lot of different ways that you could explore to help you get more out of that. And so just because you've made a little bit of progress there, doesn't mean you've figured it out. And so like you said, there's elite elite athletes that are still working on these things and not necessarily just doing them to do them, like they're still trying to get better at them. So, so from a challenge standpoint, you can challenge it with like, so some sort of performance, like you could ask yourself to go faster with it, like you can build, you could descend. Depending on what it is, you could say, I want to take less strokes. In some cases, take more strokes. So like in the example with the breathing to the opposite side, it's not, it's going to be easier to do it when you go slower. And so if you force yourself to take more strokes or to use a higher stroke rate, now you've got to make that breath happen a lot faster. You've got to be a lot more precise with it. And that's another level of challenge than just doing it at your own pace. So like if you have a tempo trainer, some drills, you can put the tempo trainer on and force yourself to, to speed it up. Different training aids can make the challenge different. So like sometimes you put a buoy in, sometimes you put fins in, you could wear paddles, you could hold the paddles upside down, you could close your fists, like a lot of different things. Sometimes you may be doing a drill with a snorkel because it makes it easier so that you don't have to breathe. Then you take the snorkel off and now you have a new level of challenge. Or if you're using fins, you take the fins off, now it's going to be more difficult. And then another way to do it is to add some fatigue to it. So you could start doing the drill and taking a lot less rest or like this can be fun too. It's

like you do 100 freestyle with pretty strong effort, you're focusing on whatever skill you're working on. And then you go right into the drill. And now you're starting to do the drill with your heart rate up, which is going to be more difficult and it's going to be more challenging. You're really going to have to focus. And then two, you know, this is kind of another mistake that people make is I just don't do the drill by itself. Do the drill, swim, do the drill, swim. And so like the example you gave with the one arm freestyle, bring the opposite side, like you could do two 25s like that build to add a little speed to it. And then you could go right into a 50 or 100 freestyle where you're trying to execute the same skill. And that's going to generate a little bit of fatigue too. But also, no one cares if you can do the drill. Well, you're doing the drill so you can actually swim well. And so if you don't practice going from the drill to the swim, like that's a missed opportunity for sure. Yeah, definitely. And like you do a lot of sort of calls with coaches, you put out a lot of content. Is there anything that stands out to you that's really resonated with the people who view your stuff or that you've been speaking to recently?

I think the biggest thing is that there doesn't have to be this distinction between skills and training. And so I think that's the like, and so for people that like to train, which is definitely going to be the triathlete crowd, which is great because fitness is a huge part of it, you don't necessarily have to give up the training and just only just swim easy and just perform easy drills. It's like, if you can find ways to integrate these two things, it's going to be one, a more engaging experience. But two, it's going to be more effective. And so just kind of using the example I just said, if you have a set today that you have to go 10-100, it's like, well, you could go four rounds of maybe a 50 or 225 drill and then do two 100s and then do that four times. And that's an easy way to just constantly remind yourself how to execute these skills a little bit better. But two, your heart rate is going to be up just the same way. It's going to be the same thing from a physiological standpoint, but you're able to get more out of the same thing. And so I think that can be a little bit of a perspective shift. And two, it can be a lot more exciting because now you can be a lot more creative in terms of how you write your workouts or write sets. Yeah. And when I've seen sets from some of the best coaches or those that have had the most success, there's often quite a bit of detail in those sets because they're keeping it interesting. They're challenging you in different ways with breath control or stroke count, whatever it might be. And you're working

without thinking that you're working in a way like the time flies because it's such an interesting and engaging set. And I think that's the real key to having someone get better at swimming without getting bored. So it's like, this is somebody who's coaching 10 times a week with the same swimmer. It's like you've got to spice things up and really challenge them mentally as well as the physical side of things. I mean, you've seen a lot of that. What do you recognize with those coaches who have the best buy-in from their athletes? So it kind of goes back to the have one goal thing from a skill thing is a lot of sets will have a very clear goal.

And it's one that you don't almost have to explain. It's just almost obvious. And those are going to be the most engaging sessions because you have one clear goal and then the work clearly relates to accomplishing that goal. And so that's going to be, you just have a focus set. And so instead of just doing 10-100s or whatever it is, we're going to do the 10-100s or something similar in a very specific way to accomplish a very specific outcome. And then I think it's very easy for swimmers to see this will make me better because I'm doing something that's clearly moving me towards my goals. And so I think 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. 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. The more that I would find myself as a coach having to explain why we're doing something, the further I am a way of delivering something that's going to be effective because it should be pretty obvious what the purpose of this and how this will help someone.

If we're going to work on our just sticking with the theme, our breathing, like our ability to breathe well with some endurance, that set that I mentioned earlier, like the 225s and then the 2100s, it's pretty clear what that's accomplishing. And so it's easier to do something like that than to just be like, I'm going to do 10, 200s and it's just like the goal is just to finish it. So I think, like you said, the more that there can be those little pieces in there and they're all geared towards, they're not random pieces, they're geared towards things that the swimmers need to work on. And if you're writing workouts for yourself that you know you need to work on, it makes a big difference. Yeah, definitely if you're writing your own sets as well or just having to train by yourself, it can be a challenge to get through anything more than about 2k if you've had to write your own set. So if you can do it in a way where you set yourself little challenges like holding a certain breathing pattern or stroke count, then the time will fly and you're not just focused on, all right, this is number three, let's do it, this is number four, get through it. And I say that from personal experience because it's like I would write my own sets and unless I've really got like a big race or a really big goal I'm training for, if I don't have that then it's very hard to like motivate yourself if you've written your own set and you're at the pool by yourself. So right, but I think a lot of people are in that in that situation. Right, right. And again, like just keep it simple. So like we talked about having the one big technical goal that you're trying to accomplish over a period of time. So just find one way, like one simple way to build that into your set

just a little bit. It's not like every single lap has to be super focused and super dialed in, but it's like if I've got zero technical engagement in this set, how can I go from it's at a one out of 10, how can I go to a two out of 10? You don't have to take it to 10 out of 10 and it's just like find one small thing that you can add to it. And then as you get comfortable with that, maybe next time you add a little bit more, it doesn't take much, but it can make a big difference. Yeah, absolutely. Ed, is there anything that we haven't covered that you think would be good to add in here or cover before we wrap up? I think that the other thing is just to be consistent with it. Skills take a while to improve, especially if they're the big skills that really matter. People are working on them their entire career. And so that can be, I think another mistake is if you bounce from thing to thing every week or so, you're never going to really spend enough time on something to really make a difference. So I think that's probably the other big thing that we didn't really discuss is you got to be consistent with what you're trying to improve, because if you jump around, it's like, you know, whatever the chase two rabbits catching on that saying, it's, you know, it definitely applies here too. So much so. I mean, I've had one focus since, I think it was November. So it's been, yeah, like pretty much four months with this one focus. And I think about three months in, it started to click for me. And it was just breath timing. Like just, I was, I was a bit slow to turn, bit slow to turn back. And so my right hand catch wasn't as good as it could be. And it was like,

I didn't really see results for a while. Didn't, I had glimpses of it, but like in sessions, but like, it just wasn't really clicking. But then eventually, like I raced a week or two ago, and I, it just felt so good. Like I felt like I could rate up very quickly and still hold water just in the open water. And yeah, but it just took a very long time. And I've been swimming for, since I was six or seven. And so it's like, it's taken me a good solid three plus months to actually see the results of the work I put in. And that's training on a very regular basis. So yeah, it's just, you got to give it time and just don't, don't jump around. It's tempting to do that. It's so tempting to do it. But you know, if it's that, if it's the one thing, if it's that big rock, or if it's the bottleneck that's stopping everything else from happening, then you might need to spend a good solid few months on it. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. And so like, like we talked about earlier too, it's like, it doesn't take that long to be able to maybe make a change when you're going nice and slow when it's 125. But like you said, you could probably do that within the first week or two. But like you said, it took, it took three months for it to show up for real, like in sessions. And that's where it's like, you know, you can really do this for real. And that's the difference is it doesn't take very much to make a change in a low pressure environment, but ultimately we need the changes to show up in a high pressure environment and pressure being, you know, psychology, physiology, race, all like, all that stuff. And so that's what takes so much time. And I think that's what people don't appreciate. It's like, just because you can do it slow today, does not mean you're going to be able to do

it in a race. You have to do all that training too. And like you said, that's months and that's for everybody. That's not, you know, that has nothing to do with ability level. It just takes a long time for the skill to be, you know, I guess ingrained to a level where you can perform it at a high level, you know, somewhat unconsciously. And that's, I think, the big, the big thing that people miss with them. Yeah. The analogy I made with a pro triathlete I'm coaching at the moment is like working away at one thing for a while. He's like starting to see those results a little bit. So it's like, it's just like correcting the course of a ship by like one or two degrees, just slight shift. And we're eventually going to get there. But just every single day, we've got to just keep course correcting. And, you know, eventually you'll, you'll end up there. But yeah, it just, it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen overnight. Right, right. Andrew. So for those that are listening, so for me personally, I went through your sort of stroke fundamentals course of six, 12 months ago, I can't remember exactly. But I love the kind of structure of this course. It's very, it's very simple in the fact it's easy to understand. And from easy to understand, it's easy to implement. And the way that you explain things, I've been able to take a lot from it and incorporate that into my coaching and my own swimming as well. And so, so for those that are listening here, we'll put a link in the podcast description. So we've got basically an offer for about 50% off that course for those that are listening and would like to go through that through the course. And I highly, highly

recommend it. I've been through it and learned so much from it. So we'll put that in the show notes. Anything you want to add about the, about that course and sort of why you put it together and how you structured it the way you did? Yeah, so mostly it's kind of taking it back to the, you know, the fundamentals of what people need to do to swim fast. It's, you know, because I think it could be very easy to get lost in the woods of I need to have a, whatever, 70 degree or 103 degree angle bend in my arm. But if you don't really understand why that's the case, it's hard to, to really commit to that. And so it's about discussing, you know, what really needs to happen. Like you said, in a simple way, that's not simplified necessarily, but just it's a, it's the simple basics of what needs to happen. And then you can better understand what needs to, you know, what needs to get better, why it needs to get better. And then it makes it easier to select activities to help those skills. And so that, that's kind of the, the thought process behind it. Yeah. Yeah. I really, really enjoyed it. And it's a good reference point. Like I've, one of our other coaches has sort of has gone through it as well, just as like, yeah, to, to give him that, that insight too. So it's been very useful. So if anyone is listening, we'll put that link. It's just, you know, our show notes, just for listeners of the podcast. So Andrew, thank you for being on there on the podcast. Love chatting with you. And as I said, I've learned a lot, learned a lot from you. And yeah, keep doing what you're doing because it's very important for the, for coaches and, and also swimmers who watch it as well. So thank you. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast.

If you'd like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post Unusual Strategies For Developing Your Swimming with Andrew Sheaff appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Struggling to keep your legs from sinking in the water—no matter how hard you kick or how low you keep your head? You’re not alone. But why do some swimmers maintain a perfect body position even when they’re looking forward and barely kicking?

In this episode, after coaching over 6,000 swimmers, I break down the real reason your legs are sinking, what you can do to fix it (even if you feel like a natural sinker), and share one powerful tip that can help you float more easily—something most coaches never talk about.

We’ll look at how your body’s weight distribution affects your position in the water, and the key adjustments that can transform your technique.

I like the Bruce Lee saying of be like water where water can be hard. If you come down from 10 meters and there's no nothing's broken that surface tension, water can be very hard. It can also move around, it can be very fluid. We need to hold our bodies and move in a way where we've got some some tautness and tension to it. So we've got form but not where we're too loose and floppy or too rigid and stiff. We need to find that sweet spot in between. 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.

Are you struggling to stop your legs from sinking when you're swimming? Even after you've been told to put your head down and to kick harder? Then why is it that some swimmers still have great body position even when they're looking forwards and not kicking hard? I've coached more than 6,000 swimmers and I'm going to share with you what actually causes your legs to sink, how you can fix it even if you feel like you're a natural sinker and one bonus tip that can help you float in the water much easier that I don't see any other coaches talking about. When you look at the human body we are unevenly distributed with our weight. Most of our weight is through our hips and our legs. They're a lot heavier than we are through our torso and so that works against us when we swim, when we're in a horizontal position. The weight of the legs wants to take over so we need to do something in order to change the balance of our body and move our center of mass forwards and the way that we do that is to extend our arms out in front of our head. So this can help raise the hips and raise the legs but the problem that a lot of swimmers face is that when they're swimming freestyle they're not keeping one arm in front of their head at all times. That's what we call front quadrant freestyle. So when I'm analyzing swimmers and we have a look at a bird's eye view we often see that there's nothing in front of their head for a pointing time and that means that the weight of the hips and the weight of the legs is going to take over and that's a big reason why they sink when they swim. So when you swim in it's important

to take a little bit of time to extend forwards with the arm while the other arm is taking its time to move forwards in front of you. That way you'll always have something in front and that will help with your balance but that's going to be impossible to do if you don't do this next thing. When I'm watching someone swim the way that they breathe and the way that they turn their head can have a really big impact on the rest of their stroke down the line and this is one of the things that I find causes someone to sink. It's how they're breathing and a big problem that we see with beginners swimmers is they're breathing in a way that's very panicked and rushed and when they're doing that we find that the balance in the water is not quite there because they're taking very small inhales or sometimes too big of an inhale where they're trying to gasp in the air and that can actually cause the balance to be thrown off a bit. So what we want to aim to do there instead is that when we turn the head we want to take this sip of air not like a huge gasp of air like we're trying to fill our lungs we don't have time for that and if you think about the way that you'd naturally breathe just walking down the street it's just going to be in and it's going to be out and you're not thinking much about it. If you can get to that point when you're swimming freestyle where you're taking this sip of air then you exhale a little bit through your nose as your face is in the water and then release the rest of the air as you're turning your head just before you take that next breath then that is the way that you can keep your heart right down and that will

actually improve how you sit in the water. Now the other part of that is that when people go to breathe if they're in that panic state and they're feeling like they're running out of air they often either lift up and turn to breathe and their heads way above the water and it's like lifting a bowling ball above the water the weight of four or five kilos is going to drop the back half your body so we need to make sure that we just turn keep that bottom goggle in the water so almost half our head is in the water or sometimes we see people looking up to the sky or looking way behind them and when they do that it causes their shoulders to roll too far and it's very hard to keep that arm in front so you lose that front quadrant timing and so that's where we find that the legs really starts to sink when that begins to happen. So once your breathing is comfortable and it's natural then you can make the most of it but you won't be able to take advantage of that until you do this next step. When we go through some of the exercises that we take people through in our clinics we have them do some floating drills and I find that when people try and get their hips up they have a tendency to stick their bum up in the air where they're bending through the hips and the waist but we actually need to do the opposite of that in order to be horizontal and stop our hips and legs from dropping we actually need to belong through the body and almost tuck our tailbone underneath which makes us straight through the hips so it's a little counterintuitive because you think well to get my hips up I've

got to stick my bum in the air but that causes your hips to bend your legs to drop and creates more drag so what we want to try and do instead is think about being long from our head to our toes tuck that tailbone and be tall and proud in this position so when we're straight then we can actually use our lungs to our advantage so your buoyancy comes from your lungs filled with air and it's like having a balloon that if you push it down it's going to pop back up we can then put some downwards pressure through our chest as we're swimming which will help your hips and your legs to come up after that so we can only do that though if we have the right posture first now this will work except if you're making this next mistake

I've heard a lot of coaches say this is I want you to kick harder to keep your legs up but the problem with that is the movement of the legs the kicking motion in freestyle is not very efficient when we're in the water it takes a lot of effort we're using the biggest muscles in our body to try and propel ourselves forwards if we're kicking hard and you do not need to do that to be a good swimmer or to be going fast because the kick is there to support you not so much to propel you so when we kick hard quite often we find that it's a waste of effort and the way that people then kick is they're bending their hips and their knees are lost and it's very inefficient that way so if you're doing that it's going to create more drag which will cause your hips and legs to drop and the other mistake that we see there is that if your toes are pointing to the bottom of the pool that again increases the drag and it can increase the drag by up to 42% which is a huge amount from just not pointing your toes behind you so what I try and have the swimmers do is think about keeping their legs somewhat long we'll let the knees bend a little bit and we want to point the toes and keep the feet and ankles quite loose and floppy and that way you can actually use the kit to support you and propel you forwards a little bit but it's more there as a counterbalance than anything else now I had us from the other week who he was facedown hands in front trying to kick himself forwards and he wasn't going anywhere so what I said to him was I want you to not think about trying to move yourself forwards

with the way that you're kicking right now I want you to firstly just loosen your ankles keep your feet nice and floppy and the way that you kick actually moves you forwards is it's the top of the foot as it's kicking down that's what will actually move you forwards it's that little movement there every time you kick downwards and so as he was going back down to face down he started to get a little bit of momentum and move himself in a forwards direction so the way that you're kicking can really make a big difference and I think a lot of adults especially adults who maybe feel like their kicks slowing them down or that they have very stiff ankles they find their kick either moves them backwards or they don't go anywhere but you can change the way that you're kicking especially by doing that face down front kick drill to help figure out what's going to move you forwards even if it's slowly so if you kick correctly it means your kick will be there to support you and help keep your legs up but not if you're making this next mistake 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

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experience clear vision from start to finish i've seen some swimmers take good advice and have it completely ruin their stroke because that advice gets misinterpreted and one of those really common things to misinterpret is our recovery when we bring our arm over the top of the water i get have been taught i think we've all been taught about a high elbow recovery and to me that implies the elbow should be pointing up to the sky but the way that that can get misinterpreted is people think they need to drag their thumb along their body or really pull their shoulder and elbow back out of the water where it's coming way back behind them and i see a lot of adults throw their alignment and balance out because of that so if i'm looking from above at someone and i see that when they finish their stroke their elbows getting pulled back behind their centerline here that is going to cause them to lose balance and it often causes their hips and legs to drop so what we aim for there is that we keep this nice and straight in front and as this arms coming through we just want this arm to be somewhere else the side so elbows pointing up hand is relaxed and we're just opening up through our underarm that way we can keep balance but if you are pulling this up and then coming behind you it's going to cause you to lose that balance and that's when we find that your wriggle all over the place the legs will splay out really wide and then you're probably going to find that your hips and legs sink so that's a really big common cause of people struggling to keep their hips and legs up and when you do that right it makes this next step

so much easier to achieve if you think about the direction that you are pressing with your arms under the water that can impact whether you're going forwards or whether you're dropping your hips so if we have a look at someone through the catch which is this motion here if there's too much force in a downwards direction it actually presses the chest up nice and high which is good except it drops the back half the body it drops the hips and legs so if they're pushing down too much then it can actually cause your hips and legs to drop so our aim there is to try and go through this catch motion where we're setting ourselves up to have our hand and forearm pressing mostly backwards and that's what moves you forwards now on a stake that often gets made there is when people are coming over the top of the water they go to enter and instead of entering with their fingers first and sliding their hand forwards under the surface of the water they overreach and they end up landing elbow first instead of fingers first now when they come in and land elbow first they end up pretty much having what we call a dropped elbow from the beginning and that will cause you to push down on the water which will cause your legs to drop so if you can enter fingers first we slide the hand forwards and then set up what we call a high elbow catch position then you're able to press back on the water and that will move you forwards and that's going to give you a bit more speed and propulsion which will help keep you up and you're going to be pushing down here causing the back half to drop so the way that you go through a catch and pull

can also impact whether your legs are sinking or not. At the start of this video I talked about swimmers still having good body position even when they're looking forwards because if you do all these other things right you can still sit horizontally in the water. Now don't get me wrong head position is very important especially as a beginner swimmer so the way that we need to make sure our head is is in the water is like an ice bag. An ice bag has got 10 to 20 above the water but the rest of it's actually below and that's how we need to have our head when we swim in so just the top the crown of our head is above the water the rest of it needs to be below otherwise it's like holding this heavy bowling ball luck above the water which might weigh four or five kilos and it's very hard to overcome that drag so we've got to have it at the right depth. The second thing is we need to make sure we're looking in the right position anywhere from looking straight down to about one or two meters in front while we lengthen and extend the neck because if your chin comes too far forwards guaranteed you're going to see this big lower back arch and that lower back arch is going to make it hard to keep your hips and keep the legs up so with good head position we find that we're very straight through the head the neck and the spine and through the rest of the body so the head position does play an important part but it's not the be all and end all there's a lot of other factors there that we just want to make sure that we're doing to keep our hips up and stop our hips and legs from dropping. Now one final bonus tip for you that I don't really hear many coaches

talking about it's the tension that we hold within our body so particularly swimmers who are a little bit nervous around the water and they don't feel like they're balanced very well they carry this tension where everything is very stiff and rigid. I like the Bruce Lee saying of be like water where the water can be hard if you come down from 10 meters and there's no nothing's broken that surface tension water can be very hard but it can also move around it can be very fluid. We need to hold our bodies and move in a way where we've got some some tautness and tension to it so we've got form but not where we're too loose and floppy or too rigid and stiff we need to find that sweet spot in between so being able to be comfortable be somewhat relaxed but maintain some bit of tautness through the body to keep good form and shape and be streamlined is an important part to actually keeping our hips and our legs up. If you find that you're getting tired when you swim check out this video about why that might be. 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 What You’re Not Being Told Told About Sinking Legs with Brenton Ford appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

What happens when a veteran swim coach, who’s spent years refining adult swimmers and triathletes, returns to coaching high school kids? In this episode, Frank Sole—coach, educator, and lifelong student of the sport—shares how “water is water” no matter your age, and why the principles of balance, buoyancy, and body awareness remain timeless. Frank dives into the biggest crossover lessons he’s bringing from Masters swimmers to juniors, the importance of teaching athletes to “own their technique,” and why he tells even his fastest swimmers to slow down and swim well, not fast. We also explore how Frank’s coaching philosophy has evolved over decades, the power of habit over outcome, and the surprising results his athletes are getting—not just in the pool, but in their lives. Whether you’re a coach, a swimmer, or someone who’s passionate about getting better, this episode is packed with wisdom, stories, and the kind of gold you can take straight to your next session.

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First of all, patience. Take a deep breath. We'll get you there. But this is a process, right? If we, I've got to convey to a young swimmer, if we're focused on the outcome versus the process, you focus on the outcome. You may do well at an event, and you're going to be very disappointed lots of times when you don't hit your best time. But if you stay focused on the process, you're constantly building towards that outcome. So that hasn't changed. I don't care whether I'm coaching a fourth grader or somebody who is swimming in the Pan-An games as a U.S. master swimmer. So that's the similarities between what I'm doing now and what I did do.

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here's your host, Brenton Ford.

What happens when a veteran swim coach who spent years refining adult swimmers and triathletes returns to coaching high school kids? In this episode, Frank Sol, coach, educator, and lifelong student of the sport shares how water is water, no matter your age, and why the principles of balance, buoyancy, and body awareness remain timeless. Frank dives into the biggest crossover lessons he's bringing from master swimmers to juniors, the importance of teaching athletes to own their technique, and why he tells even the faster swimmers to slow down and swim well, not just fast. We explore how Frank's coaching philosophy has evolved over decades and the power of habit over outcome and the surprising results his athletes are getting not just in the pool but in their lives. Whether you're a coach, a swimmer, or someone who's passionate about getting better, this episode is packed with wisdom, stories, and the kind of gold that you can take straight to your next session. So, Frank, welcome back to the the podcast is the third time that you've been on here. One of the things I wanted to jump into today is you've recently started coaching a high school team again, which was your sort of original how you started coaching. But then you went to a lot of masters coaching, but now back to high school is what would be some of the things that you've taken from coaching masters athletes over the last few years, that you are now incorporating into teaching the high schools. And what are those things that you're starting to focus on now? And has that approach changed for you over the years? You know, Brent, and excuse me, first of all, it's good to be back with you. Again,

this is I think our third time together and I appreciate the energy and camaraderie between the two of us. But yeah, I mean, you know, going club, you know, I grew up in New Jersey, Jersey Shore League, high school club teams, YMCA, and that was a good part of my life for say 15 years. Then I moved out to Arizona and got, you know, triathlon, open water swimming, and a lot of masters years under my belt as a master's coach. And you know, I come to the realization that water is water is water, right? A body in the water will whether it's a master swimmer or a younger swimmer is still going to need to pay attention to the laws of, you know, hydrodynamics, they're going to need to learn balance. You just got done doing a piece on that on Instagram. They're going to need to learn mobility, hip rotation, how to kick, and how to breathe. So I take a lot of what I've learned from when I was a high school coach into my master's because now I'm dealing with adults. Now I've gone away from masters so much, but I still have a lot of my triathlon clients and open water swimmers who I work with, but going back to my roots, young swimmers, I am living in the Florida called the Villages and I am the director of youth club swimming here and a high school coach also who answers to a head coach for the high school program, but I run the club, the club program. It's great to be working with fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh graders again, really getting them excited about the sport of swimming and bring up another generation. So I see so many similarities between

US master swimmers, high school swimmers and young swimmers. Again, as I shared with you, water is water is water. There's just the laws of physics that still have to be applied. And but what I will tell you, the high school swimmer, it's so cool to be around that club and high school event again, you know, being on deck for high school meets and the cheering and the, you know, the camaraderie and being at districts and our team won districts and the boys and the girls, which was kind of unheard of. Generally, you win one or the other, but we took districts in both. We did well in regionals and had a great strong showing in states, but being around that energy of those young swimmers is really what got me excited again, if that answered your question. But, you know, you learn a lot working with adults, right? You know, there are a lot who are very willing to say, I want to learn how to swim better. And then they have that fixed, there's others who have that fixed mindset, but no, no, you know, I've been coached. I know how to do this. And you get to learn what you, how far you could go with a US master swimmer or an adult swimmer. High school swimmers, a lot of 99%, they want to learn, they want to get better. How do I get fit? That's all there. How do I get faster coach? How do I get faster coach? How do I get faster? First of all, patience, take a deep breath, we'll get you there. But this is a process, right? If we, I've got a conveyed to a young swimmer, if we're focused on the outcome versus the process, you focus on the outcome, you may do well at an event, and you're going to be

very disappointed lots of times when you don't hit your best time. But if you stay focused on the process, you're constantly building towards that outcome. So that hasn't changed. I don't care whether I'm coaching a fourth grader or somebody who is swimming for in the Pan-An Games as a US master swimmer. So that's the similarities between what I'm doing now and what I did do.

And in terms of focusing on the process, one of the things that I've done last year and this year, in terms of just setting goals for different life goals, business goals, coaching goals, all that sort of stuff, it's not setting what's the end result that I want, certainly thinking about it, but it's what are the habits that I need to do, like what are the things I have to do every week to achieve that? And if that's the thing on my goal list, it's like go to the gym two to three times a week or swim three times a week, whatever it might be, that's been so much more attainable than this thing way out in the distance. And it keeps it just really simple and it's doable for people. You're 100% right. I apply it in my own life. I literally have a journal that where I will literally check off virtually through the course of a day, all these things that I want to get done in a day and the X, the cross means that it's gotten done. So it's all process every day, habit, chop wood, carry water, chop wood, carry water, do it every day. If it's three times a week, do it every day. There's certain things that I just will not go to bed until I've done those things. And I try my best to convey that to young swimmers. They like, they like results, right? They want, so what's your goal this year? I want to hit a, I want to hit a state time. Okay. Are you willing to do this, this, this and this to hit that state time? Meaning I call it like Monopoly. You get to get out of jail cards, right? You know, again, Monopoly, how many practices will you not miss, right? Or English, but you only miss two practices in eight, nine weeks? Okay.

Too, too many, but you get my point. So it's, I really want my athletes to focus on the process. If we do that, the outcome generally will take care of itself. As an ex-high school teacher, I would tell my kids go home and study every night, read 10 minutes. By the end of the week, you've got an hour's worth of reading done. You take your quiz, you take your test. And all of a sudden you're getting your B's. You're getting your B minuses. You're getting your C pluses. You're A's, but it's all about the process where we hear that, but there's so much truth to that, Brenton. It's so true. Focus on the process, my friend. Create tablets. Yeah, exactly right. And are there any certain particular things that you're really drilling into the, the swimmers at the moment, like in terms of like technical things, what's your coaching style? What's your coaching approach like with the athletes? Again, I'm going to go back to the video you just did on Instagram in regards to balance. I am a true believer and I've always coached this way. And I will continue this coach this way is that you must take care of the vessel first, meaning the body. The body has to be balanced. It has to understand buoyancy and body position, right? I heard a coach use these terms and I've used them for years and I take no credit for them. Stay athletically long, stay athletically taught. And I teach athletes that, right? If you are six one, I want you swimming like you're six four. If you're five, five, I want you to swim like you're five, seven. I don't care technically, you know, what, what God has given you in regards to length, but I want you to swim

long. I want you to use your body. I want you to swim from your body first and we'll add propulsion, right? So I will always tell my athletes, always protect the integrity of the vessel. I could be a tugboat with a big engine and I think I'm a fast boat, but I'm still a tugboat with a big engine. We'll follow where I'm going. So I see swimmers drop hips, poor body position, poor timing, and they're adding additional propulsion that elevates dragon resistance eight times. And I don't care if you're who you are, an Olympian or just a club swimmer, you're going to lose every single time because water will win that battle every single time. When you can keep the body long, maintain the integrity of balance, meaning as I'll use your term, as the Aussie say, bring to keep the bum up. You're creating a more hydrodynamic body, minimizing dragon resistance. I will spend as much time as necessary. We in my club program, the last 10 days, that's been the focus that has been the absolute focus with fins without fins. Anything I can get them to do is stay long in the water and minimize dragon resistance. My definition of swimming is get from point A to point B in the most efficient effective manner as possible by simply minimizing dragon resistance and adding the right amount of propulsion. Meaning where you're at, right? I can't swim right now, say Frank can't swim at 90 strokes

per minute and add that kind of power in my rapping and catching effect. So right now, if I can only swim at 52 strokes per minute, but swimming efficiently, let's celebrate that.

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Let's celebrate that. And then I could start to add the engine piece to it. Now let's talk about propulsion. But again, if we're a tugboat with big propulsion, you're just a tugboat with big propulsion. Makes sense? I mean, that's just something I just cannot stress enough to young swimmers, to older swimmers, master swimmers, maintain the integrity of the vessel always. Yeah, it doesn't matter the age or the experience of the swimmer. It's always going to come back to that. And one of the things that I like to do at clinics is in the beginning, we always start with that with body position and balance. And I have them go through a couple of exercises, some wrong way, right way exercises, just to experience the difference between the two. And then I have them go through this bit of a checklist in their mind, where they push off, go 50 freestyle, they check in on the head position and making sure they're long from head to toes, checking on the body and the posture, make sure they're using the lungs to help support them and letting the water support them, which it can do if you hold yourself correctly. And then just making sure the legs are doing the right thing, not kicking too big, not kicking too hard, but just there to support you as well. And when they get all those things in place, they're very much like a needle. They're long, they're streamlined, and then everything becomes so much easier. And typically when people go through that, they're feeling pretty good, they're moving quicker, they're moving easier through the water. But it's easy to get distracted with other things like the catch or how much should I be breathing, all these sorts of things.

But if we always just come back to that, getting that vessel, getting the body to be long and streamlined, everything else builds from there. So yeah, that's always a place to start. And whenever I dive in, I just subconsciously I kind of go through that checklist. But it's conscious now because I'm aware that I'm doing this checklist, but it's always just been that thing of like, all right, where's this, where's this, where's the legs, and making sure that's all correct to begin. Couldn't agree with you more. And again, that's why our philosophies are so in tune with each other. And the same thing I do, as soon as I'm in the water and I'm warming up, you know, warm ups, five, six, seven, eight hundred yards. And I can start to feel, am I in the right position? No, I can feel myself, my heart rate's going up, what's wrong? Well, I'm working too hard. Well, is it my balance or am I not breathing? No, my breathing's fine. It generally goes back to the fact that I am dragging myself through the water, being frontal drag, warm drag, my wave drag is elevated. The amount of oxygen now that needs to go to the muscles is being robbed from the heart and from the, from the lungs. And it's just a runaway, a snowball effect. And people say, well, I just can't swim fast. No, let's get you swimming lean, long. And like you said, you're just lengthening out the body. And once we do that, I will always tell the swimmer Ironman athletes, if they feel like the wheels are falling off at, you know, 1.2 miles through halfway through, go back to buoyancy and

balance and body position. Am I over kicking? Like you said, in the world of triathlon, we hear all the time, how do I get a stronger kick? You don't need a stronger kick. Your kick is fine. Kick is designed to maintain the integrity of the balance of buoyancy. That's what the kick is there for. It is not, we're not trying to move you forward. At the Olympic level, the kick only really accounts for about 10% of propulsion. In our level, we want a strong, solid two-beat kick. If you're great at a six-beat kick, great. But I want my swimmers to understand if they're going to be swimming a distance event, I want them to think and swim like a distance swimmer. You're not swimming 50 freestyle. You have to think that way and act that way. So as soon as you come out on deck, if coach Frank wrote you, your workout today is three by 1,500 with a three-minute break in between, I need you thinking like a distance swimmer. I need you thinking long in the water, two-beat kick, or my stroke rate. I am not swimming like there's an alligator behind me. That's a pun joke because I live in Florida, you know, alligators. But you get my point, right? I mean, it's all relative and how you coach that athlete and how receptive that athlete is. And to hammer home, your point is the more you pay attention to this stuff, you don't need a coach on deck. Most of the time, you're going to start to feel it inside. Maybe next length of the pool, you're going to count strokes. You went up three, four strokes. Something has gone wrong. Something has gone wrong. Maybe you're timing, you're buoyancy. Again, balance is off. But bottom line is,

as coaches like you and I, that's my job is I want to convey that to the athlete, whether it be a young athlete, any of my athletes getting ready. I got one getting ready to swim Catalina Islands this, we're coming up this August. Think like a distance athlete. Think like a swimmer. Think like a distance athlete all the time. That's what you got to tell yourself. So when I talk to my young kids, you're a sprinter. Think and act like a sprinter. Okay. So bottom line is, I'll keep my sprinters away from my, from my, my 500 people because I don't want those two ever. It's like oil and water because guess what? I got a sprinter in this lane and a 500 swimmer in this lane. Guess what this 500 guy wants to do? He wants to swim like the 50 freestyle, right? But the bottom line is teach your body to what I will always say is learn how to know your environment, proprioception, a fancy word. Know what your body's doing in an environment. Own what it is doing in an environment and have the ability to make the necessary corrections when that time comes. My hips are starting to drop. Am I kicking too hard? Not kicking hard enough? Am I not rotating? I tell you what, a part of where I've gotten the balance piece, I go all back way to total immersion. I will give Terry a lot of credit for that. He taught, uh, taught me early on to swim from your center of balance, which is right at that T here, right at the sternum, leaning how to lean into the water a little bit as you rotate that pressure, pressing the armpit a little bit into the water helps to elevate the hips versus our center of gravity,

which is about an inch above our navel, right? All of that because our large muscle groups, our legs, our hips, our glutes, all heavy muscles. It's going to drop. It's going to drop. I think you did one of the little example that one of your videos where you're just lying there in the water and eventually all of this starts to drop, right? And especially if I'm not breathing right, now my lungs are like a buoy, all of that's floating up too. So it's timing, breathing, balance, buoyancy, but all of this, it takes a lot, a lot's going on, man. And like you said, now I got to think about the catch. You got to be kidding me. So that's a little answer and say, we will spend a lot of time, a lot of time on this. Don't care. I tell my high school swimmers right now, my club swimmers, I don't care about speed. I don't care how fast you're going. I care how fast, excuse me, I care how well you're doing it, not how fast you're going to do it. Fast and as they say in Italian, men's a men's technique, not good, right? Fast with great technique. Man, the world's your oyster as a swimmer at that point. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I know you're doing some online coaching. And so what would be those things that you are trying to make the swimmer aware of so that they can self-coach and self-correct and they build that proprioception when you're not there to give them feedback or have eyes on them outside of them sending you footage? Man, we spend a lot of time on balance, buoyancy, body position. The other one is breathing. I find young athletes, master athletes, senior athletes,

college athletes, most of them were never taught how to breathe. I am working with a gentleman right now, 65 years old. And his note came back to me when I gave him some breathing assignments to do. He goes, I'm almost embarrassed to say that at 65 years old, no one has ever taught me how to breathe properly. We're born, nobody teaches breathing. We just assume that breathing in and out through our nose or our mouth is normal. And we see that many times I'm standing on deck and I'm looking at a video of an athlete, and you could just see that the breathing pattern's off, right? I mean, you got that classic, as they rotate, they're blowing out, they're breathing in, and you know, they're holding their breath into water. But those are the things that I like to work on. Balance, buoyancy, body position, breathing, right? I will have them old school. I mean, if they have a Garmin or Apple Watch, check their heart rate. But if they have to go old school, right now, if it's an older athlete, I don't want you any higher than 128 to 134 on your heart rate, check it. If you're too low, I need you to kind of, you know, again, pretend there's an alligator behind you, right? But he's far behind, but he's not trying to run you down. So those are the things I try to do. And then we start to work mechanics, the technical proficiency. I'm an old school coach. I know a lot of key coaches talk about reaching, wrapping, or excuse me, reach, catch, pull, and push. There's a term we used to use calling wrapping the water. And I still use that term. We come in, we wrap the water, unwrap the water. So we extend,

we want to feel that water under our armpit, we want to wrap the water and unwrap the water. When I use those terms, they seem to take that, that, that corrosive feeling of those, gotta reach, wrap, pull, and push, boom, right? And they say, I gotta push the water behind me. Wrap the water, drive the body, unwrap the water. And I undoubtedly will have come back, athletes come back to me going, oh my God, that was effortless. I didn't have any trouble breathing. And I actually watched my times go down three or four seconds per hundred. And I'm saying, we're on the way. We're on the way. So that those are the things I want them to learn. And it takes time for them to be able to self coach themselves. And I got no problem with a coach, an athlete texting me, sending me an email many times during the week, Sunday afternoon, Sunday evenings is a big night for me to do Zoom calls or phone calls. Checking in, how's it going? Good. How'd this go? Good. How'd this go? Good. How's the back feeling? Good. Okay. You know what? You've been stressed a little bit at work. I'm going to tell you not to go swim tomorrow. You could almost hear a pin drop, you know? Take a deep breath. It's okay. That's part of the process is letting the body recover, rejuvenate, regroup. And nine times out of 10, they come back to me going, I slept an hour and a half later this morning. And I felt like I got caught up. So those are the things that I incorporate in coaching my athletes. Get to know the athlete.

Get a feel for where they're at. Great communication like you do. You're brilliant at this. Great communication with the individual. Be able to, after time, you get to know them before they even call you or send you a video, what you're almost going to see. But the videos that they send me, it's critical, right? I think people like you and I have been doing this for so long. I've been at this for 27 years now. I would always love to see underwater video, but there's a lot of, I hate to use this word, there's a lot of assumptions I can draw just by what I'm seeing on top of the water, what's going on underwater, water refraction. I can see a little bit, hey, he's crossing under his body. He's got thumb down and his palms out. And then I can work on making those corrections, drill sets. I'd like to create the drill right into the body of the workout, right? Six strokes drill, six strokes swim, six strokes drill, 25 drill, 25 swim, 50 drill, 25 swim. You get creative with it. But as long as the athlete is getting it, and I'm finding at the younger level, Brenton, is that one swimmer in lane three is grasping it. That same swimmer in lane four is struggling mightily. But I'm blessed to have enough coaches that we could pull that swimmer aside and go, let's back them up a little bit. If we got to get them swimming with a PVC in their hands, because they're wind milling their arms and they're not staying anchored out there, or they're cupping in their hands too much, you get to learn, you get to feel your athletes,

you get a real sense. And I take a lot of pride in knowing my athletes and where I need to take them. So a lot of pleasure out of doing that when you're not on deck with them. You know what I'm saying?

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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. Yeah, so we do every fortnight, I do like a coaching membership call where people send in their videos and I had one yesterday and we had 20 odd people sending their videos through. And I'd say, all right, this is the one thing I want you to focus on for the month. This is a drill or two drills that I want you to incorporate into your workouts. And it's interesting watching, when they write in, I ask them what are they being working on? Where do they feel they're at? Where's their pay set? And often people will say, this is what I think that I need to work on. This is what I think I need to work on. And particularly if they're quite new, usually it's the wrong thing. Usually it's like, you know, they've got an idea. They think, all right, I think this is what's the issue. But it might be too far down the line. Yeah, it might be, I feel like, okay, my elbow is dropping in my catch. It is, but the reason it's dropping is because the way that you're breathing is you're looking too

far forwards or you're lifting your head or you're over rotating, whatever it might be. So let's go back further down the line in those initial things. Let's get those dialed in and then we will build up to the catch. We'll work on that, but not yet. Yeah. And I love that approach. And I really work hard at that. So I will look at a video and I may look at it three, four times to say, what do we really need to address here? Is it the dropped elbow or is it the poor body position and the timing? And if we took care of those things, all of a sudden you fix this and all of a sudden these little things, these other innocuous details fall nicely under and all of a sudden they have success. But if I will always say, look, A, B and C, when I coach you, A always has to come before B. B always, this is not up for debate before C. Once we get to D, E and F, we can kind of fool around with those letters. You know what I'm saying? We could fix this because I, but if you do not have the fundamentals of ABC specifically under your belt, I could fix all the dropped elbows in the world. But if, if my timing is off, now my shoulders are plowing through the water. Now I'm, my form and frontal drag is gone exponentially high through the roof and we're no better off than we were. So it gets that way. So if you don't mind, I'd love to share something with you. Okay. Not that I do this, but my phone is sitting right here. I have a athlete I've been working with for over a year now who is a US master swimmer.

He swam in a US master's meet in Florida today. His exact words, 112.2, fastest time in two years, broke my old record from last year of 115.2

hundred fly. But this is a guy, when I write workouts for him, he just, he just, he just does what I asked him to do. Take a day off. He does what I asked him to do. 4,000 yards tomorrow, he does what I asked him to do. Today we're only doing 1500 with a focus on walls. That's all I want you to focus on is walls. So when you see something like that, that's exciting. That's exciting. Okay. And as coaches, now you and I get text messages like that gone. I was off my best time. No, that's part of the process too. You're not going to always get best times, but we've worked on breathing. We've worked on body position. This is a gentleman who would swim, fly all arms using virtually no body and his kick was just too much knees and we had to break that down. How did we do that? We went into the gym and we started doing a lot of Pilates and we started doing a lot of yoga stretches and we started doing nothing but a monofin to get the feel for the body. What do you want me to do? 20 by 50 on 20 second break with a monofin. Swim a 300 cool down, get the hell out of the water and go home. Okay. Got to love those kind of athletes, right? Got to love those kinds of athletes. So I thought how appropriate that this came in through this conversation that is like good job, Frank, but the athlete is doing what I'm asking him to do. It just reassurance as coaches that we are writing workouts. We're doing our tapers properly for these athletes

and have them prepared to go out and perform. Again, master's level, college level, Olympic level, high school level, club team level. And it's like we've seen, we've been there for a long time. We've seen a lot of things, seen a lot of different athletes. Jen have a pretty good idea of what's going to work for someone. Not always the case, but I have a pretty good idea. And so like I compare it to my, my two kids do Jiu Jitsu, the oldest one, he's stepped up a class. So he's kind of going against this kid is a little bit older. And yesterday, the instructor was giving him some advice while they're trying to take each other down. And my son's trying to trip, he's trying to do this trip on the other kid. And he's just too far away. Like he needs to get in, he needed to get in close, need to wrap his one hand over the top of the other and he needed to get in close to be able to do it. And he kept like trying to get him to do it, kept saying, get in close, getting close, but he kept trying to trip him from too far away. And eventually when he listened and took the advice, it worked. But before that, he's just, he's still trying to trip, but he's just too far away. Nothing's happening. And so like if you, yeah, if you can just listen to your coach or your coaches, you're probably going to have success over the long term. So that's great to hear. Yeah. It's like, it's so good to see masters swimmers who may have swum as teenagers. They can still hit lifetime PBs, many of them. And maybe, and if they were really elite, okay, maybe they're not hitting lifetime PBs, but they're getting faster at 45, 50, sometimes 55 and beyond, like it's,

it happens. And down here in the villages, they have a master's program here. And it's amazing. I mean, mind you, it's a retirement village. So the youngest person on the team is 55 years old. And they've got, they have a couple guys 82, 83 years old, but they swam

Eastern Illinois, Anford, they swam at some small divisions to school, and they're still living their passion. And you're staying healthy while they're doing that. And we know the body, mind, relationship, keep this, keep this and this working together. Okay. I mean, a little hard to explain it to a 16 year old kid, as he's walking by you on the way to practice eating a McDonald's hamburger and a bag of french fries, right? Going, dude, this, this, this was the best meal that you could pick before you get into practice. You're in the water in 15 freaking minutes. And I would say, if you throw up in my freaking pool after eating that, you know what I'm saying? So it's good to see that the, the love for swimming is still there at whatever age. Again, you know, bringing young swimmers up, whether it be Jiu Jitsu, if that's their love for swimming, triathlon, we know here in the States, USA triathlon is doing a phenomenal job at the college ranks. I think they have over 40 plus maybe more, I'm sure they do more triathlon programs for females here in the States. So they're introducing a lot of these younger people to triathlon, open water swimming, if they were big pool swimmers, but bottom line is your point is well taken is that is when we can define a plan of action for a swimmer and as coaches, be honest with ourselves going, this is not working. Is it

the athlete or is it me? Let me go back and rewrite this workout. Let's try it again

because we're not perfect. I don't care who you are. You, me, any coach is going to make mistakes, but we have to own up to those mistakes and saying

nobody got hurt. Nobody died here. We just go back and figure out what we need to do. Right? So that's it. I'm always, always doing that. I have my journal here. I'm always, always writing my workouts in this journal and then writing notes as a follow up to that day's practice for my club team gone. This was an awesome practice. I want to do the same one two weeks from now. I want to use this as my test set because they loved it so much. And you get there, you see their energy, right? Some practices, as you walk away, go on. This was a tough one. This was a tough one. It could have been better. If you conveyed what you needed to get done, I would always tell, you know, I tell my master swimmers, same thing. Not every practice is going to be like, you know, all right, we're having fun out here. Coach, we're not having fun. Fun? What the heck said we're having? We're not supposed to have fun. We're supposed to swim. You know, it's my big joke to them, but I want them to have fun, right? I don't care if it's a master's, it's a triathlete. I want them to enjoy the process because if they're enjoying the process and they can see some results starting to develop through that process, their confidence level is going to start to go up. Wow. My times are going down. I'm feeling stronger. I'm feeling better at this. I want to show up again tomorrow. If they're not feeling confident and they're not seeing a process, that could get disheartening, right? I mean, you and I both know that. So the line is, that's my focus and that's the energy that I put out there. That's been my philosophy. My philosophy has changed a little bit over the years,

but I still believe that if I can connect with that person one-on-one, great communication, show that athlete I truly care, which I do. Every one of my athletes, I don't care who you are, do I care about that athlete and do I want to see them succeed? They're going to start to see that and that's what I see in your coaching. It's clear. When I'm watching an Instagram or you and I are talking off the air, the passion's there and any of your athletes know that. I've talked to athletes who you coach and they couldn't speak more highly of what you have done in their lives. That's what I said to you early on. As coaches, we don't care who connects with them. As long as somebody connects them and they're really moving themselves forward through this process. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And how has your philosophy changed over the last five, 10, 20 years?

I believe when I was a little bit younger as a younger coach, I was very adamant it was going to be this way and we're going to only do it this way. I've learned to embrace some information from my athletes. Let's go with triathletes, specifically what's working for them. I'll give you an example, right? Here we go. We are off the wall. We're going to get that high elbow, fingertip dragged, thumbed up the side and we're going to drive those fingertips into water. That's great. You're 48 years old. You got the shoulders are locked up like a bank on Sunday. You're going to have to modify what you want to do with that particular athlete. So we may have a three-quarter recovery, throwing that arm out there a little bit more, a la Janet Evans straight arm into the water and you start to learn to work with the athlete and where they're at. You know, as well as I do working with a lot of the adults athletes, shoulder surgeries, maybe they've been sitting at a computer for years and internal rotation is so, so bad. And now you're asking to open up peck major, peck minor and getting those lats engaged, that's going to take time. So I work with the athlete where they're at at that time. How did I learn this? I will tell you, I had the absolute blessing to work with a lot of challenged athletes at a place called Ability 360 in Scottsdale, Arizona. And what I found out as

as much as these athletes want to swim, they have very, there were many strong limitations coming out of wheelchairs, shoulder issues, a lot of military who were injured in Iraq and Iran in the Middle East. And you learn to work with them and saying, here's the vessel I have. Now, if they're more like a tugboat, I'm going to get them as efficient tugboat as I could get them. And that's where my I think my philosophies change. I get yoga coaches, you will do it this way. Another thing, I challenge myself every single day. And I haven't missed a day in well over a year. 18, there's this 18 minute rule. Say, if you study something for 18 minutes, a day at the end of the year, you will know more than 90% of the people in your field. Every day for 18 minutes, I read something on swimming every single, every single day, 18 minutes, whether it's watching one of your videos, watching something, a fascinating book, I literally just finished up. I don't know if you know this one, the biology of swimming. I would recommend any swim coach, any swimmer to buy this book. I read it cover to cover, every word, every word, even the boring words, every word. And I'm reading his second volume right now. If it's swimming, I will learn something. But that's what I do. That's how I change my philosophy. I don't know everything. There's some pretty smart people out there

in this industry who know more than I do. I was very blessed two years ago through U.S. Masters or through ASCA to become a fellow, a fellow of 2023. I was in a room with seven other coaches

and I felt like the dumbest man in the room. And that's what I wanted to be, because I wanted to learn from them, right? Mentor taught me years ago, you go in a room like that. You want to be the dumbest guy in the room. You want everybody smarter than you to learn from them. And they brought in coaches from some names that I don't recall, but a coach from Georgetown, from North Carolina, from Virginia back then, an assistant coach, and they would come and talk to us as fellows to educate us on the project we were working on. So learn, learn, learn, be open, be willing to say, I don't know everything. Be honest with yourself. If you screwed up with a workout, you made a mistake, be honest with yourself. And just as Carol Dweck and her great book Mindset, Have a Growth Mindset versus a Fixed Mindset. No, always done it this way. This is the way we're always going to do it. I don't care what Bretton does, I'm not doing it that way. And then you step back on, damn, Bretton knows what he's talking about. I will try that with my squad. I will try that with my squad. So that's how my philosophy has changed. I think as I've aged, I've become more open

to hear from other coaches. Years ago, I wasn't so open. It's that young man's mentality, a lot of testosterone flowing through my body. Now I look for coaches to talk to, look for these opportunities to be able to collaborate and to share and to get educated. Yeah. Well, Frank, it really shows through speaking to you. The passion shows through. The knowledge shows through and the fact that you're still so interested in it, you're open to new ideas and studying every day. It's really evident from chatting with you. So it's great to hear you're keeping really busy over there in Florida. Doing a lot of different things swimming-wise, which is fantastic. So it just really expands that the breadth of knowledge and working with all these different types of athletes, you have to become really good at everything in a way, the really advanced skills, the more basic skills. And I think having that width of knowledge, it just means you've got so many tools in your tool belt that you can pull out when you need them. So, great to chat again. Those that are listening, so you've written a book which will include in the show notes, which we covered a little bit on the first podcast that we did together, but we'll make sure we include that in the show notes as well. And what's the best way for people to get in touch with you? Well, believe it or not, I don't have an email. I don't have a website anymore. I've gotten to a point where I didn't need it and I was getting too many inquiries in it, but you go right on Instagram and try Soul. If you type in Try Soul and you want to send

me a note, you have a question. I'd be more than happy to do that. Even if you have no problem adding my email address, you can certainly do that. And if somebody wanted to reach out to me and I will always respond back to people because again, the passion to educate and help swimmers to become better at this in this sport. That's my whole goal in life anymore. So, yeah. Fantastic. Well, thanks again, Frank. Great chatting. Always good seeing you, my friend. Always good friend. See you next time. Stay well. 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 Fast Comes Last: Mastering the Process Before the Performance with Frank Sole appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, we sit down with Sharon Van Rouwendaal, Olympic gold medalist in the 10 km open water marathon at Rio 2016 and Paris 2024, to talk all things freestyle—especially how adults can improve their technique in and out of the water. Whether you’re getting back into swimming or looking to sharpen your technique, this episode is packed with actionable tips and deep insights from one of the best in the world.

Get in touch with Sharon:

They show me this they basically show me stuff like this and I'm like that really wide if you can't do it on dry land you can't do it in the water welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water become a better swimmer and live a better life here's your host Brenton Ford welcome to the effortless swimming podcast Sharon welcome back to the podcast it's been a couple months since I've had you on since your Olympic victory and you've made a big transition in that time to now stepping away from the competition side and going into more coaching so I want to dig into that and how that transition has been and some of those things that you've learned over the last six plus months having made that transition so welcome to the podcast first of all thank you for having me again so yeah I think this is the the third time now so it's it's great to have you back on and we're actually running a trip in the Maldives in October a long distance swimming trip so we'll get to explore some of the beautiful coral reefs and islands and adholes and things around there which will be fantastic so I'm looking forward to meeting you in person there which will be which will be great and and then working with the swimmers who are coming along there but first thing I want to jump into is since you've made that transition to coaching what have been some of the key things that you've had to pick up having gone from that competitive swimmer to now having to

teach the stuff that you were able to do yourself basically the main thing is that I've really like a lot of patience for my swimmers and I try to explain it as simple as possible so there was this for example there was this thing that in Rio when I won the Olympics I had this hand that like the elbow was touching the water first and then this hand came and my french coach was saying yeah you have this little hand that comes in and I didn't know how to fix it and then my german coach barred he said well just rotate more and then basically because I didn't know how to fix it myself he just made me well explain it really easy it's in your rotation and so I look at those little stuff people think oh my hand is not going into the water how do I do that but it is by rotating the other shoulder more in the water that you can lift so I always try to give examples of my experience and then explain it as simple as possible to my swimmers and that's I think the thing they like the most about my coaching there's two things that stand out there first one is keeping it simple that that took me a very long time to learn when I started coaching I would give too much information and it would be too complicated and it's just it's very hard to do more than one thing so if you can keep things simple that's I think that's such an important thing for coaching and the second thing

there is that you're not addressing what seems like the obvious issue which is say like let's say your elbow is entering first the cause of it was lack of rotation so it's actually going back a step to the actual cause of it and not the not the the symptom so that I think is again a really important skill when it comes to to coaching is to actually how do you identify what's the the actual cause so we're going to fix it long term yeah you have to go a step back you know like go step back like they always think this is the problem but it's like that's not the problem that's not the thing we're going to fix we're going to fix it by doing another in a different way and it's and the thing that stands out to me as well is it's very swimming can be very simple but it can also be very complicated but when you put it down to the the core fundamentals and the way I see that is like right good head and body position let's just get horizontal there we need to make sure we rotate make sure we recover properly and then we can work on our catch and pull and obviously breathing has got to be in there as well but like you sort of can boil it down to those couple of things and if you take that sort of approach then it is for me that's been the easier way to to figure out what's the what's the cause of some of these issues that we're seeing in the stroke yeah did you have a certain sort of way that you got taught from your coaches or is this stuff that you've had to figure out as you've gone along since you started coaching

yeah well figured it out of course with the german coach my filip luka was more of a coach that was tough and just swim you know and baren barricade was more the coach that was very um perfectionist so i would always be scared not scared but i was like oh he's looking so i need to be like there's one thing that stood out that i learned from him was when i arrived so there was that rotation problem and when i arrived he said but you can finish your stroke much longer you can swim much longer and i was talking about and then at some point so there was this triceps push that i teach people now it's like you can go out here but you have to rotate to go out if you really want to push that triceps up and he was standing there and i remember my first four months my triceps were on fire but if you just correct so i'm not even when people i have clients coming at home i don't even film them on the water yet so i don't even focus on the catch the pool anything on the water the main thing that they will learn in one session is that their push is like 30% longer than before so they already gained maybe let's say 10 centimeters in their stroke by just rotating and like doing a longer triceps push and that's what i got it gave me the feeling in germany or i was trained

with parent that i have to i have all this i have these long arms why am i not using those last 10 centimeters of my push why won't i do that but then i also discovered you have to rotate to do that if i don't rotate i have this i have this click in my arm so i always rotate enough pushing the back and then you can come back and so those are the things that people are really happy with when i teach them it's they see the difference in one session and they are then they have to focus on i give them technique exercise where to focus on in their sessions and and they are trying to do that and if they come back the next session then we will see what we can do underwater or what we can do with the hands if the hands is like this it's easy to fix because you want to have hands like straight so those are all my things that i learned as a swimmer and i experienced myself that i my triceps were burning so that's a good sign but that's that's the basics i really like to teach those parts rotation and longer strokes yeah one one thing so i had a clinic a week and a half ago it was and one of the ladies said to me like i'm so my arms just my shoulders just get so tired my legs my legs get pretty tired as well and like so i just i i just like i'm working too hard and so we filmed her did the analysis and like first thing

she's just swimming so flat and just the amount of effort you've got to put in to get any sort of distance in the stroke well you can't get much distance firstly but just the amount of effort you've got to put into the arms to pull yourself through the water instead of getting into a more streamlined position and getting 10 probably 20 centimeters for her it's it's no surprise that that swimmer is feeling the way that they're feeling when you see what they're they're doing and and i actually got a message from her this morning actually and she said look i knew something was wrong in the stroke but i just i just couldn't put my finger on it and then when i looked at the footage i thought okay there's a lot of stuff wrong here but thanks for breaking it down and making it making it simple and one of the things you mentioned was that that change initially with the triceps right so you didn't have the specific strength there to hold it initially but you built it up over time that's the thing with with these stroke changes is sometimes it can actually feel more difficult and possibly even slower yeah initially but ultimately it's going to be faster and it's going to feel much better once that becomes the new habit and you've got that swim specific strength yeah yeah so um i remember in the sand when i won the olympics i could switch to sort of what i call philip stroke a little bit like the french coach stroke where i go a little bit shorter in the back more frequent and then with the current i would do my long and easy stroke so when those people leave my session they swim the same pace

but much easier which can make them improve the the faster pace at some point i mean a frequency would have won i think the dodgy was there that the olympic she would have won the race but frequency doesn't win it's a proper like a longer i mean i have much more power of course because i give those longer stroke but i also save energy for at the end when i want to put my frequency in i go much faster and you have people for example triad each they only have one frequency so i put my pool really really slow and they say now you have to go with very like a slow motion swing for you very long strokes and they can so they do like their normal pace they stop swimming and then you know normal pace again i think slow strokes and so sometimes it takes a step back so i tell them imagine walking and doing your groceries every day that's your level two walk right so level two to level three walk but no now we're going to do groceries groceries with very big steps and very slow they're going to get tired they're going to create muscle so i want to go that step back by doing sort of a dps stroke and then they're then they can build it up to that level five version five eventually with a nicer stroke yeah it's a good way to approach it and especially you've got a pool where you can change the speeds it's

what's the brand of pool that you've got it's called a swim intelligent pool so it's they are based in the Netherlands for now i think maybe in germany as well but yeah it's uh i have the olympic version so it can go to 55 seconds but if you do that you could surf in my pool um and almost water comes back but basically when i swim myself i put it around 122 to 1 like i don't go any faster and then you can even put some fins and pedals in to make it sometimes it's quite boring because i'm you know i'm looking at the the ground all the time but i put on some music on the side if i have my breaks and drink something but it is really nice because you don't have to go anywhere you don't have to take your car do the changing in a changing room talk to people like you just do your quick thing and then you can work it's like being able to go out for a run from your front door yeah you can do the same things from in from your your back door so uh yeah that's that's a good way to do it have you ever tried with headphones before because i've had i've got a friend who uses them she's training for the computer napoli swims 36ks and she's doing most of her training with them and she loves them and i i i just tried them on and they're uh they're really good in terms of the quality but they just go over the years i contacted a brand if they could send me one and then um

but they didn't answer properly so i was like okay i'll buy one soon but first i'm trying with the radio on the side just using music in my breaks you know yeah yeah it's it's almost a hurdle i don't want to or it's it's it's a step i don't want to take because then i feel like i might become reliant on it yeah so i don't know if that's just like yeah but there's another thing that i make my swimmers do is uh what they don't realize uh is that the warming up is really important and that's because i had a shoulder injury since uh december 2015 and i've got like uh yeah rupture in my biceps and it is still there and as you can hear it's not not everything is fine in that shoulder so if i in the plane i wouldn't sit properly i have sometimes to click it so that it's like it yeah it seems weird but then it hurts less or something and since i am in germany i've discovered how to warm up properly and how to position myself so in the watering basically in in france i was swimming with my shoulder like this so this would be tense and the shoulder would be to the front this way and in in germany i learned how to fix my shoulder to the back but you need to create back muscles you need to to work on your yeah basically your shoulder blades and i wasn't doing that in gym

and so we did all those drylands before and even the last one and a half year with my fissure ring we were doing rotation exercises because i noticed when i rotate more in the water i get less tired and i get less lactate so my arms can go on longer so that's the difference maybe of 2024 where yeah i won the world's and olympics because of the rotation but so i i give them this task to look in the mirror at themselves and i say so show me your stroke show me what you're doing in the water and then i get these people that like they show me this they basically show me stuff like this and i'm like is that really wide if you can't do it on dryland you can't do it in the water so what you want to do is and then i tell them like the basics like i said that i explained easy is that i would say that okay you follow your right like your right eye is following your right hand so this stays on this side and then this one stays in this line of your leg and then doesn't come over the middle line of your body side basically i explain it really easy i love that exercise because often at clinics let's say someone's recovery let's say they're coming over and they haven't got the elbow pointing up towards the sky it's low pointing behind them so they've got this very sort of flat and low recovery

i get into them i say all right let's you know show me your recovery over the water and we're just standing on the on the pool deck and they show the exact same recovery that they're doing in the water and then you know we try and adjust it and manipulate it so that they're coming over in in that better position so their underarm is showing their elbows pointing up and just trying to get them to make that change out of the water and then if someone's trying to demonstrate the stroke out of the water but they're super wide they're not reaching forwards they're not rotating there's a good chance that they're not going to be doing that in the water and so yeah i think it's it's a very especially in the mirror it's a really good way just to to show someone what they're probably doing and then if they've got a few key positions to kind of move through one of those that you sort of touched on a bit before is like that that initial reach up here another coach explained it as reaching for the cookie jar it's like we're trying to just get that cookie jar just on the top shelf we want to get up in that position first and then when we pull through um another coach i learned it from was it we want to trace this outside line of the body pretty much what you just you mentioned there for those couple of things it's like real key things that if you can do that then you're going to be getting a long way with those sorts of things yeah and what i also do with the if i give um if i come to a club visit i say no we also do the dry land before so i don't just come for swimming we do dry land and i give them like these terra bands this elastics and then i show them how to do stuff so for example that

triceps push um that they don't do in swimming i show you with a band and i say well you push out you push out like this and then i try to make them feel what they should do on land to do in the water so that always comes in a in a package because i don't believe i had a client last time that i was giving online coaching and i said but you have to do your dry lands if you don't do your dry lands we don't work together anymore because that's part of my philosophy my philosophy is that you need to do your dry land before or anytime that you have off and you want to do a little quick resistance workout that's when you do that and you have to do it and so we stopped working together basically because it can make the time for it and i said now then then your technique doesn't improve it's part of the technique process yeah yeah those and it doesn't need to be a whole lot either when you're doing the terra band stuff like it doesn't need to be hours and hours it's just a a little bit before you you get into the water 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 Debra 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 cna s 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 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.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 and in terms of the clients that you've been working with are there any particular types of sets that you've been giving them that they weren't necessarily doing but they should be doing and you've seen good results with it I did a speed change it so basically they couldn't do like zone if I give a let's say I give a five times 300 I ask for zone one zone two zone three and four zone five and it's always the part they're gonna do zone four zone three already too fast well zone one is already too fast but their max is going to be like their zone three to four but the last one should be the fastest one and not the middle one so they can't control what they're doing so basically I teach them how to go step back like I said with longer strokes and then I really write down okay this should feel like slow motion swimming second part level two should feel like you're getting more into your normal rhythm three is like frequency higher frequency and level four is starting to kick more with the higher frequency and five is just like give everything you got frequency kick and then sprint at the end or something so I mark down behind the levels what have to do like the steps

and then we get there so that's like and then I also give them sometimes a kick set because like four 100s kick is already a set for them because the most of the triad leads for open water swimmers they sometimes I coach people and it does nothing to us right it's just your normal walking routine your swimming routine so I give them kick sets or technique sets and all of the sudden they get the hard breathing again so see this is where you create lactate this is where you create your cardio so you need to do kick sets and so sometimes I give them like faster kick sets or like some three kick sets a little bit and then they all tell me that they're the last one they can't do it fast because they all lactate before already their legs hurt for from four times 100 and I used to do five times 400 kick sets we did twice on the camps we did twice a week huge kick sets huge kick yeah that's we used to do an 800 time trial every second every every second week I think we're doing it an 800 time trial of kick and so I used to do it as a an 800 medley kick just to mix it up and I was doing medley at the time but man that was that was hard work I got like it helped so much for the 400 medley that I was training for and I mean in a in a triathlon you got a wet suit on people are not necessarily going to be kicking a lot but if you lose the kick

then you lose the rest of your stroke so that kick still has to be effective and done well so that you can the way I see it is it's like it gives you this grounding effect it's like when you throw a ball you've got your feet planted on the ground so you've got something firm to generate that kind of power from and it's the same thing with your kick it helps you rotate sides it gives you that counterbalance and then it really gives you something to derive that power from but if you if your legs are just kind of doing their own thing you're gonna have a hard time making use of your upper body yeah yeah I call it a dance mine is not great just you use mine for a few times but I mean I am doing I am I don't know how I learned it but I am an Olympic champion with it with it but yeah I I crossed them uh yeah I don't know and so we are at the end of micro like the last four years we're trying to fix it in a sprint but I can swim 26 seconds 26 seconds on a 50 I think if I use it but I didn't want to use them so but I was really really good in paddle swimming and arm swimming back in the days but then I got my shoulder injury so then the solution in France was let's do 6k kick sets with shorter starting time so I basically was swimming all the sessions with kick for three or four weeks because I couldn't swim on my shoulder and then I got really good in kicking so then in Germany we did those kick sets and I would

I think my best thousand meter was a 131 average which is a 132 average in kicking but then you see me race I don't use them I don't like I don't use them but there is a for me it's like a dance so it's the opposite way so this one kicks on that shoulder goes there so it would be a pretty nice dance and then on my coach was always saying use them at the end and then you can you know you can win and I was always like lactating too much to use them but I kick more of course but yeah I can do it but I would advise people to to learn it the proper way not the my way and I must also say like the last videos of my swimming career are the ones that I look at it as like okay this is Sharon swimming the best that she can with injuries in her body let's say so now I would be I remember those videos you used once in bikini I was swimming with a really high catch now my angle would be a little bit more wide because of the injury I didn't want to get too close to the body because then in a shoulder hurt so I wanted to not in a straighten way but it was easier for me to hold it in a like not 90 degree way but more like 100 or 110 degree way well that I remember that the video you're talking about swim quite a few years back I think

that your your catch I think was on your right arm was like it was it was I'd never seen anything like it it was so like the angle was was unbelievable so that's a problem it's a problem so I would say now I prefer when people I don't like the close to the body angle at all I like the a little bit bigger angle so 92 more not straight of course only if they're sprinted but that would be also the more like healthy angle in my opinion so that's also things I give because of my experience I give a healthy way of coaching I think it's not like a lifestyle coach but you need to do your warm-ups if you don't want to get injured or and and if you want to be coached by you as well you gotta make sure you do your warm-ups yeah of course yeah the in terms of the catch like I I've had a couple of swimmers that have either come to clinics or sent videos through and they are they've been over doing the the catch like that they're thinking that more is better and you know if I can get it to 90 degrees or whatever then I'm going to be swimming better but for most people they don't have the range of motion through their shoulders or the mobility or the strength really so it's it's that compromise between a better angle which is more vertical but they have a lack of strength there compared to something that might not be be as good but they can apply a lot more power they can use their bigger stronger back and shoulder muscles through there and so

for 99% of people similar to what you mentioned is that's where we need to that's where they they need to be is somewhere that's sustainable they're not going to injure themselves and they can apply that power and use those stronger muscles that's the that's where most people should be and not try and not try to replicate where you are because you are 0.01% but what you can do is that I make them push my hand down on dry land like this and then I explain when they're here now they should try and pull with the lats of the muscle here back so I explain in phases like this is just the part when you feel the water you're not even pushing then there's the part where you do your catch and then when you pass the catch you need to start pulling with the lats so make them feel the muscle so on dry land so that's why I always say dry land plus swimming because then you can feel what you're doing and you can put it into the water or in your stroke yeah it's a really good way to to approach it and the the other thing there too just in terms of the catch is and I'd be curious to get your opinion on this like what I've talked about in videos before is that sort of the shoulders sort of down and back is when you can be strongest through here but sometimes that can get mistaken as you should keep your shoulders down and back the whole time but to be able to get into a good catch you actually need to let your shoulder blade slide up along your ribcage and this shoulder to come up to be able to get into the catch and then here is when it will sort of come

down and back like that's that's what I try and get across is that what you would teach is that what you sort of say or had you explain it differently so when I was swimming I had scratches in my neck so like you know the here because of the swimsuit so that means that when I was swimming I was touching with the swimsuit the shoulder a little bit so that's I mean I think it's a good sign but of course doesn't mean that you have to do this it's a different way so now I say to people that they should be as long as possible in the water and the shoulders the dry land exercises they start by so if you give them external rotation it starts by step one shoulders back that's the position they start in and then they do the the shoulder rotate the external rotation and so when they swim they should do their shoulders back as well and then when they go to the front it's because of the rotating and then the shoulder is allowed to touch at the head at some point if they they have a swimsuit they would scratch right now um and then they rotate back but what I wouldn't recommend is what I did with that catch that this I wouldn't recommend rolling the shoulder forward so that they'd go to the front and so that's why I give a lot of backstroke to my swimmers as well I did a lot of backstroke because it gives you this swing rotation automatically in backstroke and it opens up these muscles which where my injury is so that you get this stretched out basically

before you swim freestyle so I did a lot of back free sets just mixing because then I got the stretch and then I could swim longer freestyle so that would be my opinion on those shoulders and how to get long to the front is also that push in the back so you go you don't only go searching to the front here no it's that backhand also normally is helping you but I also noticed all the Dutch people I coached they breathe one in two so I grew up in France where they teach me one in three so I have this opposition way of swimming and you of course you have a lot of people doing the catch up way of swimming that's more like this so then you have to think like you have to kick more to get there to the front probably when they did a catch up stroke yeah it's um it with the with the finish of the stroke if I'm analyzing someone's video quite often we've got to address the back end of that the finish of their stroke because if they're coming let's say they're probably flat through the hips right so they're not it's not coming out probably so first so we've got to get the hips on the side to go to open up there and finish the stroke on the way back go towards your upper thigh then you'll be able to get the enough reach and get on to the side and then you'll have that length so yeah it's that like where all right where do we need to start here quite often it is chicken or or the egg it's like where we need to figure out what comes first because sometimes it's the opposite for for a different person but

for me that's quite enjoyable trying to figure out what's what's the actual cause of it and just trying to go through their video and different angles and figure out where where's this bottle neck coming from in their stroke and once we remove that bottle neck then that will let everything flow because if you're swimming correct if you're swimming well with everything in time and everything in place then the catch comes a lot easier whereas if you're doing things incorrectly it's very difficult to get a good catch so that's why good swimmers like yourself that looks beautiful to watch because everything's in sync and in rhythm and so to get there sometimes there's this bottle neck that we need to remove or identify and then work on fixing that's like when they when they do open water swimming and they sight or when they do general swimming and they have a hip problem so the hips sink then I always look at the head first because their head is basically like this and then your hips sink automatically although when you make a double chin when you're swimming it already lists to have hip for example so I always look step back step back and then like I said before so I don't even look at the hip problem I'll just look at the face first to the head first yeah so it's all yeah I really like it and also there's one thing that I think a lot of coaches say that they're not allowed to rotate the hips or move the hips which is correct because they're not allowed to do like a snake in the water

like you know but they're allowed to do like first the step one is hip and I call it like hip ribs shoulder hip rib shoulder and that should be at some point when you're a professional swimmer it's like it's a one thing but for amateurs or people who want to get better it's just you explain it hip rib shoulder hip rib shoulder so they open up the hip first and it's something that I teach myself only the last two years with my physio I had to do it on a ball like a swiss ball and then I had to open up with my hip and I couldn't and he said but that's the way you start opening up in the water hip rib and then shoulder so there's a lot of stuff I learned also last two years that I'm already giving to people now so I wish I knew so much when I started swimming or when I was 20 or when I was going to the Olympics but now I'm happy to share it with yeah with everybody just going back to that exercise on the so you're lying down on a swiss ball where like can you explain that exercise so basically you're in this sort of plank position you know like you have your um yeah your hands on the ground basically and this ball is under my hips and then I need to move that ball with my hip and then go to the side so it's basically I'm having this yeah I am on my hands

ball under me my my feet are touching the ground so I'm basically like this I'm not in a real plank position I'm like this and then I need to open up and I wasn't allowed to open up with my hand first so I had to open up my hip and then my ribs and then my shoulder and in Doha we tried it for the first time just two days before the race I couldn't do it so the last six seven months to our experience we just started working on that basically I remember seeing your post videos yeah I think that exercise or something similar so that that makes a lot of sense now and so the the main thing there was to get the sequencing of those yeah of those joints or or bones yeah yeah working in the right order yeah yeah so I wasn't rotating enough and it made me relax it more so get more mobility in my hips or more mobility in here I started every morning by sitting on the ball and checking if my rotation is enough so if I go over the midline in the back that's enough if I didn't have enough rotation I did all the exercise on my program but I think soon I will share it more on my Instagram and make the mobility like show real with mobility exercises for rotation I think that can be a good thing to share I shared it in this like bubble of Doha where we started on my Instagram but I think I should make a real of it

it could be fun I think that'd be good yeah to say it yeah well Sharon thanks so much for being on the podcast again and as I said in October looking forward to meeting in person and for those that are listening if you want to jump in for the long distance camp is there's a minimum of 145 per 100 for three k's in terms of the pacing and in terms of how much swing there's between four to ten k available for swimming each day so if you got any questions just send us a message through the the website and I think there's five or six spots left there at the moment yeah looking forward to that and it's going to be good fun beautiful place to swim and and also it's going to be some some good coaching and and a good group of people so yeah thank you very much for being on the podcast and looking forward to October yeah me too thank you thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you'd like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

The post How to Improve Your Freestyle as an Adult – Olympian’s Advice with Sharon Van Rouwendaal appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Today, we have a powerhouse guest—Greg Harper, the fastest swimmer in Ironman 70.3!

Greg shares his key lessons from the pool to open water, how to develop speed and endurance, and the mental strategies that set top swimmers apart. From the snowball effect of smart training to the secrets of holding a faster stroke rate, this episode is packed with actionable insights for triathletes and swimmers alike.

01:53 Transition From Pool To Open water

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I think the one of the things I always try to stress to my athletes is like, yeah, do your homework or like be a student of the sport. You got to have that really learning growth mindset and swimming, like maybe more than cycling and running and other things because it's just, it's so nuanced. You have to try so much to make small improvements. And if you don't really embrace that, then it's like, you know, you're, you'll fizzle out, you know, you're not going to find that improvement. So that's what I really try to stress through, through everything that I teach and talk to people about. You got to love it. It might suck sometimes, but you'll mostly love it. You'll be in a good, you'll be in a good, good path. 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. All right. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. Greg, thanks for, thanks for jumping on the podcast with me. I love having someone who comes from a swimming background has transitioned to being a pro triathlete. And then more recently, you led the swim in the half Ironman World Champs. What was that like for you being first out of the water and was that a goal going into that race? Yeah. Well, I appreciate you having me. Just a big fan of everything you do on, on your channel and just preaching the good word about swimming well. But yeah, it was, it was kind of a goal, you know, as my first World Champs and I knew that coming out first would be, I'd get a lot of good press for it. I was prepared to like put in a pretty good effort to, to do that.

And it was so fun, like, you know, all my friends and family were watching the stream like, oh, we saw you. And, you know, it's, it was a lot of fun. So I'm really glad I did. And I was definitely a bit tired running into my bike to start the race. But it was, it was worth it for sure. And yeah, I had a great time out there. And yeah, it's kind of more in your neck of the woods in New Zealand. And yeah, I had a great time in that part of the world and never been down there before. And coming from that pool swimming background, what is it that you had to change about the way that you were swimming or training to become good in open water? Yeah, you know, translating stroke to open water is always, I feel like it's just really different for everyone. I was fortunate enough that I kind of had a gallopy type stroke in a high stroke rate, which allowed me to translate my stroke pretty well to open water. I think one of the things I did, it was not worry about setting my catch like so high, close to the surface, you know, like that long like pool stroke, just kind of, you can be a little more choppy and a little more scrappy in the open water. And I think that's kind of what I leaned into a bit more. And knowing that I didn't have to do a bunch of hard swimming all the time in the pool, you know, I can do some longer aerobic type swimming. And my coming from a swimming background, my speed was good, right? Compared to triathlete. So I didn't have to focus on it that too much, you know.

Yeah, I find it hard to, it's probably hard. To go from being good at open water to then getting back in the pool. That's what I've personally found. Like, over the last, I don't know, 10, 10 plus years, I've just been more open water and I've become quite good at that sort of stroke and style. And whenever I come back to pool racing, it's just like, oh, my God, I just feel like a hack. I just don't have that smoothness and length to the stroke. And I think it would take probably several competitions and meets to be able to get back to that point. But I think going from, yeah, maybe from like being okay in the pool to then going open water and getting scrappier again, I feel like that's an easier transition to make, at least personally is what I've found. Yeah, I definitely would agree. And, you know, you don't have to be as efficient in the open water. Right? I mean, you just, there's so many more variables. You got waves, you got chops, you got current. So, you know, if you look at some of the best triathletes in the world and you, you know, put them in a pool, you're like, that's like a front pack swimmer, you know, because they are, it's not really beautiful. It's not that long, loping stroke you might see in the Olympics. But, you know, when you get in the open water, they can really hold their own.

Yeah, absolutely. And like a couple of years back, I did some filming with Josh Amberger, like, because I wanted to capture some underwater footage and, you know, show his stroke and stuff like that. And we filmed in the pool and it was like, it doesn't look that pretty. Like it's not a good looking stroke, but it's so effective. It is so effective in the open water. And I think he was maybe second, you know, out of the water, maybe behind you at half Ironman World Champs. And yeah, and like to me, that was like, OK, it's not about how it looks. It's like, is it effective and is it going to be good for the open water? So it is almost, it's a requirement almost to be able to get scrappy in your stroke to swim well in the open water rather than being too precise or too perfect and smooth. Like you've got to let things go a little bit. And I think that is a big learning curve for people who have maybe just built up their stroke in the pool, right? That's good. We need to build that technique. But then like having to let that go a little bit in the open water can be a bit like, but I've just worked so hard at getting my technique to, you know, to look good. So how would how would you recommend someone get, you know, get more comfortable in being a scrappy open water swimmer? Yeah, you know, I, a lot of people that I coach and things I stress, doing things in the pool that also get you out of your comfort zone, you know, being a competent, I, you know, summing the other strokes, right? And being able to do some like no breathers, you know, doing some hypoxic work and, and scolding in different ways. Cause in the open water, you just, you never know when you're going to find yourself in a weird position, maybe you get bumped and you kind of like

school to rebalance yourself. And I think all the little things, I say this things to people where you got to learn how to swim like a swimmer before you can get away training like a triathlete. And it's like, you got to do all these things that swimmers do, like kind of the fundamentals to kind of increase your overall awareness and just comfortable in the water. And I think that's kind of how you become a better open water swimmer too. It's like, why don't you do flip turns? Like that's not going to help me in the open water swimming. Well, it's like, well, if you can't hold your breath through flip turn, you're not going to be a good open water swimmer. Like you need to get comfortable doing stuff in the pool. And yeah, I really, I really believe in that stuff will help you become a better open water swimmer.

Yeah, I really like the way that you put it just in terms of if you are like sculling in different positions and just like just finding yourself more comfortable in the water and able to adapt to different scenarios, it happens so much in the open water. And you don't have time to think about it. It's just like, you know, if there's chop and waves, your hands in, you've got to start the catch pretty quickly. And there might be some current and swell or there's people around you and the water is aerated from their kick and all this sort of stuff. And it's just it's got to become this intuition that you've got. And you're right, by mixing things up in the pool and throwing yourself in these different situations, that trains you to be able to just find that hold of the water without having to think about. It makes it subconscious. Yeah, and that's kind of what we're after. It's like, you can't the more you think in the pool, you know, the slower you can end up going sometimes, right? It's we want to train the things specifically sometimes in the pool or, you know, going to practice in the open water. So when we get to a race, we can just race and hopefully our subconscious puts us in the right direction when we have to rebalance or, you know, throw an elbow. No, I'm just kidding. But, you know, the open waters, it's so unpredictable. So I think that keeping you on your toes and training is good. And, you know, one other thing, just.

You talk about it to an open water. I've heard you say this, don't be a victim. And I think it's just so big with the mindset and everything. Like if you're dreading lining up to swim and open water race, it's probably not going to go well. So, you know, just being a more comfortable pool swimmer might be able to help you in that regard, too. But yeah, the mental part is obviously just just huge in that regard. Yeah, I totally agree. And you see it exacerbated a lot more in the open water. You know, if someone's like, I'm not that comfortable in the pool, you are not going to be comfortable in the open water. And there's obviously so many other variables that I think people build up to be bigger than what they need to be in a lot of cases. And I don't mean to like downplay the open water swimming. Obviously, there's bigger risks and things like that. But like in reality, for most people, if you've got a wetsuit on like the worst case, right, like float on your back, get your breath back and start again. Like it like and even if you get swam over like, yeah, there might be people coming, but you could easily you can easily get out of the way. Like it's there's really not that many actual dangers out there. But we build it up like like there is a lot more. So I think like obviously just getting the practice in is very beneficial. But yeah, just getting comfortable in the open water. And I think just trying to throw yourself into these situations where you're like, all right, I've been here before, I can deal with it. And, you know, I know I know what I need to do. And one of it like hypoxic training is is so important.

We do a lot of breath control, whether it's like eight fifties breathing like three on the first one, we might go five, seven, nine. And we do that twice through or even just like trying to go twenty five meters breathing and doing a few repeats of those. Like that sort of stuff. If you can keep your calmness about you when you're holding your breath and not able to breathe, I think that can help a lot a lot too.

But yeah, that's that's really big, I think. And it's also a test of efficiency in your stroke. You know, if you can't swim twenty five, no breath. You know, maybe your breathing is not quite right or you're working too hard on your recovery. It's like you kind of find how to find that ease of your stroke. And that's why. You know, it can be hard from afar. You know, I program some breath control stuff. And sometimes when I'm starting with an athlete, like it's so hard. I'm like, just keep trying because you you will find a way to be more efficient. You know, I can't be there on deck with everyone, but I think there's like interventions like that. Like, hey, if you can try to get comfortable doing four times, no breath. And look, you can do it because I I've taught eight year olds to do it. You know, you're a grown up. You got this, right? So I think that can help with kind of the efficiency. And then, you know, when you miss a breath in the open water, you choke on water. Can you keep your calmness about you and kind of stay composed in the moment, which. And then your mind is OK and you're not freaking out. And this one goes well. And, you know, kind of there's like a snowball effect in the wrong way. But there's also a snowball effect like in the right way. You know, keep your wits about you. Yeah, absolutely. That's it. It's a good way of putting it with a high back doing the hypoxic stuff. It forces you to your body to figure out what it needs to do to make it through. And, you know, quite often, I think people the immediate reaction is I've got to get my turn over faster so I can get through these strokes quicker. If you're doing, say, breathing every seven strokes, it's like, all right, I'm going to rate up. But then it makes you more tired of like a lot quicker.

So what you actually have to do is just maybe slow down a little bit back off the kick, be very relaxed in the recovery and just have a very sort of gradual build up with the power through the through the pool. And you actually just have to sort of soften everything and just kind of switch off slightly. And the way I sort of picture it is like a it's like you're an F1 driver. It's like you're in the driver's seat and OK, you're making the movements, but you're just sort of analyzing everything around you. Like when you're swimming calmly and swimming well, it's almost like you take that step back and you're just kind of looking from a third person view almost where you're just kind of adjusting the knobs. Like how much effort do I need to put in if you're racing? It's like, you know, do I need to try and overtake this person? Where's the buoy? All that sort of stuff. It's like if you can take that back seat or that third person view, then I think that helps with the calmness of it all. Yeah, I really like the way you just said that back seat. It's like you take a little back seat and all of a sudden you're super aware and especially triathletes. I mean, they can get just so hyper focused on this queue and that queue and whatever it is. But then, you know, open water so much about awareness, you know, and in the pro ranks, it's like, oh, yeah, I was on someone's feet and then they let the gap go and I couldn't close. I'm like, well, you weren't aware enough to realize it was starting to open up and to go around and to close that gap, right? So kind of the awareness and everything is it's so big. Yeah, for for comfort, but, you know, also just going on what's around you, like, you know, some people I've never had a problem with it,

but they don't really even know how to draft behind someone when they're swimming, right? You know, it's yeah, you kind of have to take a back seat and just kind of survey to, you know, find out what's really going on, especially in these mass starts like, you know, Ironman, Kona or something like this. It's, you know, that awareness in the open waters is so, so huge. And yeah, I find that people who come from like a water polo background and stuff tend to be good open water Summers because they move their body in weird ways, they're strong, and they're always constantly aware of what's going on around them. And, you know, they kind of have the heads up type of stroke too. So I always find they succeed a lot just for those for those same reasons. Yeah, it's like the like surf life. Well, they call it surf Ironman over here, but like surf life saving where they've got like ski board and swim. And like those those guys are unreal in the open water and you look at them in the pool and most of them actually like they've got their head a bit high, the hips are a bit low in the pool. They've got I generally like a fairly quick turnover and I'm not these super long smooth strokes, but they're like their open water skills are unreal. And like I've raced I've raced some of the best. Yeah, the best surf lifesavers in some some competitions, just in open water. And like it amazes me how good they actually are at that. Like they are just it's almost like they've got a drone and they can just see what's happening in the pack. And, you know, but obviously they're they're in there in the water, but they've just got such a good sense of things and they just know when to turn up the heat, when to back it off.

And like it's it's unreal and they just stick to you like we like they they did not let up. And you know, and I think for a lot of people it's they have and I've had this with some pro triathletes I've worked with as well. It's like OK, on the bike, on the run, I'm happy to like dictate what's happening here in the pack. I'm happy to dictate the pace that we're all going to go. But when it comes to the swim, if they're not like the top four or five guys, they're like, I'm just going to sit back and I'm I'm I'm going to be a bit of a victim here. I'm not going to sort of dictate what's happening in my race. And so I think you're right, the mindset that they need to take into it, that people need to take into it, even if you don't feel like you've earned it or you deserve it, you've got to go out there with this. Like, all right, it's my race and like no one's going to mess with me. Yeah, right. OK, let's say fake it till you make it. Well, and where you come from, you know, in Australia, that whole surf lifesaving, it seems like it's really ingrained like in your culture from a young age. Like, you know, people are very into it, especially maybe if you live on the coast. And, you know, typically Australian track, they seem to have like a high level of open water. And they, you know, actually we talked about Josh and in that 70.3 worlds. I've never battled with someone as hard as I did. And it was with Josh in that race, like just the way that the turn was at the first buoy, I was kind of on the outside and I was like, oh, there's someone I'll just body this person off, you know, just kind of swim into them and take the feet of the person who was leading. And it was Josh and he just came right back at me. And we were just on top of each other for two or three minutes. And I just after the race, I was like, yeah, you don't want to fight

in Aussie in the water. I think they are not going to relinquish those feet very easily. You know, Josh is a small guy, too, but he packed a punch. So I'm always, yeah, I'm always envious of, you know, kind of Australian swim culture, you know, and you think about guys like J.R. who's, you know, he's involved with pro triathletes and stuff. And yeah, it's, it's cool to see because everyone seems aware of the water, water safety, but they just love swimming and love the ocean and just kind of respect the whole sport as a whole. So it's cool to see from, from my perspective, when it's not quite the same as like an American triathlete, I would say. This episode is brought to you by Pillar Performance. Our new sponsors Pillar are a sports micronutrition company. And the easiest way to describe it is that while hydration and carbohydrates products will take you through to touch the wall as fast as possible, Pillar's mission is to get swimmers to the starting blocks in the best condition over and over again. I recently started taking Pillar triple magnesium after a friend had recommended it, and it's been a game changer for my sleep and recovery. I take one scoop 30 minutes before bed each night in the same way that you might start your day with a coffee. I finish it up with the magnesium and recover better for tomorrow's session in the pool. Pillar performance is used by some of the biggest names in swimming and triathlon, including Zach Stavilti Cook, Jan Frodeno, Ben Canute, Ash Gentle, Taylor Nib amongst a host of other well-known swimmers and triathletes. Where Pillar differs from other micronutrition you may have taken before is both the quality of the types of magnesium and the tangible results that I see on my garment each morning.

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Yes, it's certainly much more of a culture here. And like him just learned to swim lessons in Australia. It's like nearly every kid is doing learn to swim. And then obviously we've got a lot of lot of coastline as well. And one thing that I see regardless of age is that there's kind of like this tipping point for people where they eventually get comfortable enough being in the open water that they're not phased by getting pushed under or waves and all this sort of stuff. And I've seen it with my young kids as well. Like they're they're eight and six now. And it's only been the last like probably six months, 12 months where we can go out and it's deep. And they're just like kind of happy to just get smashed by a wave to have to dive under it. But before that, I was like I was really aware of like what's going on. And I cannot leave these guys within less than an arm shot of me because it's just like it's not safe and they're going to panic. But like I've taken them for quite a few years and they've finally got comfortable. But then I've seen that with like ladies in their in their late 60s as well, who were just like they call them tea baggers, where they just go into the water and kind of sit there and chat who have gone from that to then actually like doing these open water races of two kilometers. And like they're very, really proficient and getting really good. Like it doesn't matter what age it is. There's this tipping point where if you just keep going long enough, you'll eventually get there, but you need that consistency. And yeah, just don't don't stop when it gets hard.

Yeah. And I think that's that's super big for triathletes too. It's like, and especially if you have limited time, right? Or maybe you're in a program that's, you know, you're written by just a regular tri coach and, you know, they're not really a swim coach and you're new to triathlon and swimming. And I can see how you get really kind of burnt out or frustrated. And then you never really find the love of the water and swimming. And, you know, that's, that's part of it. You have to love going to the pool. And, you know, most of the time, I mean, we all are not going to always love going to the pool, but I think that's so big. And yeah, it can be at any age, like you say. I mean, I was coaching this older gentleman last year and he was like, Oh, do you think you could get me faster? I'm like, yeah, 100%. Like if you wanted to get faster and you're going to enjoy the process, of course we can make small tweaks to help you get faster. Especially if you haven't been a swimmer your whole life. Yeah, I think it's, it's really, it's really cool to see too. I mean, I'm sure you've helped people who are older, like find love of swimming way later in their life. And it's probably like, wow, that's cool. And they're going to, you know, take that to their, to their grave of their love of swimming. You know what? I remember my, so my dad used to race at master's competitions. So when I was maybe 10, 11, 12, my dad was icing master's comps. And I remember he came back from nationals one year and, and they had it's like the 800 or the 1500 freestyle. And they had someone who was like 99 years old doing this 1500. And it's like, everyone just cheered at the end.

Like that's amazing. Like, well done on doing that. But it also took like an hour and 20 minutes. And like we, we don't have that kind of time, especially when like the way they used to run it was like heats. They're like, everyone had to stop what they're doing for an hour and 15 or however long it took.

Yeah. It's like something you can do forever, which I, which I love. Yeah. In terms of, I know you write the swim portion of some triathletes programs. What, what would you say that you go in and do differently than what some other tri coaches might be doing? And why is that beneficial for people with decimal mean? Yeah, I would say the main difference I do is kind of shorter intervals than a typical triathlete coach and also like a speed focus. I just really think that speed is efficiency. You know, you're not going to be good at an Ironman swim. If you know, you can't swim fast, right? I mean, you don't have to be a world record 100 freestyler, but we need like a baseline level of speed so we can find efficiency at its slower paces. And you know, it's, I'll see a lot of like four, eight hundreds or something. You know, I'm doing an Ironman. I got to do long reps. It's like, you know, I think you can do hundreds with short rest and still get that same aerobic stimulus. And you can just keep your stroke together better. You know, and stay engaged. And maybe you change paces. Just all those little things, I think make a big difference. And I think about it like this, there's, there's protract or pro swimmers out there and their whole existence is trying to keep their stroke together for two minutes, you know, or four minutes. And then triathletes with no swim background can think they can just go in and do 10 minute reps in the pool. And like their stroke is going to be good the whole time. It's like, it's ridiculous. Like you guys aren't pro swimmers and that's okay. We got to work with what we got. But, you know, I'll do a lot of like just aerobic fifties, where

I'll, you know, do 30 fifties, you know, take six to eight seconds rest, but it's like that quick reset. It's like, I can accumulate more time swimming faster, kind of at the same effort. And at the end of the day, I think that's kind of important. Rather, if I was going to do a, you know, it's, I would swim slower relatively, and it's kind of the same aerobic, you know, stimulus or so. So I'm really just, I want to trick people into accumulating more time going faster, essentially. And also just like a lot of like 25s at, you know, 80 to 90%. Kind of like, you might know strides for running a lot of pro runners do them. It's kind of like efficiency and you do them on your easy days. I like to do that on the swim easy days too, where, you know, hey, let's do four 25s at 85 or 90% effort at the end of warmup, just to, like I said earlier, you can hopefully your body will figure out a way to be a little more efficient just through that, that speed intervention. And I think it can be powerful from afar, which is always hard. It's always hard to make big changes when you're not with someone on deck, but I think that can be a powerful intervention as well. I really like what you said there about, like, let's say like 200 swimmer or even 100 swimmer, like if anyone's done a max effort 100 from a dive, we'd like trying to keep you straight together for the last 15 meters. And even as a, yeah, as an elite swimmer, so yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's, yeah, I do not do not enjoy like even 200s or 400s from a dive, like all out, it's just you can't keep

you straight together very well. It takes a lot of work to get to that point. So yeah, no, that's that that makes a lot of sense. Now, in terms of like paddle size, one of things we're talking about before the podcast was bigger is not necessarily better. Can you go into that?

Yeah, I think people think that, you know, the bigger the paddle, like the more strength you have, you know, you're going to build, but for a lot of triathletes, the strength isn't your limiter, you know, it's probably your technique and things like this. And when I, when I put on big paddles, and when I see for people, the stroke rate just really, just really slows down. So if you're in the pool with big paddles doing long, slow stroke rate, and you go to the open water or something in a race, it's like, I want to have a faster stroke rate, and most people should in the open water. There's always exceptions, but I figured the, and I always tell people, I saw with Nathan Adrian in college, and you know, he's an Olympic gold medalist, hunter freestyler. And like his, his fingers would go a little over the edge of his paddles. Like this is the best 100 meter freestyler in the world. Like his hand was actually a little bit bigger than his paddle. And because he wanted to set a really high catch, and he wanted to keep his stroke rate together. And I think with the bigger paddle, it's like, most people don't have the strength to really sustain a really effective high catch or a great stroke rate. Or, you know, and obviously the risk of injury can go up a little bit too. But yeah, I think the stroke rate and kind of like where you can set an effective catch that's sustainable, kind of, yeah, you can, you can get into trouble there, I think, depending on, you know, who you are and where you come from. Yeah, definitely. I agree. Like we've got, we've got our effortless swimming paddles, which is like, it's a fairly sort of standard template, but we've got small, medium, large. I wear the medium ones, which are slightly bigger than my, yeah, just

probably slightly bigger than my hand. And like, if I go, I don't really, I don't wear the large ones because it's just too much load. And I just don't, don't need that. And I think for most people, like it's going to be the smaller, medium size, especially for like most, probably most females, it's probably going to be small, just generally they're a little bit smaller for males, like maybe small to medium. But those large ones, I think just, yeah, there's, and there's no point trying to train those bad habits as well, under load. Like it's just, I see a lot of people who come to our clinics who have shoulder issues. Sometimes it's from how they're sitting at their desk, desk during the day, or how they're using their mouse and keyboard. But nine times out of 10, it's something super obvious in their stroke that they're doing, that when you showed in the video, it's like that position, like this really awkward position, you're doing that 2000 times every morning. It's like, are you surprised that, that your, your shoulder hurts? It's like, yeah, it's pretty clear when you see some of the things that, that you might be doing from on BDA. Yeah, 100%. And it's like, if you have a massive paddle, it's just going to exacerbate that. You know, like, oh, you have a, you're pulling super wide and you're like, oh, my shoulders always soar here. Oh, I also wear these massive paddles. It's like, yeah, that two and two usually will, will go together. And yeah, I just, and triathletes in general, I'm just such a massive fan of just stroke rate. You know, I think when you look at all the best triathletes in terms of, you know, Lucy Charles Barkley and people like that, I mean, she's got the fastest stroke rate in triathlon, essentially. She's also like the fastest female swimmer in the history of triathlon. So those things tend to go

hand in hand, I think. And I think in there's actually in the rougher conditions too. So I think, you know, paddle everything, it all plays a small role, right? You think people think things aren't related, but, you know, taking things, thinking about things critically in the pool and like every little, if you don't know why you're putting on your gear, you know, you should have a purpose, you know, don't just, oh, I'm going to put on my massive paddles to swim aerobic to get to a K today. Well, you probably should have a purpose to what you're doing. I don't know if the big paddles I can quite find a purpose for anyone really, unless maybe you're a professional 53. It's funny you say it like, what's the purpose of it? I was talking to a friend of mine, Ben, who's a coach and he said he went on a national event camp and it was his first one. So he's got, he's there with a breaststroker who was one of his swimmers and then he's got like the best coaches in the country there. And it was his turn to write a set for all the swimmers to do. And so he wrote the set up and he's like really nervous and you know, trying to make it the best possible set he could. And then he had Lee Nugent, who's like the national national team coach and someone else come over and they're like, all right, why did you put that there? And this is like the warmup. It's like, all right, why did you put 450s of like kick there? And he's like coming up with a reason. And then, all right, what about this? What about this? And they just question him on everything, not because it was a bad workout or set, but like they make it, they want him to think about what's the actual purpose of this. And if there's no real reason

behind it, then why are we doing it? So I think it's a really good, good approach. It's like, you need to have a purpose behind everything. And that way you can save a lot of time as well. You can get rid of those junk miles and you can, you know, you can make sure that what you're doing is actually going to help you go forwards. And I think, I mean, I'm sometimes guilty of it. It's like, all right, we want to get 4k done today. All right, how are we going to get there? Yeah, but it does make a good point anyway about yeah, making sure everything's got a purpose. Yeah. And it's, it's easier said than done a little bit. I mean, every single lap doesn't always have a specific purpose, right? And sometimes coaches just put stuff in to put stuff in. But, you know, I always, it's always fun to have a swimmer or something to question you to kind of keep you on your toes like, okay, let me make sure. And I was a little bit of that guy growing up with my coach, you know, he would say something and I'd like, why? And I think we grew together as well. Like, I think I helped him become a little bit better of a coach and he obviously helped me develop into a great swimmer. And it was like, we would sit in his office and just like talk about how we're going to get me to the next level. You know, I'm like, well, Phelps reads every left every stroke. How come I he's like, well, Phelps still rotates evenly. You're not rotating evenly when you do that. And, you know, there's things stick with you over, over the course of your life. So it could be really powerful for a coach and kind of an athlete to get those questions, even though as a coach, sometimes you're like, don't question me, just do the set. Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't question me. That's right. Any terms of, like, favorite sets, do you have any particular favorite sets that you personally like to do?

Yeah, I do. Well, I don't do it as much these days, because I don't have, I don't swim long course, but like 10 400s long course was always like a set growing up that I did. And I really enjoyed it as much as someone could. Like, I was kind of one of those swimmers who was like, yeah, let's get after it. These days, I really, like I said, I like doing shorter aerobic sets on short rest. And I think it's just like, it makes the time go by quickly. And you, I was thinking about what the hardest set was, because I know you've asked some of your guests that before. And it was with this, this woman, and she said, she's a really great swimmer. I think she's Australian. She's like, oh, 10 100s on the two minute as like the hardest set you could possibly do this hour. And I was like, I was thinking that exact same set. So I don't do too much of that these days, but, you know, a five 100s on the five minute. I mean, it, it's awful. But doing a set like that is also kind of a favorite too. And, you know, it's funny. I actually left this comment on one of your Instagrams once and I still get people liking it. So I get like notifications. And I was like, oh, that's one of those sets where you like feel slightly sick after. And that's kind of how you know you did it, right? So I think the five 100s on the five minute is kind of one of those. And that's a fun set for me. But yeah, you don't feel super good when it's over. But maybe 30 minutes down the road, you feel a little bit better. It's so, yeah, so painful. It reminds me of the Jevesi, the all burn spew set, whatever they call it, like the one that Brett Hawke used to do. Yeah. It was basically like, it was like hundreds until you do 100

max effort. And then you scale a Gatorade or Powerade and you keep going until you spew. It's almost like the BMR. But it's a similar thing. But like, again, like, I don't know what the what's the purpose of it. You don't you don't need the Gatorade at the end of each 100. But yeah, that's a hard set. When you see like big coaches like that, just do fun stuff sometimes. I mean, it's fun in a sense. And that's kind of the beauty of swimming. Like I think good coaches keep their athletes engaged in different ways. You know, I saw the ASU coach was posting something the other day and they're jumping up in the middle of the pool doing streamlines and then sprinting. It's like these are some of the best summers in the world and they're still doing weird stuff. And I think that's why, you know, they're successful as well.

Yeah, that's what and it keeps it interesting. Like it just mixes things up and look the distance isn't going to look great on your on your watch or like he might be missing 800 meters from from your workout because you've been doing some funky stuff in the middle of the pool. But I think like it's that stuff that can really help you learn and help your body discover what it needs to do to get a fish in to get fast and all that sort of stuff. And like one one that I've that I really like, we throw it in occasionally for our Wednesday sprint sessions is we do vertical kick, but you actually have to move forwards. So it's hands out, kicking vertically, but you just lean forwards. And I got this one from Andrew Schaeff where it's very hard but you're working that the up kick. So if you don't have a very good up kick, then you're not going to move forwards. So I found that to be hard, but like just an effective way to develop your kick. And then we do, I just call it like bucket skull, but like on your back head or head sort of up and you're just going next here and you're going feet first. It's like feet first skull. Again, really hard and your forearms feel it after 25 meters. So like that stuff is very slow, but it just mixes it up and you still get a lot out of it. So things like that can be. Yeah. And you know, we talked about schooling earlier. I think that's like it's can be pretty powerful. And there's so many different ways to do it too, you know, like there's tens of different ways to school and, you know, putting your body in a weird position and finding out how to move it. It's, you know, it's all part of the, you know, I feel like swimming is a bunch of boxes

and, you know, you got to check as many boxes as you can try new stuff. Some of it, it's not going to click with you and some of it will. And it's so different for everyone. So I think like trying all those things can be just really, really important. I always use the example like okay, if you're trying to teach 10 kids one thing, you're going to have to say it five different ways for it to connect with each, you know, to get it to connect to each one of them, right? Because it's not going to connect with someone in one way and it will with others. And I think that's how you, yeah, it really improves as a swimmer. And I think that's, this is what's missing in triathlon a bit, you know, there's no exploration and not enough curiosity on why people are fast. Like what, oh, I can't swim backstroke. I'm like, well, go on the internet and try to find out a general theme and, you know, practice kicking on your back. You can do it. It's not so hard, you know. Yeah, that's right. And I think if you get better at backstroke and breaststroke and maybe you fly, like there's a lot of similarities there. The catch is the same. You've still got to rotate and backstroke, it just gets the shoulders moving in another way and it helps you. You've got to figure out what's moving forwards there. So yeah, it's really worth doing. And last week, I went on holidays with my family and we were spent heaps of time in the beach and heaps of time in the pool that was at the resort. And so I was in there with the kids and we were in there for a couple of hours a day and we're just playing a game, like keeping off like these sinky toys and like we try

and steal it from each other. And like they're doing all this stuff underwater, kind of like a fish, like just darting around and like just seeing what they can do to get away or to get me. And like that sort of discovery and that sort of play, like you don't need to be stealing sinkies from each other in triathlon training, but like some something like that that's fun. And like and you're not thinking about all right, got to get my like hand entry right and my cat just like I just a little bit of that discovery stuff goes a very, very long way. Yeah, and I just such a big believer in like how resilient our bodies are, you know, you you might pick up something and you didn't even know you did and you might swim more efficient just because you tried something new and you never know what you can learn just by doing. Yeah, listen, we call it we play sharks and minnows. You might call it something different in Australia, you know, where someone's it and they try to get you before you get to their side and your your squirm and your darting and changing direction underwater. And it's I think those things. Yeah, I really really can make a difference. You know, it's not always more yards and obviously swimming a lot is important. But you know, these little things too are. And yeah, very fun and engaging and I like to write workouts that you might have to double check a few times when you're going through it because I don't want it to be hey, you're doing 2200 today. It's Wednesday, you know, I want a little more intention with it. And so people keep people engaged trick them into swimming 4k not read the whole 4k as they're doing it. Yeah, exactly right. And in terms of what's maybe a belief that

you've changed over the last couple of years, as you've gotten to maybe just developed and progressed as a triathlete, having more experience in triathlon, like what's what's something that you've had to change your belief on that comes to mind? Yeah, I think for myself, it's

I don't have to do as much like hard threshold swimming as I once I thought I did. You know, I'm like, oh, two or three times a week, I got to, you know, get in 1500 to 2000 of like, you know, really hard swimming.

I've done so much of it that I can swim a lot of just kind of aerobic volume maybe a teeny bit of speed. And I'm pretty much set. And I don't think it'd be the same with everyone else. But I realize the more I've gotten older, the less quality I have to do to yeah, kind of stay stay where I am. But you can't also neglect the little things as well. But that's something that's kind of changed changed for me. And one thing I will say I've changed for athletes I coach. I always would say like, swim more, swim more, swim more. And I think that's important. You need to swim a lot. But I also think that. Yeah, just I lean more a little bit more into the speed versus like, not versus volume, because, you know, you need volume to support speed work. But I think that getting fast is like, I just think it's so powerful if you want to be efficient. My hundred free time compared to all the pro triathletes is super, super good. That means I'm also a really good case swimmer. And I think those go really go hand in hand with, you know, how fast someone is in 100 versus their Ironman time. I think the correlation would be pretty much direct. And in a lot of people now you can talk about types of athletes, you know, like, oh, he's a sprinter or something. But we're kind of just talking about all aerobic athletes because it's triathletes in general. So, you know, I can't sprint to 4800 meter freestyle, but I can sprint at 55, which is good for triathletes. But it's slow in terms of swimming. I think you need to get that speed up just just for everyone. And most people triathletes have never really done. And it doesn't have to be massive

amounts of it. But I think making sure you're fast and swimming a good amount is something that they've kind of changed a bit.

I did say that was a bit of a controversial take when you posted that on your Instagram about the fast 100 times help with faster longer, longer distance times. And I think yeah, like there's obviously nuance to it. It's like, yeah, you've got people who are sprinters who can produce a lot of lactate that can go very fast. And that's that is certainly not me. I cannot sprint over long, long course. It's yeah, a longer distance. It's it's fine. But yeah, I think like, yeah, generally, okay, if you yeah, if you can do 120 with an all out sprint, then there's a probably a much better chance that you can hold, I don't know, 130 fives for your two case swim compared to someone who's doing a 128 for an all out all out sprint. So I think there's like, yeah, it's got a fairly direct correlation there. And if all you're doing is just aerobic stuff, and you've never like really tried to work on that that speed, you might be missing out there 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

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vision from start to finish. I think I wanted to sort of ask about that I didn't before is in terms of stroke rate. What are some things that you would recommend people do to develop the ability to hold a faster stroke rate? And is it something that they should like go from 60 to 75 on fairly quickly, or just over time progress it? Like if you got a bit of a strategy or way that you approach that? Yeah, you know, if using a tempo trainer can be like a tool, you know, that beeping, you kind of got to know what stroke rate you usually do and maybe progress slowly with it. I just think doing the, you know, kind of mentioned earlier, like, oh, just a few 25s fast, maybe at the end of warm up and at the end of your main set, just like, doing a bit of that speed work, you don't have to crush like DO2 max 50s and 100s and all that. But just like small doses of, hey, let's do half lap like super fast turnover, go for it and like rewiring your brain a bit to hold a higher stroke rate. So then when you do a race, it's not going to be that high, but you're more comfortable because you've you've trained swimming a stroke rate that's faster. So I don't I don't try to get too specific with it. I think if someone came to me with a big plan and they say, I'm actually doing this thing with my buddy right now because he sent me some swim videos and he hasn't progressed too much and he's a pro triathlete. His stroke rate is so slow. So I said, okay, I want you to get in some 40 25s every day at this stroke rate, just to learn how to swim with that stroke rate. And hopefully he can find some efficiency with it. And then when he goes

back to swimming in a race, maybe that intervention helped him. You know, I don't think there's like you said there's always nuance to everything. But I think a little bit of speed and just practicing like, oh, I'm going to some super fast stroke rate. Yes, do we want to shorten our stroke? Intentionally, you know, that could be a slippery slope, of course. But I think the speed is really big. And it's just small doses just to practice that turnover. Yeah, especially for the pro triathletes or top end age groupers, I think that can be a very good strategy. And I've seen it work with, I mean, I had Becky on the podcast and she she said for her that just transformed transformed us her swim leg. Like she was just she was too long, too smooth. So I can't remember who her coach was at the time, but basically just got her to like right up and just just get efficient at that at that speed at that stroke rate. And she said like from then on it took about 12 months to be able to do it. But then from then on she was like she was right up there. But before she just really struggled because she was just going for too much length. And I did a session with a guy who's like who's about to transition to pro and he is relatively stiff, like just through the shoulders. And like he's just he's not going to have that length of stroke. So we did a session and I think he was typically around like a 364 maybe no high 60s. I think when he was racing. And so I did a session where I wanted him to go as fast as he

could with his stroke rate and as fast as he could go for like 25 meters was a stroke rate of like 82 or something like and that felt just so quick. But ideally if he was just like over speed work and going as fast as he could, he should be able to get that to like 90 or 100 like really getting it going. But he just couldn't do it. Like he just wasn't used to it. So just trying to stretch that rubber band or elastic band of like the range he's comfortable in over time, I think will help him long term like the friend that you're talking about. So yeah, I think for athletes at that sort of level it can be very, very useful. And I mean even ones not at that level, but I think more so for the top end age groupers or pro triathletes. Yeah, definitely. Like you said, it's like stretching it. Okay, can you do it for 10 25 school? Let's stretch it to a 50 and like, you know, and that takes a lot of time, of course. And you know, without a coach there on deck and stuff and checking in with someone online every week or so, it really can be tough, you know, and I get it frustrating for a lot of people. But you know, even in the pro triathlon game and you know, age group world type races with mass starts, you got to be fast. I mean, that's everyone sprints the beginning, right? You know, so it's not only like speed can help you find efficiency at slower paces, it's also like, well, you also need to get out and then be able to kind of settle that speed. So yeah, I just I just think it can be so powerful for stroke mechanics, stroke rate. And yes, if you're doing a bunch of speed and you're swimming inefficient or something, maybe you're

reinforcing bad habits, but I would say it might correct some of the bad habits as well. And it's hard to intervene from afar as well. And I think that can be, yeah.

Yeah, those those ways for people to work out what they should be doing without you being there, like that ability for them to self coach. And when one of the course, you know, I think which one was it in our right now five day catch challenge, which is like a five day course, people they're helping with their catch on. I think day two, we work on the beginning of the catch. And one of the exercises we have them do is like do this front kick drill with fingers up, elbows drops like intentionally breaks on position. And then we get them to the right position. And just building up that awareness back and forth, then helps them understand what it should feel like when they're doing it right. And then they can know whether or not they're they're doing it. And there's heaps of different little exercises, like wrong way, right way that you can do to be able to self coach and know what it's like when you're doing it correctly. So yeah, stuff like that, like speed work, the faster you go, the more the drag is multiplied. And like, I think that's what forces you to figure out what you need to do to maintain your speed. It's, it's such a good, good approach because there are very few swimmers on the planet who has someone giving them feedback every session. And like, there's very almost no pro triathletes who are getting that sort of feedback every session either like it's just squads are too big, you often have to do training on your own. So you've you're going to have to self coach it at some point. So yeah, figuring out how to do that, I think is very important. Yeah, student of the sport, I think it's so big and it's something it's like, you know, if you're in a squad or something, you're not getting one on one attention, well,

take a 50 off and watch the fastest swimmer in the pool, you know, like, see what other fast swimmers are doing to and I think that's big. You had this drill I've seen you do where you just you kick out in front with your in your arms just in a catch position, just like holding a high elbow catch to like, learn what it feels like to be in that position. And I've actually prescribed it to people before and it's, I never really thought of it like that, but just holding a high catch and moving through the water can like, Oh, then when they swim, maybe they'll just go right into that position. So yeah, I think you're, you're super good about cool things, I think. And yeah, I mean, people who probably started for your five day catch challenge, probably get faster, which is cool. And yeah, it's cool to see. That one of the drills there, we do one called YMCA, which is like you kick at the start of the catch, kick in the high elbow position, kicking what we call the power diamond, like just hands under shoulders and then kick at the exit. And it's like, I I'd seen something similar before, but I'm like, Oh, look, these that seem to be the main positions that we want people in, like, yeah, but no matter sort of what, whether doing pool racing or open water. So how about we just give them lots of time to be able to get the feeling of it? And then we'll just have them swim after it. And so I was like, Oh, it's a bit of a silly drill, but like, whatever, we'll see if it works. And so, but it's one I've continued to use for for years, since coming, coming up with it, because I think like it can be hard when you're moving through the water and you just

don't sort of get the chance to necessarily like feel or actually being a high elbow catch. So just taking that time to kick in those positions. And the thing is you like, you feel the drag being created in a really good catch and a really good power diamond. And so the message I try and get across for him is like, right, yes, it's slow and it's hard right now to kick through all that drag. But on the other side of that is your propulsion, like that's the big paddle that you're going to work with. So if you're feeling a lot of drag and like this is hard, well, that's good. All right, you're training the right position and not obviously not for everyone, but for a lot of people that that can just help them kind of get the sense of where they need to be through the stroke. So when they do that drill a few times and they swim in between a lot of them start to move closer to those positions. So yeah, just trying things that might look a bit silly, you know, in the pool, that can be can be really helpful 100%. And I, I call I think I know you call it a power diamond. I think before when I I didn't know I called like a half diamond because it's like it's only one arm usually. Yeah. But I think when I see this in triathlete so much, it's like this crazy wide pole. And it's like it's almost a balance. And I think like it's kind of an I see it so much in triathletes. And yeah, you know, it's, it's so weak that wide pole. And it's like sometimes I watch videos of myself and my hands like on my midline, sometimes crossing over it. You know, even if you look at some of the best swimmers in the world, it's like, yeah, some of them have like traditional catches, but some of them are really up on their midline. And you know, some of them even like cross

over slightly. And it's like, when you're a kid, it's like never cross over, you'll go so slow and triathletes get to the like, well, I can't cross over, I'm going to swim super wide. But it's like, I better off crossing over slightly than having this crazy wide pole. I feel like that's kind of a hot take. But it's like, I just, I feel like you can still be powerful when you're really, you know, underneath your body. And it's close to that power diamond shape.

Well, particularly, I saw it in as a coach, Tracy Bown, I saw it in a book, there was like four photos and it's just pictures of like where you are in relation, where your arm is in relation to your body through the catch and pull. And when you look at it, so like you're starting, let's say you're on your side drop here. Okay, so we're in line with the shoulder, then we actually rotate a bit more in our catch. So it's still roughly in line with the shoulder. We almost sort of flat once we get to the diamond here. And again, it's like, maybe slightly wider than the shoulder. But then as you come through, and this was like the, you know, this point kind of clicked for me is we actually like coming into the midline because you're rotating on to the other side. And I see a lot of swimmers get stuck in that second half there. They think they need to keep this high elbow catch position all the way through. And that stuffs them up because there's just no connection through the last half of their pool. So if they can, yeah, if you think of coming into the midline or at least close to it, then you're actually getting that tricep and I press at the back of tricep extension. And you have that connection with the whole body. But yeah, you're right. Like I just see that with like that wideness all the way through because of like a misinterpretation of the catch, trying to do it the whole way through or like trying to not cross over. Yeah. Does that like have you seen that as well? Is that sort of ring true for you too? Yeah, definitely. And that's when I see it on myself when I'm it's turning. It's right at the end where you're like crossing over. But right, it's like your body has shifted. You've rotated and you're just basically like, you know, brushing your hip slightly, right? And getting that tricep extension. And, you

know, if you're if you've been swimming your whole life and your triceps never been so or it's like, well, you're probably not finishing your stroke quite right, you know, because that's those those really are firing at the end. And yeah, it's funny when you're a kid, it's like streamlined behind your head, you know, put your head and, you know, and, you know, pull wide. But it's like sometimes to teach kids you teach them things that seems like and then you realize that that's not quite exactly how I think that's true in life. It's like, don't do all these things. And then you see someone at the top and they're like doing all of these things, right? You know, I have these underwater shots of Nathan Adrian and and Michael Phelps and on their catches. It's like, they're just strict, you know, at the end of the stroke, totally on their midline, their fingertips are probably crossing over on the other side. But it's like, never cross your midline. It's like, these are the best of our generation. And here they are doing that. That's just that same thing. It's funny. Yeah, it's yeah, it's

again, like it comes down to that nuance, I think, where there's like maybe for a beginner, we need to teach them something just to kind of get them moving in the right direction that we might need to refine it. So there's just so much like spread there, like of where you can be and depending on where the person is in there, in their swimming journey. So that's why I think it's just it's worthwhile getting someone who's a coach or even another swimmer who you think can help you like it's just it just can make such a difference. And I like I did a session probably three months ago, four months ago, just where I was getting coached. And I got like one main thing from it. It was just my breath time. It was bringing the head back a bit earlier because I was that was with Tracy, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's I listened to that episode. Yeah. Yeah. So I did the session with her and it was actually it was turning the head a bit earlier so I could get it back earlier and it took me a long time to actually make the change and to see the results of it. But the last couple of open water races I've done, I have felt really, really good. And I've been able to like I got my rating up really high and held it comfortably because like this breath timing was was there. So it took me a good couple of months to be able to do it. But like, yeah, all right, just one thing. And that's made like a huge difference for me. So yeah, I think like most people if they were to just focus on one thing for six months, they would likely see a big improvement as well. Even if it's something as simple as breath timing, like, yeah, you know, I can I can swim one is one 12s for like a half Ironman

swim. And that like, I feel like that could give me like a second or maybe two seconds. If I were to ever race half Ironman again, which I won't, I feel like I'm past it. I can't write I'm too slow. But like, yeah, it's it can make a big difference just that one things. Yeah, I think that's the way to go. And I mean, that's what the podcast roll about is trying to help people improve their swimming. And because we cover so much, sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming. So just trying to always come back to that simplicity. And what about for you? Is there something in your stroke that you've been working on recently or anything that sort of stood out to you? Yeah, I mean, something I'm always working on is making sure I rotate fully to my right side. And I've really been swimming this way since I was 16. It's like, I like to breathe to my left. But I know no matter what I got to throw in a breath to the right, you know, every, you know, six to 10 strokes or something like that, just to keep my body balanced. And, you know, sometimes if I if I forget it, I'll like get this kind of pain in my back, because I'm you know, I'm throwing my thing and I'm galloping a bit when I swim. So if I don't keep my rotation in check, I can even like have a kind of a tweak in my back. You know, I'm like, well, I'm 33. I'm like, oh, I'm getting old. I'm like, no, you just weren't, you weren't alternate breathing. And you can put a little weird strain on yourself in the pool. So that's something I always think about. And just making a little bit point to kick a little bit more in my training this year, just because like when you swim fast, you kick a lot. And you know, if I'm racing some of the best athletes in the world, and, you know, like, oh, I want to go to a big race

and maybe I'll have, I'll get in a scenario where I want to lead out. It's like, well, I'll probably have to get to my legs a little bit. And I want to train that a little bit more this year. So when I get on the bike, my legs aren't, you know, in a place where they haven't been. It's like, no, I did some kick training to prepare and now I can get on the bike and I can push the power that I should push. But one other thing, you know, you're someone who coaches and you look at all this video, but the fact that you can like take a little pointer and your stroke and like, you know, make, make changes is like, I think that really speaks volumes to you. It's like, you're coached, but we're always confined things for their own stroke. And there's always room to grow in swimming, you know, not, you know, Bob Bowman probably learned some stuff, you know, here or there. And it's like that think the good coaches always are have that kind of student mentality as well, because we can always learn from a new swimmer or a new training stimulus. Yeah, exactly right. And even if they're like, if you're, if they're a coach or a swimmer who like may not have been in the sport as long or like may not have had the experience, like there's still a lot of stuff you can learn. Like I've learned great, like great cues or great ways of explaining things from, yeah, from coaches who are even like fairly, fairly new to it. So and that's, and that's to me, that's the real sort of journey is that there's no, there's no endpoint to it. It's like brushing your teeth is like, you got to do it every day. And the same thing with swimming is like, there's, there's no end point to it. You're not going to know everything and every single way to coach and you're not going to have worked

with every swimmer. So yeah, it's that's what's what makes it fun. And I think like, there's not much better feeling in the world than like having a swim or a race really where it all just comes together, where you feel like you've got this great rhythm, you've got the fitness behind you and you're just motoring along like that. That to me is just like, it really puts a smile on my face. And it doesn't happen that often, but when it does, it's like, yeah, that was, that was worth it. And I'm sure you've had some moments like that, maybe a half iron man world chance where you're just like, yes, that was, that was really nice. Yeah, no, I was thinking about that when you said it's, you know, when you're swimming in the open water, you can kind of take a peek behind you when I was like, I'm working hard. And I looked behind me and I realized I had a gap on the field. I was like, this is cool. And like, I felt that flow and it's like, yeah, I was hurting, but I was like, I was perfectly happy just staying on the gas and just finishing well, because it's like kind of everything came together. And that's open water can be tough that way. Sometimes like, you don't know if you're in a good rhythm, but then, you know, and even I'll question it myself, but then I'm looking around like, okay, I'm moving well compared to other people. But, you know, so if you're out there, like, oh, I'll feel perfect rhythm in the open water. I mean, that's the open water in general. You might never feel really that smooth throughout the swim, but it's just a matter of have you done all the little things to put yourself in a position to, yeah, have an efficient stroke during the race.

And Craig, before we wrap up here, is there anything that we haven't covered that you think we we should or anything that you sort of had written down that you thought would be good to cover? No, I think we recovered it mainly. I think one of the things I always tried to stress to my athletes is like, yeah, do your homework or like be a student of the sport. You got to have that really learning growth mindset and swimming, like maybe more than cycling and running and other things, because it's just it's so nuanced. You have to try so much to make small improvements. And if you don't really embrace that, then it's like, you know, you're you'll fizzle out, you know, you're not going to find that improvement. So that's what I really try to stress through everything that I teach and talk to people about just you got to love it. It might suck sometimes, but you'll mostly love it. You'll be in a good, you'll be in a good, good path. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you for being on the podcast and keep putting out your controversial posts and opinions on Instagram. We'll include that in the show notes as well for people that are that are listening to. So I love a bit of back and forth. And it's good to see both sides of it too, right? Like you put it out there and I know probably trying to stir things up a bit. But it's like, it's good to see the different opinions come out. And, you know, it doesn't have to be right or wrong. It's like, you're probably going to learn something there. So it's I love that. And yeah, keep doing it. Yeah, I appreciate it. And yeah, thanks a lot for having me. It was, yeah, it was an honor to be on the show. You're such a such an influential person on the, yeah, the swim space. So I appreciate you having me. Thank you. And if anyone wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do it? Yeah, I guess maybe

through Instagram or my handle is G harp. And then Z O R Z G harp is ours. Just an old friend trick of the sorry, it's an old old inside joke with a friend. But yeah, Greg Harper, you can probably search me on Instagram and you'll find me. And yeah, hopefully I'll have some I'm kind of working on this website where I'm going to be putting out some like kind of training plans and things like that. So hopefully I'll get that in the works. And yeah, hopefully people respond to it well. Sounds good. Thanks, Greg. Appreciate it. Thanks, man. 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 Lessons From The Fastest Swimmer In 70.3 with Greg Harper appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to analyze the strokes of over 8,000 swimmers and triathletes, ranging from beginners to elite professionals. Throughout this experience, I’ve discovered the key factors that set fast, efficient swimmers apart from those who struggle to improve.

In this video, I’ll be sharing the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from analyzing swimmers of all backgrounds worldwide. I’ll debunk common myths and misconceptions often heard around the pool deck and reveal what truly makes the difference between a smooth, efficient swimmer and someone battling their way through the water.

The second thing is, ignore most advice. Most advice is not relevant for you. And I say that from giving so much advice through our Instagram, through our YouTube, through our podcast, I give out a lot of advice. But most of it is probably not relevant for you. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer, and live a better life. Here's your host, Brenton Ford. Over the years, I've had the chance to analyze the strokes of more than 8,000 swimmers and triathletes from beginners all the way to professional triathletes. Over that time, I've learned what really makes a difference between someone who's fast and efficient compared to someone who gets stuck and can't get any faster in their swimming. In this video, I'm gonna share with you the biggest lessons I've learned from analyzing people from all over the world of all different backgrounds, the biggest myths and misconceptions that I hear around pool deck. And what actually makes a difference between someone who is swimming efficiently and smooth to someone who's really struggling their way through the water. The first thing I've learned from coaching 8,000 different people is that strava is a lie. Whenever you're checking your strava and you're looking at the average pace of someone's swim session, there's so many different variables that go into it. When I look at my own pace, well, often we do more than 1,000 meters of a warm-up with fins on. That's going to skew my average pace to be much faster

than I would actually swim if I wasn't using fins. And the same goes for if we are doing shorter intervals of 50s and 100s, where you can go faster. You can take that rest and your overall pace could be a lot quicker than what it would normally be if you're doing intervals of 400 or 200 meters. And then there comes paddles and pool billies which are obviously gonna make your times a lot faster. So when you're looking at other people swimming and their average time on strava, it's very easy to get in your own head and think, I'm just not that good compared to these other people. But I think strava is a way to maybe motivate yourself to try and push yourself to do some bigger or more challenging sessions. But on the other side of that, sometimes we think that we need to do a lot more than what we're actually doing to get better or we compare ourselves in a way that is not actually comparable because the times that people are doing is misconstrued because of all these different variables. So strava is a lie, it can be motivating but it can also make you feel like crap which is not what we wanna do. So it depends on how you use it but I think across the board, strava can really tell a whole lot of lies if we don't break it down and look at the actual stats behind it. The second thing is ignore most advice. Most advice is not relevant for you. And I say that from giving so much advice through our Instagram, through our YouTube, through our podcast, I give out a lot of advice. But most of it is probably not relevant for you.

And that's because whenever, let's say I'm analyzing someone's video inside our membership, I'll give them one thing to think about for the month and that's it. Because for most people, there's one bit of advice. There's something that's slowing them down or stopping them from getting quick outs this one thing that if they can fix that, they'll get better. But if they're thinking about 10 different things, they're not actually gonna move in a forward direction. So I think it's best to ignore most advice and just focus on what's actually gonna make the difference for you. And let's say you've come to a clinic of ours or you've gone to a coach and I said, work on this one thing. You're probably better off just switching everything off and practicing that one thing for one or two months time and down the track, you'll find yourself further ahead. Then if you were looking at all these different videos, trying a million different things and having nothing to stick. So most advice is not relevant to you. The third thing that I've learned from coaching 8,000 different swimmers is that most adults overthink and sometimes the solutions to what they're looking to fix come from unexpected sources or an illogical way of actually approaching the problem. So for example, we have a lot of people who have problems with their breathing. They get tired before they get to the end of the pool and they think the issue is with the breathing itself. But more times than not, it's from doing something that's causing them to elevate their heart rate or even like a mental state,

a way that they're thinking about the pool and the water that's actually stopping them from being able to breathe normally. So it's not that the way that they're breathing in their stroke is the issue. The issue is that maybe they're over kicking and that's causing their heart rate to be high or they're deep down, they're sort of afraid that they're going to sink in the water and they're not comfortable. And so they hold this unnecessary tension in the body. And that's the thing that we actually need to overcome or work on for them to get better and get comfortable in the water. So sometimes the solution comes from unexpected areas or from somewhere where you think the answer might not be. And so often when we're overthinking things, it's good to either get some professional advice or just take a step back and look at what's the main cause, what could be the actual cause of the issue I'm having or the challenge I'm having in my swimming. Number four is that swimming is not like running or riding. If you're a triathlete and you're putting the work in on the bike and in the run, typically you will get faster. But when it comes to swimming, because water is 800 times denser than air, it takes a lot of technique to be able to get quicker alongside doing the work. So often I have people who come to me, they're very fit. Their VO2 max is 55, 60, super high, but they find that they're pretty slow in the water. And it's not because of a lack of fitness or strength, but it's because of a lack of technique.

So in swimming, we've got to do the work, but we've also got to work on the technical side of things. And so you can't just go harder and train more in order to get quicker. That's certainly a part of it, but we really need to focus on the technical aspects of it. Number one, reduce drag. Number two, increase propulsion. Number five is the harder you try and force speed, the further away it's going to get. In swimming, we need this suppleness and this softness about us in order to move well and freely through the water. But if we try and force things, then we get this tenseness and stiffness about us and we don't move through the water nearly as well or as efficiently. So when it comes to getting faster, we need to try and play it cool in a way, like we're not trying too hard to get faster. And typically that's when the speed will come, when we're not trying to force it. Number six is confidence comes from seeing small improvements. So let's say you're a two minute per hundred swimmer for one kilometer and you're a little bit stuck and you feel like I'm not getting any better. I find that let's say someone's come to a clinic and they have one thing to focus on to start with and maybe that's just better body position. If they focus on that for a few weeks and they find that their times are coming down to 157, 156, that gives them this boost of confidence, like actually I can get better and I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.

And so a really good way to approach swimming is to have one thing in mind, test it out, try it for several weeks and hopefully you see an improvement in your times or how you feel and your efficiency in the water. And then you can build on that and you can move on to the next thing. Rarely is it where you go from two minutes per hundred straight down to 130 per hundred nor need to see small incremental improvements over time. But that is the thing that keeps us motivated. So if you can keep things very simple and keep it to one thing, then you're likely to have this confidence about your swimming rather than which we often see is that people get caught in their own head and they're their own biggest doubters. And that's when they really don't enjoy their swimming. Number seven is your catch is the same in all your strokes. So now five day catch challenge, it's specifically for freestyle, but the catch is the same in all four strokes. So if it's butterfly, this is your catch. If it's backstroke, this is your catch. Breaststroke is here and freestyle is here as well. It's the same position, you're just in a different position in the water. So if you can establish a really effective catch in freestyle, that can help you for your backstroke in your breaststroke and your butterfly. So even though they're different strokes, the same things about your technique all apply. When I'm at a clinic and we are looking at someone's stroke, I ask them to give me feedback

on what they see in their video before I talk about what I can see. Now sometimes, especially if someone's seen our videos, often they'll have a pretty good understanding of what they're looking for. And some people get all the things right, which is terrific. But quite often people are looking at not the most unusual things, but things that don't really make a difference to their speed. They're looking at these little one percenters that don't actually make a difference or move the needle for their overall speed. So quite often when we're watching ourselves swim or we're critiquing ourselves, we're looking at the wrong things and not the things that will actually make a difference for us. So when you look at yourself swim, it's worthwhile thinking about what would actually make the difference to my speed. And usually it's those bigger things, the fundamentals. So head and body position, effective kick, the right rotation. Those couple of things there can make a huge difference to our speed. It doesn't really matter. If you, let's say you're coming in like this, at this angle, compared to this, that's probably not gonna make much of a difference because that's a much smaller piece of the overall pie when it comes to your speed. So look at the things that will actually move the needle for you to get faster. 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 the 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.

We are our own harshest critic. When people see themselves swim, they are always really harsh on the feedback that they give themselves. So when we're running clinics and I've got someone next to me in there, they're watching themselves swim, normally they're like, oh my God, I can't believe I look this bad. I can't believe I'm doing all these things wrong. But the other people in the clinic, they don't care. They don't care how you look. They're not judging you as a person or as a swimmer. So quite often I find people are so quick to judge themselves and critique themselves and they make themselves feel bad about maybe the way that they're swimming or approaching it. But in reality, no one cares. It's really just you. So the good thing about that though is that if no one cares about how you look or your speed when you're swimming, then it doesn't really matter where or at. We just want to try and improve from there for our own sake, not for anyone else's sake. And the same thing goes for like, when you walk in the pool, you might have a quick glance at the other swimmers there, but in reality, you don't really care what they're doing. It's more about you. And so all the other swimmers who arrive at the pool are thinking the same thing. They're only thinking about themselves. So don't worry about how you look or what you're doing when you swim because no one else does. And I think that can be quite a good thought to have because I know I've sort of felt the same when it comes to other sports. It's like all these people must be thinking about me and judging me, but nobody cares.

Swimming is as much mental as it is physical. Certainly there's a physical aspect of it. We need to have some general fitness and strength and mobility to swim well. But on the other side of that, so much of it is mental, especially for someone who's new to the sport, often they come into it with these mental blocks of, oh, I'm not a good swimmer. I'm kind of afraid of the water. And they carry that in where they have this tension and uncomfortable way of swimming. And it's not until we overcome those where we can just relax and be comfortable in the water that that person can then actually get better. And it also goes for people who are swimming at a more pointy end of the field where sometimes they think, oh, okay, I'm an okay swimmer, but I don't think I can get much better. So the mental side of it is just as important as the physical. And I think one way to really overcome that side of it is to either work with someone who can help you there, like a coach or a friend, but also just seeing these small improvements over time. Let's say it's open water swimming that gives you fear. Just progressively challenge yourself there. If you can progressively do something a little bit more difficult than what you've done in the past and just over time push that comfort zone, then looking back two or three years down the track, you're probably going to find yourself having progressed so much that you can't even recognize a person who was there three years ago. Working on your technique is like watering seeds.

If you have planted some seeds in the garden, you're looking to grow some vegetables, you might water those seeds for weeks and weeks on end and not see anything happening. But under the ground, the seeds are getting watered and they're starting to sprout, but it can take a long time. It can take three, four, five weeks until you see that sprout coming out of the ground. And you might feel like those first couple of days or weeks where you're watering the seeds that nothing's happening. But eventually it's going to sprout. And working your technique is very much like that. So many people who send in videos for our membership and I give them feedback, or so many people who come to clinics, they work away for weeks on end without seeing the results of the work that they're doing. And then usually you say in one session or in one week, they're like, oh my God, like I'm a lot quicker, but nothing was happening before that. So swimming is very much just like watering seeds. You don't know the impact you're having until you do. And if you can have that patience about the work that you're doing on your stroke, then it's more than likely you're going to see the benefit down the track. When people start swimming, it's usually an aerobic challenge first. Then it becomes a more muscular challenge or fatigue. And then it becomes aerobic again. So usually when someone begins to swim aerobically, they're very challenged because they're not used to this intermittent breathing. They're used to breathing whenever they need to.

And they're probably kicking harder. They're trying to keep their hips up and their legs up. They're doing things that are aerobically very challenging for them. When they get cast that point, it becomes much more muscular where they're starting to use their lats and their back and their core and those things more. So they get fatigue there a lot quicker. Then once they get over that hurdle, then it starts to become a bit more aerobic. They've got good technique. They've got a decent amount of swim specific strength. Then it becomes more of an aerobic challenge after that. One of the things we focus on on this channel is technique. But sometimes what you need to get faster is not more technique work. Sometimes you just need to do the work. Sometimes it comes down to having to practice something for longer, see the results of that, make that a habit before you get better. So sometimes it's not just about more technique stuff. You have to do the work alongside it. So it depends where you are in your journey but if you have been practicing something for a week, you might need to spend a solid six to eight weeks on that thing and practice it more before you see the result of it. We need reminding of things more than we need to learn new things. So you probably know you need to have good head position where you're looking mostly down. You need to be horizontal in the water, have a light, consistent kick, 30 to 40 degrees rotation. You probably know that you need those things. When someone sends a new video to our membership

and I'm giving them feedback, a lot of people aren't doing those things and it's not because they don't know to do that. It's because they even need a bit more reminding in order to make that thing a habit in their stroke. So maybe if you are watching our videos, maybe just pick one thing and go about working on that thing rather than looking for the one secret piece of advice that's gonna help you get faster. So often we just need more reminding than we do learning new things about our stroke. Several years ago when I was training for the Rotnist channel, that was the biggest swim that I was training for. It was a 20-kilometer swim across to Rotnist Island in Western Australia. Now, before this, the longest swim I had ever done was 10 kilometers in training. But in the lead-up to that event, I was doing sessions in the pool that were sometimes five to 10 kilometers and I was doing swims in the Bay in Melbourne that were up to 16 kilometers for the furthest one. Now, doing those longer swims made a four-kilometer pool session feel very easy. But the only reason it felt easy was because I changed my mindset. I changed what I thought was actually a long swim. A long swim was something over 10 kilometers. But before that, I was just mostly doing three to four and a half kilometer sessions before it. So in order to make whatever you're doing now feel easy, sometimes we have to push

or go outside of our comfort zone in order to change our approach or change what we're thinking there. So if there's something there you feel like you're stuck with, can you go well beyond that? Actually change how you think about what is challenging right now. Focus on fundamentals before worrying about the finer details. Imagine you were going to buy a car and you were so concerned about the color of that car that it had to be red that you weren't concerned about it having four wheels and an engine. It just wouldn't make any sense. The same thing goes for when we're looking to swim faster and get better. It's about having those really good fundamentals of just swimming rather than worrying about these very small, fine details like how far apart should the gap between my fingers be? Should I be at 125 degrees here or 130? Look at the bigger picture and get those fundamentals right first. It will take longer than you think. It will take longer than you think to get better at swimming, to get faster at swimming and to feel comfortable in the water. So if you set a timeline of say three months for you to really nail this swimming thing, there's a good chance you're not going to achieve it. But if you can set that timeline of I'm going to work this swimming thing for the next two years and not worry too much about where I end up, there's a good chance you'll actually go a lot further

than what you think. But usually it's like building a house or renovating a house. Normally you have to think about, all right, it's double the cost and it'll be double the time to what I actually think. I reckon it's the same thing in swimming. I've certainly seen people progress faster than I expected but more times than not, it actually takes longer. So that being willing to have that patience about the way you approach things, I think is a really good trait to have when it comes to swimming faster. If you want to know what good fundamentals are in freestyle, click this video here to watch me break down the entire stroke.

The post I Analyzed 8,000 Swimmers—Here’s What Actually Makes You Faster with Brenton Ford appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

What if you could go from struggling at 2:20 per hundred to cruising at 1:55? Today’s guest, Fraser Hill, did exactly that, and he’s sharing exactly how he did it. Fraser started swimming as an adult, dabbled in triathlons, and eventually found himself diving deep into the world of technique, training, and open water swimming.

From joining an effortless swimming camp in the Maldives, to refining his stroke using simple but powerful cues, Fraser has transformed not only his speed, but his entire approach to swimming. In this episode, we talk about the key changes that made the biggest impact on his speed. The mental battles of open water swimming and how small tweaks like fixing body position and connecting the stroke led to massive breakthroughs.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in your swimming progress, Fraser’s story will give you some practical takeaways to help you break through your own barriers.

So more times than not, we're better off focusing on something earlier on in the process, whether that's head, body, rotation, length, like there's just other things that most people need to, to focus on. Um, and I had, I had someone, uh, messaged me the other day and they, they were going through that week course and they're like, well, like, this is, they'd just gone through week one and we, we focus on breathing and like, it's just, it's too basic form. It's too basic, but like, it doesn't matter where you're at with your swimming, like if you can, even if you make a slight change to breathing, you might find that you're actually a little bit more relaxed. You can actually, you know, conserve some energy. So like, if you look at the best in any sport, they are just masters of the basics. And so it's always good to just keep things as, as simple as you can. Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here's your host, Brenton Ford.

What if you could go from struggling at two 20 per 100 to cruising at one 55 today's guest, Fraser Hill did exactly that. And he's sharing exactly how he did it. Fraser started swimming as an adult, doubled in triathlons and eventually found himself diving deep into the world of technique, training and open water swimming from joining an effortless swimming camp in the Maldives to refining his stroke using simple, but powerful cues. Fraser has transformed not only his speed, but his entire approach to swimming in this episode, we talk about the key changes that made the biggest impact on his speed. The mental battles of open water swimming and how small tweaks like fixing body position and connecting the stroke led to massive breakthroughs. If you've ever felt stuck in your swimming progress, Fraser's story will give you some practical takeaways to help you break through your own barriers. So, Fraser, tell me a bit about what your, what was your background in swimming, did you like to swim as a child? Did you start as an adult? Like where did swimming start for you? Yeah, I started swimming at university. 42, three years ago, I think I started just swimming in the pool, doing a few links and really enjoyed it. And then when I was working on, I'm a veterinarian, when I started working, I decided to do some of the mini triathlons, which are very popular in the 80s. And so it's like a swim 500 meters practice doing that. Then I've just swum for leisure for the rest of the time. The last two years, I sort of got more focused because someone said to me, do you want to go to a swim class?

I know how to swim, what would I need to do that for? But I went along with Finella Ng, she's here in Hong Kong and we did a four week course and I was like, wow, I can believe the difference. And she put us onto a series of YouTube videos and one of them was your effort of swimming. I started following it and I thought, right, I'll do the five day challenge. You know, that made a difference. And I did the eight week challenge. And then I was making some progress and I watched a lot of your podcasts and see how you analyze other swimmers. And then I did some of my own filming and I realized I'd fallen into a trap. You were talking about earlier where I watched my own videos and criticized myself. I should send them to you. Anyway, I must do that. And I realized, wow, there's a lot more I can do here. So last year I signed up, went to the course in the Maldives. And then, you know, that made another difference. So it's been really the last 18 months, two years. I've just focused, focused, focused on swimming. It's the only thing I've done. And just felt, get some improvement, wanted to do better. And then, you know, felt confident enough. Now I do open water swimming here in Hong Kong in the, in the, um, there are a lot of events, actually. So in the, in the master section, which I'm in the older section do quite well. So it's a lot of, you know, I really, really actually enjoy that. So I'm a new, my new thing. Um, but I'm watching a lot of your videos and podcasts. I've realized some of the problems I have, I've posed everybody has in them in the open water, I get frightened. I had a swim, two swims ago, it was really big chop and it was just terrifying. And I couldn't actually finish it.

So I've managed to overcome that next one was okay. But, you know, just is that variation. And when we trained on Utah taught us about how to swim with the group, but I still find getting swum over, getting booted in the start. I just find that dreadful side trying to hang back a little bit. So, you know, that stuff like that. So, um, but, you know, to be honest, I'm not trying to win a triathlon. I just want to enjoy what I'm doing, keep it going and maybe swim a little quicker.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Well, in terms of where you start, I think you mentioned before the call, you were around 220 per hundred. Um, you're now down to around sort of 155 and one of your goals was to get to a sub 20 minute one K swim, which I've, I've heard a similar sort of goal from a lot of other people who were around sort of your, your speed to 20. Um, and that's quite a good, good benchmark to, to get to where, what did you change over that time to go from two 20 to 155s?

Yeah, I couldn't crack 20 to 20 minutes until about 80 months ago. And I did that first course and it took me a year of training in the very last day of this, of the season before the pool shop. I managed it. So I was, you know, I can do it now. Basically a distant memory because, um, so many things I've changed, um, in my stroke, I had, you know, many, many things I was doing wrong. And I think I just got some thinking about the Maldives course. There was three, three key areas that I really changed things that I've changed in the last six months since that course. One was body position, which was, you know, far too low in the water. Um, hips are dragging, legs are dragging. And I knew in doing that, but I actually couldn't figure out how to change it, even though I've watched over and over. You're telling us how to do it. I worked with Gary Haring and then some of you, but it was really the other students on the course that we were talking about it. And someone said to me, it's like putting on a type pair of jeans. Kate, I think it was. And then now that I do this abdominal jeans on, which has, has makes a huge difference, plus something I hadn't realized. Gary Haring spoke about this. He said, he, when he started changing his core, it helped his back. And I've always had terrible lower back problems and that has improved as well. So there's a lot of advantages to getting, you know, that core position. Right. Um, and I think even still, I'm not really where I want to be. I'm not sure how to get even higher out of the water. Um, so this, this winter, actually, I've decided to go to the gym and see if I can build up some core strength and work on it that way.

Um, because I think that, um, resistance is a big part of my issue. I'm just got too much stuff hanging out in the back. You know, I've got to try and get it out.

So go ahead. So that was number one. And the, the very last day I, I got you to sort of take me through. You know, I said, you know, give me some more tips cause I thought it was my catch, but you picked up what I was doing wrong was, um, and this has made a big change as well. You call it soft hands or your elbow on a string, I think it is. And I was pulling my elbow out too far out and you got me coming up higher and further forward and coming in a little bit closer to my head. I was reaching too far forward. And I think that made actually a massive difference. I couldn't believe the difference that made. That's that one change. So getting my guts, my bum up, elbows further up. And then since I came back and you had talked about it, but I hadn't really, cause there's a lot of stuff. I couldn't connect all the dots at the time, but having watched a few other videos, you talk about the role of the hips and connecting the core and all that. And I've really tried to figure that out and when I do it, and I can do it occasionally, but I have to be thinking it makes a difference. But as soon as I stopped thinking, you revert back to your old ways. So it's a, so there's a three body position change. We had, what do you call it? Where your elbow comes up on the string thing that you've got to name for it. Yeah. Well, like just the recovery, it's kind of like, um, I mean, it's a high elbow catch, but, uh, in a way where the elbow is pointing up a bit more as opposed to behind you. So, yeah, just being a bit more open through the underarm and, uh, and bringing the shoulder out a little bit more because yeah, we've, we just need to rotate enough so that that shoulder can come out and then we can

get over comfortably because that also, uh, like that also helps kind of get into the next part of the stroke. And I was actually really listening to, um, one of the videos or podcasts we did with Ash Delaney, who was Carl Chalmers coach, and he talks about in the catch, you're like, you almost want to press yourself into the next stroke. So this one's sort of, you know, grabbing the water, pressing, and with this shoulder, you're sort of connecting over the top and driving that one forwards, but you can't do that if this elbow is too low and you're sort of just coming around too low with it or overreaching in a lot of cases as well. So, uh, yeah, there's so many different things that are connected that we kind of need to have all in place for it to get into this really good rhythm. And I do remember that, um, yeah, that like, you just looked a lot smoother with that change in recovery and entry in the, in the male beef. So that was, um, yeah, I remember that, that looking really, really nice in terms of like, sorry, you go. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, you just don't know that until someone tells you because you think in your head, I mean, I spent a lot of time getting my arms going wider and I thought, this is weird. I feel like I'm swimming way out to the side, but it was, if you look at the video, you're only just in the right position. So you really, what your brain is doing under the water and what your body is doing, you've got no idea to be honest, it's where you need an external pair of eyes.

Yeah, that's, that's right. It's just, uh, and it doesn't matter how long you've been in the sport for you, you just need to, you just need that external pair of eyes. And I know that from my own strength, just you need someone else giving you feedback in terms of their sort of, so the confidence you've got in the water, but also how you feel now compared to previously. What's that difference for you? What do you notice when you're swimming? Oh, it's massive difference. Um, before you felt, and when you talked about one time spinning your wheels, I felt like I was swimming my guts out and just not getting any faster. And then, um, but with, with, you know, being a part of this, I realized that just making small changes can make such a big difference. But the thing I struggle with the most is I'm overthinking it. You've got too many things in my head. And I learned something off Gary Hurring. He said, you go through a checklist. You think, right, what's my breathing doing? Work on that for a few strokes. Uh, where's my, where's my hips? Where's my legs? What am I doing here? Where's my hands? And I go through this mental checklist and then I'll spend sort of one length of each trying to do one thing. It's probably, I probably should do the whole session on one thing that I tend to do with this, but I can now think about that, but now think about that. But so it's, um, and when I, I think the one that I struggle the most with and I should think about it more is this, I think you're one of your students had a name for a needle, not noodle. And when I get this kind of very thin feel to myself, you can just feel the difference. You really feel like you're surging ahead. And I've actually forgotten about worrying about the catch, to be honest. I have to figure that. Okay. I think that's okay. If I think work on these other things, I'll probably

make more progress.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And quite often there, if, if you're not doing something else, right, then you're not probably going to be getting the, the catch, right? So more times than not, we're better off focusing on something earlier on in the process. Whether that's head, body, rotation, length, like there's just other things that most people need to, to focus on. Um, and I had, I had someone, uh, messaged me the other day and they, they were going through that week course and they're like, well, like this is, they had just gone through week one and we, we focus on breathing. And like it's just, it's too basic form. It's too basic, but like, it doesn't matter where you're at with your swimming. Like if you can, even if you make a slight change to breathing, you might find that you actually a little bit more relaxed. You can actually, you know, conserve some energy. So like if you look at the, the best in any sport, they are just masters of the basics. And so it's always good to just keep things as, as simple as you, as you can.

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And in terms of the open water stuff, so what was that process like for you in like beginning open water swimming and sort of where you are now with it? I was terrifying at the start, to be honest, it was, as soon as you got a bit of a wave and you missed a breath, you thought, I've got to get out of here and I was panicking, but I

can breathe on both sides. So I was just relaxed, maybe do a few breaths to get back into it. And then I finished, actually, finished my first race and I won it. And I thought, oh, wow, that one's a bit after all. And then the next three or four races were very smooth water and it was just a blast. I just had a really great time. And then I hit a big waves again. And I realized, wow, this is a bit scary. I mean, you have been over it before, but when you're out there and the waves of crashing over your head, it's just you. It's just, I don't know, it was a bit of a wake up moment that I think I'll just have to pick my races. I can't afford to be out there and the really big stuff because it's too, just honestly, too terrifying, really.

Do you think you would be able to get to that point where it could be comfortable in those sorts of conditions? No, not, no, no, no, no, race. I mean, I love playing in the waves, but, you know, when you're, when you're swimming out at a distance,

it was, you know, like a one meter, one and a half meter chopper. It was almost like you want to just surf back in and get out. I couldn't go for it. So, you know, 30 centimetres or something, and you can go over and see if you're going, but I couldn't find the boys. You know, you couldn't, if you looked for the boys and you got down under it, and you got on top of it and it was a bit spray. It's like, where am I? So that was, um, I mean, you've been over this before, but that was just really something I couldn't, couldn't actually deal with it, to be honest. I thought, uh, maybe this isn't for me. Then I did the next one and I was okay getting you. Yeah, it's certainly, um, it's certainly a real challenge in the open water and like building, building up to that kind of size of chop and swell, uh, takes, takes quite a bit of practice and experience. And I think, uh, it sounds like you went from level two or three to like level nine, maybe, you know, straight with, with the conditions out there. Um, because yeah, I think like, yeah, what the, what I try and do, uh, yeah, with swimmers is like, all right, let's, let's just try and progressively, progressively build it up if we can. And, um, like most people, um, they, I think, like, with your sort of experience and stuff, I think you could, you could certainly be comfortable out there. It may, do you think it might be more mental than anything? It was mental that day, I lost it. It was actually so bad they cancelled the race because the boys blew away and no one got a time. It wasn't right. They should have

canceled from the start, to be honest. But the thing is here in Hong Kong, genuinely, the water's very calm. When I go back to New Zealand, which I wanted to keep going with, I think, oh, it's often a lot choppier New Zealand. So I'll have to build up to that again. I've done a lot of boogie boarding and, you know, stuff mucking around the ocean. So I'm usually okay going out there. But, um, as soon as you lose a couple of breaths, I think you, you start to, your head starts playing with your head. I can't breathe in it. And then you kind of get to reset yourself. And that day, I just couldn't reset. Most usually I can't. It was an interesting experience to be honest. Yeah. I had someone asking about that last weekend. Some of the advice I gave them, like they said, they were quite anxious at the start and would tend to just kind of panic the first couple hundred meters. The first thing I said to him was just focus on the exhale. So often people are worried about when's my next breath. But for whatever reason, I think just by focusing on the ex exhalation part, the inhale comes a lot more naturally. And it just, I think it's a bit more calming. But the other thing that we often have to do in open water is if you miss that breath, I would just turn and breathe the next stroke. So let's say you go, if your breath on the left, miss it. Next stroke, just like turn to the right, try and get the breath there. If you get really unlucky, just go again. Like just, it's okay to breathe every stroke. If you need to for a point in time, if you do catch some water. And I've had to do that in so many

races, especially where it is choppy. So just quickly sort of throwing it to the other side and doing it that way. Are you okay breathing to both sides? Yeah. I've always breathed to both sides. I know if I look at this one, I'll do one breath, one breath, one breath, but then it gets in your head and you actually stop and you start to breathe stroke and then you sort of go again. So it's all mental. I know it's all mental because I know I can swim and I'm fine, but it's just going to, but I wear one of those form goggles and I can see my heart rate. And it's just absolutely through the roof, you know, it's about 155. And I'm going, wow, how am I going to calm this down?

Might be best not to know what your heart rate is. Yeah. Turn that off. Yeah. I'm going to get that down back. And in terms of the next bit of improvement in your swimming, if you were to get say under 150, where do you feel like that would come from at the moment? Yeah, I've actually got a goal of 145. I can do 145s for about 200 meters and then I've had it.

I'd like to do that all the time. And I think that will come out of the, you call it rock and roll, not rock and not rolling or something like that. So the shoulders and the hip, and I've tried, I watched in a little video, a British lady, she talked about the connecting sort of the body. And when I get the hip drive going, I can actually feel a big difference. And I'm a lot quicker, but I can't do it all the time. And I've just got to concentrate on that. I think I think that's where the next biggest improvement will go. Plus getting the hips up higher again, trying to get those hips higher. Because if I swim with this wet suit, you know, I'm sort of 140 when I've got that weight taken off. But if I swim back in my tugs, I'm back down to 155. So that's presumably where the problem is, is getting the hips up and then getting that connection between the stroke, the shoulder and the hip. And I can kind of feel it coming the odd time, but if I could give it every single stroke, I think that would be the biggest difference.

Yeah, interesting. That's good. Yeah, in terms of like the body position, like one thing that can help with it, like the core sort of switching on with the jeans, the jeans queues quite good. And it's also like a, it's a slight downhill feeling through the chest. And then it's like a drawing up of the belly button in a way. So it's like, and the mistake a lot of people make is they try and get their hips up. And I don't, if you're switching the core and you probably won't be doing this, but it will try and get the hips up by sticking their bum up in the air, but then it drops the legs. Yeah. Yeah. And so it actually makes you slower. So it's almost having to do the opposite of that where the chest presses and you're drawing your core up and kind of leaning on that chest a bit as one thing. And another one that actually can help quite a bit is in the, in the kick, if you think about the, just focus a bit more on the up kick. So the upward movement of the leg. So you've got a bit of active tension or engagement through your glutes and your hammies to draw it up. The down kick generally happens fairly naturally, but it will just kind of lift the legs a bit more because most people are a little bit bent at the, at the hips there. So sometimes that can help as well. So it's one to just, one to try. Because that's exactly what I did. I was pulling the hips out the wrong, completely the wrong way until I went to the course. I was just trying to lift the hips up and actually made it worse. So it wasn't until I learned about this kind of zipping up the jeans thing and that I got an improvement. So that was, that was really

valuable. Yeah, nice. And then the other one, like the rock and roll, like that sort of rhythm and, and tempo. Some, when I think of some of the, the members videos that I have been analysing recently, a few people have sent through videos and their stroke rates, like 48 strokes per minute, maybe 50 strokes per minute. And that's what they'd be just pretty consistently. And let's say they're like two minutes per 100 or they're about, for quite a few of them, they, if they were to just increase their stroke rate by 10%, they could probably do it with the same amount of effort, but their speed would increase along with it. So not to, I don't know what your sort of stroke rate would normally be, but like a lot of people would just, a 59. So that's, that's pretty, that's pretty good there. But it is good to kind of play around with that if you, if you can. Yeah, I was going to try and push it up to 62 this year and see if that could help because I mean, you said it's probably the lowest hanging fruit, increase your stroke rate. If your technique's not too bad, you know, increase your stroke rate, you'll get a bit quicker, but it's then it's getting fit enough to maintain it, I suppose. Yeah, there's certainly an element of fitness and sometimes strength there as well. Are you doing anything with that, like anything with paddles or that sort of thing in training? I used to do paddles and pull boys and all that. I just gave it away, actually. I didn't think it was adding any value, but this winter I'm doing a lot of gym work with a trainer trying to build up my, you know, back and shoulders and see if I can get a little bit more unfit of it while I'm,

while I can't get in the pool because it's cold and get back in the fall and April. But otherwise I just, I basically swim for to be fit and for enjoyment, but I've just become obsessed. Well, that's what I like to hear. I mean, it's a, I can, I think the feeling when you're, when you really get into that, that flow state, it's just, it's just such a, such a good feeling that you just kind of all want to always go back to it. I did a swim last weekend. It's called the rip swim. It's across the heads in Melbourne. So you start at point in the pan, you go to point line style and it's like, it's where all this shipping traffic is for Melbourne, which is one of the busiest ports in the world. And there's only about a hundred people that do this swim each year. And it was beautiful conditions, completely flat, glassy, sun was out and just the color of the water, it's about 50 or 60 meters deep at some points. And it was, it was just magical. Like I just, I was just at the time, it was a race, but I didn't care too much about the result, but I was just trying to enjoy being in the water and I had some good fitness behind me. So I just felt like I could keep going. I just met, I thought this is the best I've ever felt in a race before. And it's just, it's just such a, a great feeling to be able to do that. And I think the only way you can do that is with like, put the work in, do the training and then obviously enter in the event. But yeah, to me, that was such a, such a great feeling that I just want to get more of that into that sort of state.

It was interesting after I came back from the Maldives, because for the, for the Maldives course, I had trained hard up to it so I could be fit enough for the course. So when I came back, there was a race about two weeks later and it was quite, it was a bit windy, but I think I got the same thing on the homeward leg. I still had plenty in the tank. So I just, you know, I just went for it and it was just so much fun. I thought, wow, this is great. I'm really snowing fast and did really well on that race, but it was just having that fitness behind me and, you know, and the new stuff was really, really fun. But I enjoyed it. I really, really enjoyed it. You didn't feel like, oh my God, when's this over? I can, I can actually swim faster than that last third just to try to do a bit better. I think that was fun. 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,

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sculling or do this or that or the other. Just mix it up that way.

But the thing afterwards was at first there was too much in my head and now I've sort of trying to just do work on one thing that week or one thing the next week.

The thing that's frustrating, like the first 100 meters I'll swim, I can do 129s, 130s and then it just goes downhill from there. So I don't know, just go out too fast. I think you've talked about this, you know, just ripping into it to try to slow down on the first one. But the very first 100, everything seems to click, the technique's good and then it just falls away. So I've got to try it. You've got any tips on how to stop? Is this in training or in a race? Is this in training? Yeah, just swimming, yeah, just every, you know, it's first 100, it's great, wow, this is fantastic. And then it just gets slower and slower and slower. Yeah, I think, because a few people have sort of asked about this, are you getting in the water and then pushing off or you're diving off the edge?

Push off. So there's a few reasons for it. One is when you're doing turns, most people typically are going to be a little bit slower firstly. So like first 100, the first 50 is going to be the fastest one just from that clear push off. But then also when you first start in your, like your heart rates, probably 60, 70 beats a minute. And so you can generally just swim at a good pace, the heart rates down and feel very sort of comfortable. And then it starts to pick up from there. So that's one. But I also think like, for a lot of people at the start of the session, they're just very relaxed, they're not trying to force things. And there's a bit of that going on as well. So whenever I dive in, I try and go through a bit of a body check or a checklist as well where it's like, all right, head position, where's that at? Make sure my body position is good and just sort of pressing the chest in a bit. But then like, my favorite thing is just in the recovery, thinking of my hand or my fingers, my hands, my wrist, just being soft, being relaxed over the top of the water. So it's just hanging. And then on the entry and the extension, just keeping that softness about it. And if I can carry that through a session, I'm usually swimming pretty well by the end of it. And just trying to keep that feeling going. Because yeah, any session that I've got in where I like maybe it's been like a stressful day or there's traffic or whatever it might be, I go in with that tension. And I am working a lot harder

for the same swim speed. So I think we like, I tend to carry some of that stuff into the swim. So if I can just kind of switch off a bit, it tends to tends to help.

Yes, I used to use the swim as a chance just to do, you know, think about other things, and it'll just clear your mind for the day. But now I'm thinking about the swimming the whole time. What am I doing wrong? What can I do better? You know, but the trouble, I mean, probably the good thing and the bad thing about those goggles is giving you real time feedback. So you know, oh my God, that was slower than the last one. What have I done? You know, if I change this, but the best thing is, if you change something, you go a bit quicker, you realize, oh, okay, that works. So I find that quite encouraging.

Yeah. Yeah, someone in the membership asked about that last week as well, and it's like the form goggles worth it. I said, well, it's the fact that I like about it is that you can tell whether or not the change you made was actually quicker. Like that to have that instant feedback is really helpful, especially if you are just focusing on one thing at a time, whether it's your head position or or your kick, you can have that, yeah, that feedback straight away. And that can be a good one because it might, might feel better, but it might not actually be quicker because it feels better because it's just what you used to. So, you know, maybe like you can tell whether that weirdness or strangeness that you feel because of the change is actually a good one. So yeah, I think it's, it's great. They have, I think they're really valuable for that. And in the open water, I don't use the swim straight because I find that confusing, but I just use it for the stroke rate. So I know that if I'm doing 59, then I'll go up to 60 and then come home at a 62. And I think, okay, that's good. So I know where I'm up to up to. Otherwise, you really don't know what you're doing sometimes. I think that that's the best part. Yeah, that's, that's great. And in terms of someone listening to this, let's say they're above that two minute pace per 100. Is there any particular advice or yeah, yeah, feedback or tips that you would have for people who are struggling to break that two minute mark? Yeah, if I mean, if you're in my age, like if you're over 60, and you've got, if you haven't got good technique, the first thing I do is either go to a course or do you do your challenge? But honestly, you get the most value

if you can just get beside someone for a while, even if it's just for an expert for a while, because you really can't. In my, I don't think in my mind, you can tell, work out what's wrong with yourself. You need someone to give you the kick in the ass and show you the right things.

Because I was thinking, I was just watching one of your podcasts before, and I think maybe I should get a coach for a little bit again and sign up with one of the locals and just iron out a few things because you can only go so far. And it was like the course, to me, found things that I wasn't doing right. So that's where I think that's the biggest value, go to the course or go to a coach or get someone, or I should, I should follow my own advice, I should send in my video to you and tell me, that's another way to do it too. But I thought it was all about the catch. And everybody thinks that if you get the catch right, you'll be a fantastic swimmer, but actually it's not. It's about the breathing, which I'm actually, we're all right on, I got that right. And then I think the biggest, my biggest problem was the body position. And if I had to get that core right, there's a few things that changed in the catch. And the other thing I was doing wrong was coming in too close to my head, I wasn't wide enough with my stroke. And once I changed those things, and then got a bit fitter, I can actually swim. I suppose it's hard to say, why am I better? And it's an amalgam of all those things. But the sort of the biggest change that I need to work on this year is getting that core up and getting improved my kit too. So yeah, lots of bits and pieces. But I think when I went to this course, and I learned that my stroke's too wide, and when I bought, too narrow, when I bought the stroke out wider, when I got a bit better angle on the, you know, I got, actually got the catch. And it made more sense. Because I don't know about you,

but in my time when we were taught to swim, you went in front, you made this kind of an S shape. And that's all gone now. And if you're going to get that out of your head, and then you'll go so much better. And then it's just, I think there's no end to the learning because I'm just trying to do this body rotation and hip engagement, which I think will make another big difference if I could just sort that out in my own head.

Yeah, yeah, gotcha. The, in terms of drills for like that, yeah, that rotation and connection and stuff, I think like unco drill or single arm drill with one arm by the side, breathing to your opposite side and wearing fins is a really good one for that. Because it sort of forces you to rotate enough, but not too much. And one key point that if I'm ever sort of coaching someone with that drill, I try and get them to turn their head as one hand's entering. So turn the head, get the breath, and then try and bring your head back down just as you're about to start the catch. So it's actually a bit earlier than what you do when you're swimming, but just get that breath very early and then come, come back with it. And you'll find that you're, it'll just kind of help

sink things up a bit and you'll, you'll be able to get the catch a bit better. But also just making sure you rotate to both sides because most people, when they do that drill, when they first start doing it, they're just like, they'll enter and they'll pull straight through. And there's no extension. There's no reach out there that you've really got to emphasize that. So that's a good one. And then I like the long dog drill as well, like underwater recovery freestyle. But the key point there to work on that connection and timing is don't let, don't let the lead hand pull through until the recovery arms come to about your shoulders here. So it's like, finish the stroke there on your side, bring this arm back through and then switch from there. And that helps you just feel this, this kind of core switching on through this transition at that part. Because again, most people are just like back and forth like that. There's no, yeah, there's no sort of timing with it. So they're two that are, that are often quite good. And whenever I've asked any like Olympic level freestyles, like what drills you do, pretty much all of them have said single arm and long dog. It's like, they're the two main ones, especially if you're working on those like things a bit further on in the stroke, which is like connection and timing and that sort of thing. So yeah, I think they're really good drills for, for that kind of thing. Single arm and long dog run it down. That'll be good to work on.

Yeah, we're just having the, I've just updated those videos in the membership as well with like a more recent version where it's done, done really well. So yeah, they're in the membership there. Fraser, appreciate you jumping on the podcast and sharing how you've gone from 220 down to 155. And I think for so many people that I talked to, that's something that they're aspiring to. And sometimes just feel like they're at a plateau, particularly around that two minute mark. So yeah, looking forward to seeing where you get to from here. And if you can get to that 145, well, that's a, yeah, another really good improvement in benchmarks. So 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 Easily Break 2:00/100m And Make It Feel Easy with Fraser Hill appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Imagine standing behind the blocks knowing that everything, years of training, sacrifice, and your Olympic dream, comes down to this one race. That was the reality for Brianna Throssell at the 2016 Olympic Trials, where she had just one shot to make the team. In this episode, Brianna takes us behind the scenes of her Olympic journey, what it felt like to step onto the world’s biggest stage for the first time, the nerves, the lessons, and the moments that shaped her career.

From grueling training camps in Thailand To the mindset shifts that helped her break through. She says an honest and inspiring look at the highs and lows of elite swimming. Plus we dive into what’s next for her as she steps away from the pool for now and explores life beyond full time training. If you’re looking for insights into what it takes to compete at the highest level and the mental resilience that fuels champions, you won’t want to miss this one.

Let’s get into the podcast.

I'm really trying to speak on resilience at the moment. I feel like this next generation is almost like sugarcoating everything. Like, oh, you didn't come first, but here's a participation. Like, no, everyone falls down, you got to get back up. And that's how you learn. Like resilience is like a muscle. The more you train it, the more it grows. And I think there's maybe like a little bit of a lack of resilience in kids and young adults these days. It's like, things don't go to plan. Like, I missed the Olympic team on the first night on 100 Butterfly when that was the plan. I had to get up 48 hours later and make the team. Like, I was absolutely gutted. I spent four hours boiling my eyes out to my coach. But I knew that the next day, if I didn't wake up with a new attitude, I was actually going to miss the team. Like, I was fortunate enough I'll have potential other options I could make it. But that wasn't like a given. Like, my given was almost 100 Butterfly, and that didn't happen. 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. Imagine standing behind the blocks knowing that everything, years of training, sacrifice and your Olympic dream comes down to this one race. That was the reality for Brianna Throssel at the 2016 Olympic Trials where she had just one shot to make the team. In this episode, Brianna takes us behind the scenes of her Olympic journey. What it felt like to step onto the world's biggest stage for the first time, the nerves, the lessons

and the moments that shaped her career. From gruelling training camps in Thailand to the mindset shifts that helped her break through, she says an honest and inspiring look at the highs and lows of elite swimming. Plus, we dive into what's next for her. She steps away from the pool for now and explores life beyond full-time training. If you're looking for insights into what it takes to compete at the highest level and the mental resilience that fuels champions, you won't want to miss this one. Let's get into the podcast. So Brianna, take me back to what would be maybe your most nerve-wracking race. When was the time that you've sat behind the blocks and felt like the world was watching you and you thought, I've really got to get this right here? Well, for me, I probably think that would be my 2016 Olympic Trials. At that stage, sort of in my career, all I was known for was a turn to butterfly. So I knew I couldn't make it in any other event. My turn to butterfly was my only shot. And at that stage, we actually did heat semi-finals and finals of every single race. So it was a bit of a bigger program back then. And I remember going into the final and I was like, everything comes down to this one race. Like I don't really have a backup option to make it on the team. Like if I, for some reason, this race doesn't go to plan, like that's it, I'm not going to my first Olympics. So I think that race I'd have to have found, I was probably entering it the most nervous I've sort of ever been. But in that being said, yes, I wanted to make the Olympic team and it would have, you know, it was such an honor,

but I think it's not until you've been to one or two Olympics that you could really carry the weight of trying to qualify for the Olympics. Because that, you know, I found in, say, 2024 Olympic Trials last year, like that was also very nerve-wracking because I knew what an incredible experience the Olympics was and how I wanted to experience that again and represent Australia and where the green and gold. So, but I felt like in 2016, although I only had that one option to qualify, I didn't really know what an honor or how special it would really be. You don't know what you're missing out on if you don't make it right. Exactly. And I mean, I was fortunate enough to go to the World Champs the year before, but that just doesn't compare. And I mean, in terms of the caliber of athletes in the swimming pool itself is, you know, World Championships is equal to the Olympics, but it's everything that comes with the Olympics that makes it that bit more special and just the most incredible experience in general. Is there one of those three Olympics that you swam at? Do any of those stand out for different reasons? I mean, they all stand out for such different reasons. Tokyo, sorry, Rio, sort of my first, I would describe myself as young and dumb. I went in there, I didn't really know what to expect. I mean, I was 20 at the time and it wasn't that I was there to have fun, but I just, I was racing freely, I guess. I had to turn to butterfly, that was it. I think it was midway through the program and after that I was done. And I didn't really understand how pinnacle and pivotal the Olympics were.

They can, you know, they are the highest of, the highest sporting competition in swimming. So I get, but going to the first Olympics is always so special. And back then it was obviously pre-COVID. We got to stay for the next week. We got to go to the closing ceremony. So there are a lot of incredible things that I'm so glad I did get to experience. And then obviously Tokyo is so special because I guess we thought there was a possibility it wouldn't go ahead. So I think the fact that we got there, the Australian swim team got in and out. There was no COVID, we got to race. I think we brought, I feel like the Australian team, not even just swimming, we brought so much joy to the Australians back home. It had been such a rough year and a half or year of lockdowns in and out. So I think for the swim team and everyone else to be able to perform to the equal amount of gold medals was so incredible. And I felt that we brought a lot of joy and hope back home to the Australians, which is obviously a really special and touching moment for us. And then Paris, stepping on the podium for the first time in Paris itself, obviously Paris is a beautiful city and I love Europe so much. So they're all so special for different reasons. And then in terms of going from your first one to your second to your third, did that experience, did you feel like you were able to carry that experience going through the next eight years from qualifying for your first one? And was there a certain moment in your racing

or in your training where you felt like, all right, I reckon I'm of that caliber and that level where I can actually make the Australian team. Like is there a certain moment that stands out for you where you had that belief that, all right, I think I'm a really good shot here and I know that I can be with those other swimmers.

In all honesty, I have had a really pivotal moment but it wasn't really self-belief. So in 2012, I got to go to my first Open Nationals which is in Adelaide and that coincided with the Olympic trials for the London Olympics. So I was 16 at the time, I made my first final in the 100 butterfly and the 200 as well. And I remember on the last night, I sat down, I watched the team get announced that we're going to the London Olympics and I said to myself, I was like, when they announced Rio in four years' time, I wanna be one of the athletes that's announced. That for me, I'd always been passionate about swimming and wanted to take it to the highest level I guess but that was a really pivotal moment in my career that I really set my goal of making an Olympic team. And I think being 16, making finals was also like promising in itself. I mean, I got to race Jess Shipper and Steph Rice and I just remember I was in four of them. So that for me, I was like, wow, like in four years' time, like I would love for that to be me. So that was like a really, I guess, thought-changing moment and it's how, yeah, I remember like my coach at the time, I sort of sat down with him and I was like, I wanna make the Rio Olympics in 2016. Like I wanna be on that team. And so everything from then on was gunning towards making that team in the turn of butterfly. Yeah, but in terms of self-belief and believing I can be up there,

I honestly have really laughed that throughout my career.

Obviously like I'm a butterflyer, Emma is number one, I'm always gonna be second to her and that's kind of how I viewed my whole life. And I mean, she is the goat of swimming. So yeah, it was such an incredible honor to be able to race her every time and to watch her conduct herself on pool deck. I mean, she's such a humble, incredible athlete and just goes about her business.

Yeah, she's a very, very admirable girl, but I feel like I certainly lack a lot of self-belief knowing that I'm always going to finish second to her in the hundred butterfly. So about moving to Dean's squad, like I sort of mentioned when we were chatting before, he's a coach that believed in me so much and that helped me so much as a person both in and out of the water. And I believe that sort of in the last, I guess in 2024, like I would say there were my best results that I've ever had. And I think it took that year and a half working with Dean, working with the support team around him and even all of our teammates to really believe in myself and have like full faith in myself. Can you talk a bit about the change in, like I guess environment culture of moving to Dean's squad two years prior to the Olympics because I can imagine it's like you're pretty much trained, you're training with some of the absolute cream of the crop in terms of swimmers in the world and we were talking about it before, like just Dean is so invested in getting the results for his athletes if they're willing to put in the same effort. So I can imagine like just being in that sort of environment every single day, twice a day that that would have a profound impact on the way that you maybe think about yourself or the way that you approach your swimming when you're surrounded by that level of athlete and so many of them. Yeah, I mean, it was such a big change and the most, the best change ever.

I am from WA and we were lucky if we got two on the team, maybe three. Most of the time we didn't have our coach. So I mean, I felt like such a lone wolf when I was on the team. Like I remember I was 16 and I made my first short course welds. I didn't know a soul, we're going to Turkey and I didn't know a soul on the team. I didn't have a coach, I didn't know any coaches. I was 16, I was from Perth, no one knew me. I kind of just got on a whim because everyone was having a break after the London Olympics. And to look at how that was and compare that to the 2023 World Championships or 2024 Olympics where I'm in Dean's program. He's got 10 athletes on the team. He's also got multiple support staff. I'm a senior athlete now. It just doesn't compare and I too like being able, being on the team with your teammates is the best thing ever rather than being a little lone wolf from WA who's you'd have to do your sets by yourself. You have like a coach that you work with. They might be from Victoria, they might be from Queensland but I always felt like an inconvenience because they had their own kids to worry about on the team. They don't really want to be doing my, having to time me for my sets. But yeah, like you mentioned about Dean's squad, he is the most passionate, enthusiastic, caring, incredible coach that I've ever been fortunate to work with and he will invest 110% in you

provided that you invest 110% back into swimming, into the squad, into your relationship with Dean. And I think that that is so pivotal. I mean, a lot of people ask me like, oh, like, is there a relationship with a coach important or the teammates, 1,000% it is. Like it's what makes or breaks an athlete. Like if you don't trust your coach or your gym coach or whoever it may be, then what is, what are you working with? So I know that I backed Dean, his training, his methods and percent. And I know it's what got me to being able to swim PB is the age of 28. So it was an incredible environment to be in and to be swimming next to Arnie and to for her to be on world record pace and training or Elijah on world record pace and training. Like he'd inspired me so much. And I know that I'm older than them. But like just watching them do what they do, it inspires everyone in the squad to be, to be better. Let's talk training sets. Is there a particular session that stands out to you as being the hardest session you've ever done or a particular set that you just got? Here we go. Time to strap in. I think this, this set is known by other people. Like I obviously, swimming is quite a secretive sport but I think this is where everyone knows that this session that we do. And it's on the Thailand training camp and there's a lot like Thailand training camp

is the hardest training camp I've ever been on. It's three weeks and there's this one session and it's typically a Monday morning. And I know it doesn't sound that hard but yeah, it's a 30 minute relay in either teams of three or if you're lucky four. I've always been lucky and had a team of four

as just a continuous relay in a 25 minute pool. It's just dive in max. And every single person is timed. Every single effort is timed. Every single coach is on pool deck. Every lane is timed. So you are held at the highest of standards. If you drop off point one, point two, you're yelled out, it's intense. So, and everything was obviously like a relay change over. So you're getting out of the pool, getting on the blocks. So down one end, it's like the short rest end and you might get 30 seconds. Nope, less than that, maybe 25 seconds when you touch a wall to get onto the blocks and the other end, you might get 45 seconds rest until a max effort.

25 and like someone like Kai Taylor, he does the whole thing without a breath. Like in the swimming part, obviously. Jesus. Like that is incredible. And every single effort is timed.

It's so high intensity. I think we ended up doing close to 40, 25s, max effort. Actually, no, maybe it was more than that. And I'm talking like they are max. And yeah, I mean, I usually would do like half butterfly, half freestyle. Yeah, that would have to be one of the hardest sessions. And I know it's only 30 minutes, but I remember looking back at my watch data and my heart rate was above 190 for 28 of those 30 minutes. Wow. Wow. And that pool is hot too. Like from, it's- It's very hot. Even though 50 is hot, but the 25 is probably 29 or 30 degrees. Yeah. Literally a bath. And obviously there's like, there's carry on on pool deck, there's music playing, it's like workers that like the resort would walk past and just look at us like what on earth is going on. And then one of my favorite moments, cause you do it every Monday for three weeks. But one of my favorite moments is like when that final time is up and everyone's just flaked out on the pool deck. Cause like everyone has just given 110%. They are so cooked and so exhausted, but you know that everyone has worked so hard. So it's like this feeling of achievement, but also like you're exhausted, but everyone's in the same boat. Like it's quite an incredible feeling, but that would certainly have to be one of the, one of the tougher sessions. And I know it only lasts 30 minutes. I mean, we have to make up like 6K before and after, but yeah, it's tough. It's really tough.

That's such a good way to do it though. As a relay, you've got everyone else there working, you know, you're in there as a team and you're being held accountable with your getting times at 25. And I also felt like it helped my relay changeover so much. Like I just felt so confident. Cause obviously you're getting on the blocks under so much fatigue and to be able to perform. Oh yeah. So you could be disqualified. They watched every changeover and like there would always be extras for DQs or whatever there was, but I felt like it helped my changeover so much. It makes a lot of sense, right? That's unreal. And I think back to when I was swimming competitively, like those shared experiences with other people is how you've really developed those strong bonds and friendships. And it's like, that's what really, I think gels people together. And that's like, there's, it feels like there's something out yet in the ether after you've done that with a group. Like you just feel like there's, it's almost tangible that you can just like that. That's shared pain that you've been through. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite an incredible sort of feeling, quite surreal almost. 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. Tests show that even after 2000 rubs with a wet cloth under 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.

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And so that Thailand training camp, how many Ks would you typically be doing through the week?

How many sessions as well? Nine, nine swim, but we wouldn't really go under set. Or under six. And there's a one Wednesday that's at 9K. That's a fun one. Yeah, so between six and nine, six and nine K and nine swim sessions. But I mean, on top of that, we're running around the track. Like it's like three gym, three run.

Three, three or four bike, circuit, yoga, core, med balls. Yeah, it's it's it's incredible that like the facilities are out of this world. Like I love that everything's everything's there. You don't have to get in the bus and wait for everyone to finish to come home. Like, you know, food is there. It's ready for it's like buffet style food. And yeah, like it's it's a very like lock in kind of training camp. You don't really leave. Maybe on a Saturday night, we go down to the town where there's this incredible supermarket and they cook steak and things like that. But apart from that, you don't really leave the resort. Yeah, it's it's great. I did. Jane says it's his favorite place in the world. Yeah, I bet Disneyland Disneyland for Dean. That's awesome. It was I'll try. Yeah, it's 10 years ago, actually, that a friend of mine started working at Tanya Pyro and he said it bring a group over. And so we started running camps there 10 years ago. And we've been there every year, apart from, I think, two through COVID, maybe. But it is it's just so good. Like roll out of bed, walk across the bridge, you're at the pool. And then and then dinner is or breakfast is like right next door. Yeah, it makes it so easy. Yeah, yeah, we yeah, it's a really incredible facilities. And yeah, like I love sort of love my time there. Yeah, it's a very hard work, but yeah, it's a beautiful place to be. Yeah, yeah, that's that's exactly right. And what about getting out of your training environment

like that like your normal training environment? Do you feel like everyone's able to that they're in this different mindset when they're able to just step out of their daily life and head overseas and go on these training camps? Like would you use it in the lead up to a like trials or Olympics? Like what when was it placed throughout the year? So we it was always in January, February sort of period, depending on

like because obviously Dean's very involved in the St. Peter's swimming like the school swimming. So he always had to be back for their school carnival kind of big competition. So it would sort of either be January, February from I mean, when I was in Dean's squad, but we also would always have a camp in May. And that was usually cans or somewhere a little bit warmer. Just so we do those like I guess it's the very point end of the season where a lot of things are done on long rest or there's time trials or that kind of thing. So we'd always go to cans for two to three weeks right before the trials for Worlds or Olympics, whatever it may be. And I mean, that is that's very much to one, get into a little bit warmer environment and two to eliminate all distractions. Like, you know, such a pivotal part, like the last three weeks in the lead up to Olympic trials is like a very sort of stressful time. And it was almost nice to just get away and all we're doing is focusing on swimming. I was really at uni. No one's worrying about, you know, if there's stress in the family or anything like that, like it's a very important time and the focus is 1000% on swimming and performing and training. Do you have a certain way that you'd sort of go into trials and competition in terms of like, is it like no social media or is it like making sure that you don't read at night? Like what's what's your sort of routine look like is when you're in those really sort of pointy end of your season and important parts of it? I'm like, I never shut down my social media.

Like even at the Olympics, like I was still on it. I definitely don't like delve into comments and read articles. Like, God, no, they're just keyboard warriors. But I feel like sometimes just like mindlessly scrolling TikTok. It's like a distraction. I remember at World Championships, literally this time last year, it was when the Super Bowl was on. And I just loved watching. Like the Chiefs of the after parties or whatever it may be. Like I'm going to tell us the answer, like Taylor. And I just like because it's just like mind numbing. It just takes your mind off like racing at the pinnacle of the sport. So I would like totally I definitely stay on my socials. But to look at other things apart from swimming. Just yeah. And I mean, like I'm a pretty big reader as well. Like I've got my Kindle and so if I do need to like, I'm like, OK, no. It's too much Olympics is popping up on TikTok. Like I'll just switch to a Kindle and I'll just read. Or if I know that I'm quite wound up, like I've raced that evening. I've got to race the next morning. Like I might not go on my phone. I'll just like just read because that would just put me to sleep, basically. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to say I'm asleep within like three pages. If I've trained or something that day, it's like it's very hard to stay awake at night. I've got a book that's taken me three months to get through in my halfway. So it's like it's a slow process. Yeah. In terms of like visualisation or mental rehearsal, I know that's been a big thing for you. What's your your process there? Like sort of step by step, like when do you do it?

What are you what are you visualising like at the start of a race? Like how's that process look for you? Yeah. So in the last sort of six months before Olympic trials, I sort of worked with a performance coach. I've never I'm probably not someone that like I've never really seen a psychologist. I know a lot of people see like psychologist during training and racing, but that I don't know, I just never really worked for me.

Or like, I guess almost I didn't feel the need. So I I found this this lady and she was so fantastic. Like she's actually an ex athlete herself for New Zealand in a completely different sport, but she gets it, you know. And I just felt like I I needed someone who understood how high pressure some of these situations are. And it was fantastic. Like I loved working with her. And yeah, I mean, she taught me so much. And I think the biggest thing is that I wanted to get up on the blocks at a competition or say Olympic trials or Olympics, whatever it is and say, I have done everything I can. So again, like working on that confidence situation is something that I was very pivotal to me is to get up onto the blocks to not be fazed by anything going on. If someone's done some crazy time in the heat, like they're not backing it up again at night. So I just try to let nothing faze me. Get in that very like calm mind state focus on myself and basically get up on the block saying I have left no stone unturned. I could not hand on heart could not have done or given anything more. So I think having that mindset for me was really important. Besides the turn of butterfly and I just always it's myself. No, this is fun. This is just a fun race. This is just helping me because that was just a different race for me that I didn't enjoy doing.

Yeah, it's I don't think so many people have have looked forward to a turn of fly before Lizzie. Lizzie loves it. Lizzie, Lizzie loves the turn of butterfly. And I just I have so much admiration for her that she sticks to her own race plan and just trusts herself one thousand percent, whereas I'm like I get so caught up knowing that like I'm more of a front. Well, I mean, in taking the turn of fly in Australia, like I'm more of a hundred swimmer than a turn of swimmer. So I should be out front of the hundred. And if I'm not, I'm just all over the place. So yeah, for me, like the turn of fly was just such a. I just went into every race sort of in the latest stages of my career. I went into every way, every turn of fly being like, you know what? I'm just doing this to help my hundred butterfly help my back. So that was my mindset on that. It's a way to do it. Yeah. And in terms of technique, like you did you sort of have to develop or change your technique over the last sort of eight years or foundationally, you're quite good, like with a certain things that you you've been focusing on. And if so, how did you go about working on them? Yeah, I feel like I've been so fortunate at my career that technically I'm a very good swimmer and very efficient. Like I have hypermobile shoulders, elbows and like my upper body is very hypermobile. So I was able to get into like crazy catch positions.

And I yeah, that's obviously like a massive advantage when it comes to swimming. So I felt like technically speaking, I've always been very, very good. But my skills have lacked and I felt like I have tried the last like when I sort of moved to Dean, I spent a lot of time on my skills. Like and I certainly found that my like in particular my underwater like got a phobia of holding my breath, so that's never going to work well. But I just I really learned to maximise my time underwater and actually just improve my the power of my kick a lot. And then like apart from that, like my turns and my starts and my finishes, like I guess just small things that were never really drilled into me. Like I would never ever breathe inside the flags. Well, I mean, Dean's what no one ever breathes inside the flags, just small things that are very that they become subconscious over a period of time. But for me, I was like, oh, well, OK, like that's something I think about and make sure I don't do it. Technically speaking, I felt like I've always had a really good foundation. But my skills have certainly been something I have really had a lot of attention to the detail in the last few years. And how did you go about increasing the power of your your kick? Um, a lot more kick and training like we choose that as a morning at like a dedicated kick sets on and like I'm I guess like looking back, like I'm I'm so proud of what I how far my came and then in the gym as well.

Yeah, but like we just did a lot of kick work, which I actually really enjoy. I have always enjoyed doing kick, but that just helped me so, so much. Are you how are you doing it? Are you like kickboard and snorkel or vertical kick? Like what kickboard and snorkels are? Yeah, kickboard snorkel all the time. I just think like for me, 90% of the time I'll do butterfly kick rather than freestyle.

And I just know my like obviously fly kicks quite of like a rhythmic kick. It's very hard to have a head up, so I'd always wear a snorkel. And yeah, like kickboard snorkel and just fly kick most of the time. Gotcha. And what about on your back? Are you doing much on your back or mostly just on the front? Always on my front. Yeah, I just I don't know. I guess like fly kick on your back is quite different. I would think to fly kick on your front. Yeah, I did everything on my front because I guess like I was never, ever going to be on my back in a race, so I always train on my front.

And in terms of what you've learnt as a as a professional swimmer, like some of those maybe a character traits or skills you've had develop, are there any that stand out to you that you feel like will keep you in really good stead in your future after swimming? Yeah, I think there are so many transferable skills. And I mean, it's not even just from swimming. I think like as a professional athlete, there are so many valuable skills that we we embody and that can be brought to later on in life. And I think for me, when you go into a workplace, there are so many skills that can be learnt like Excel, Microsoft, whatever it is. Whereas these skills that we have learnt or not even learnt, but we just there in our nature, like being having time management, being disciplined, listening to others, listening to a coach, having good communication, you know, just having such, you know, autonomy in our sport, like, you know, we are we're motivated. Like they're just things that we as athletes embody and that's just absolutely comes naturally to us. And I think like soft skills like that can't really be taught. Like it's not like teaching someone how to write an essay. It's like they're things that are either within you or they're not. And I feel like that is their skills that can certainly be used for future.

Yeah, it's like, and I think in terms of as if I was going to hire someone, I'd much prefer to hire someone who maybe might lack in the technical skills side of thing, but in terms of their character being on time, those those skills that you develop at a well, I think in a high level, obviously any sport, but like if you've got to dedicate to you, if you're dedicating yourself to the sport for that long, like you've got to be be good at it. And I think that is if you've got that as your call, then the other technical stuff can be can be learned. And I mean, that's what we always had drilled into us. It's like when we're 11, 12, 13, our coach was my dad was my coach for most of my my younger years. And he's just like, which of your friends are up at four a.m. in the morning going, getting up and doing something. And like just would always have that drilled into us. And I think like I look back now and I was like, OK, yeah, yeah. We've heard that. We've heard that. But then like looking back, it's like, well, yeah, absolutely. That was a really, really good skill that I'm glad that I developed and dedicated myself to as a as a teenager. Yeah, absolutely. And I think like, you know, entering the workforce at whatever age people sort of enter like post uni, like I feel like a lot of people go through uni just doing the bare minimum. Whereas in our sport, you have to go above and beyond to get to be on a team to be number one, whatever it may be. So I feel like that's, you know, going those extra miles, not talking like in the pool, but just in general,

is really transferable and can translate for later in life. Like when, yeah, you're willing to literally go above and beyond to get something done or to help someone or whatever it may be. Yeah, absolutely. And you were saying before the call, you're on long service leave from swimming at the moment, you know, you just haven't been in the pool a whole lot post, post the games. What's what's that process been like for you? Having spent, I don't know, what is it? 12 plus years where you haven't had more than a handful of weeks out of the water to now just being in there only just a handful of times. Yeah, it's been interesting. I mean, like off straight off the back of racing, I took a five week holiday in Europe, which was amazing. But I feel like since coming home, like I've obviously swimming is a very, very structured lifestyle routine. So I've had to find structure in other ways, which has been interesting. And I've like enjoyed that. I have just been creating a routine that sort of works for me. But I think like something I've really has is the ability to say yes. I always said, like, you know, after Paris, like, I just want to be a yes girl and say yes to opportunities that, you know, I'd always thought, oh, like, so sorry, I've got training. Like, I was fortunate enough to be invited to such a cool new balance event at one of the one of the, like, really boutique, bougie sort of gyms in Melbourne, like, that's a Saturday. I'd usually just be in the pool being able to say yes to things like that has been so exciting. And obviously just something I'd never been able to do or to go

to the Melbourne Cup on a random Tuesday, usually it's like, oh, no, sorry, I've got training in morning and night during the day. So yeah, just being able to say yes to opportunities. And I mean, yeah, like, tonight I'm going to Luke Holmes and like usually be like, oh, no, like I've got training on Saturday morning and that's the main set, like I can't do anything Friday night. So yeah, just being able to say yes to different opportunities has been like really exciting. But I certainly am ready to like get some like swimming structure sort of back in.

Yeah, it's so funny. I forgot like just how how difficult it is to do anything else when you are swimming full time. You know, it's like, yeah, you've got time during the middle of the day. But like, you're not going to be up until 11 o'clock at night at an event or like you just can't do that. So yeah, God, that must be must be a nice, nice change. So yeah. And in terms of the the change going moving down to to Melbourne, you'll stay there going forward, find a squad. What's the plan? Yeah, I mean, like they're obviously the VIS and I'm good friends with Sam Williamson. So he's based out at Emsack over there. So yeah, I guess like that's kind of the rough plan under like, yeah, Craig Emsack. But yeah, I'm just really just taking my time. I guess also just finding my feet in a new city is another big thing. Like never lived in Melbourne before, never even spent time in Melbourne because there's never any swimming events in Melbourne. So I didn't even I mean, like we always go to Brissie or Adelaide. So I'm like, I feel like I'm fairly used to those places. But yeah, Melbourne is completely different. So yeah, I've just sort of been, I guess, finding my feet here for the past few months. And yeah, it was slowly start, yeah, making my way back into the water. Yeah, well, it's out. Yeah, there's no no no rush. It's like a may as well just enjoy the time that you've actually got off. And in terms in terms of like you've been doing a few keynotes and speaking engagements and things like that. Are there any particular core lessons that seem to come come up in each of those talks that you're doing? So you gave a really big one on Wednesday was to 700 students

and a hundred staff members. So that was probably my biggest one so far. And I I'm really trying to speak on resilience at the moment. I feel like this next generation is almost like sugarcoating everything. Like, oh, you can come first, but here's a participation. But no. Everyone falls down, you've got to get back up. And that's how you learn like resilience is like a muscle. The more you train it, the more it grows. And I think there's maybe like a little bit of a lack of. Resilience in kids and young adults these days. It's like things don't go to plan. Like I missed the Olympic team on the first night and 100 butterfly when that was the plan. I had to get up 48 hours later and make the team. Like I was absolutely gutted. I spent four hours boiling my eyes out to my coach. But I knew that the next day if I didn't wake up with a new attitude, I was actually going to miss the team. Like I was fortunate enough I'll have potential other options. I could make it, but that wasn't like a given. Like my given was almost 100 butterfly and that didn't happen.

Yeah, I just feel like the one thing I'm really trying to chat on at the moment is resilience. Unless obviously there's a key theme that I need to discuss. Was it like International Women's Day coming up? Like obviously women in sport and empowering women. Like I'm very big on that. But yeah, in terms of like a general theme, I really try to talk about resilience and picking yourself back up. And not everything smooth sailing, life isn't linear. So yeah. And quite often, and I think I've probably spoken about this on the podcast a bit, but like quite often, those like real downs are the ones where you look back and go, that happened for a reason. And I'm really glad it did. But right now it's very hard to say it. It's like they are the often the turning points in your life. And I find for me, if I'm working on a certain thing, say for effortless swimming, if I'm really frustrated, I feel like I'm not making progress with it or I'm like, it's a new skill or something I've got to learn. I know this is actually the right thing to be working on because it's hard and it's difficult and I'm getting frustrated. So I just keep with it and it will eventually come through. But to me, that's actually a sign, I'm working on the right thing here because it's difficult. Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like you have whatever it is in life, it doesn't have to be school or sport. But like challenging yourself is so important. I mean, that's why after Paris, I knew I was taking like the rest of that year off swimming and I was like, you know what? I feel like I love exercise and I'm very much about like a healthy lifestyle and fitness and that sort of thing.

But I was like, you know what? I need a little challenge. So like, I've never done more than five K in my life. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna train for half marathon. And yeah, I did it on Christmas Eve. And yeah, like I just needed something to work towards a goal. And God, it wasn't easy. I'm like, world's worst run. I can't keep my heart right below. And I just think like that's so important is to challenge yourself in whatever way it is, like the personal challenge to you. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Brie, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate you spending your time here. I know you've got quite a bit on. So yeah, thank you very much. And congratulations on all of your success over the last eight plus years. And yeah, just I've sort of watched you from afar. I've seen you obviously training with Arnie and I know Kia somewhat. So like just great to watch your progression and journey and watching you competing in Paris was amazing. So congratulations and looking forward to seeing what's to come. Thank you. And thanks so much for having me on the podcast. My pleasure. 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 You’ll Never Improve If You Ignore This – An Olympic Swimmer’s Advice with Brianna Throssell appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Imagine teaching yourself how to swim, never having a coach, never training in a pool, just figuring it out by watching others. That was Alex Roman’s reality for most of his life. He swam to survive, but certainly not to thrive. But one day, a swimmer effortlessly glided past him in the open water. And it sparked something, curiosity, what made them so fast, and what was happening beneath the surface that he had never considered.

That moment sent Alex on a journey of discovery. One that transformed him from a struggling swimmer with inefficient technique, Doing slower than two minutes per hundred into someone now who competes at national meets and swims a 50 meter sprint in under 30 seconds. His improvement wasn’t just about training harder.

It was about training smarter. And in this episode, Alex shares the pivotal moments that fueled his rapid progression. The techniques and the drills that made the biggest impact and why understanding the science behind swimming changed everything for him. If you’ve ever felt stuck in your swimming or wondered if it’s possible to make huge gains as an adult, this episode is packed with insights that could change the way you approach your own training.

So let’s dive into it.

We tend to focus on parts of the stroke rather than, let's say, take a whole course of swimming and not think about it, just go through and finish the course and improve the whole thing holistically. For someone who ends up looking at your videos, it's probably looking to improve some part of the stroke. And so what I think is important is to find a way to identify actually what you're struggling with. It's not always obvious because if you have been swimming until a certain point, you already feel natural with whatever you're doing. So you should, I would recommend getting feedback from someone, either you send them the videos and then pointing them out to you and then you work on those. 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. Imagine teaching yourself how to swim, never having a coach, never training in a pool, just figuring it out by watching others. That was Alex Roman's reality for most of his life. He swam to survive, but certainly not to thrive. But one day, a swimmer effortlessly glided past him in the open water and it sparked something, curiosity, what made them so fast and what was happening beneath the surface that he had never considered. That moment sent Alex on a journey of discovery, one that transformed him from a struggling swimmer with inefficient technique, doing slower than two minutes per hundred, into

someone now who competes at national meets and swims a 50-meter sprint in under 30 seconds. His improvement wasn't just about training harder, it was about training smarter. And in this episode, Alex shares the pivotal moments that fueled his rapid progression, the techniques and the drills that made the biggest impact and why understanding the science behind swimming changed everything for him. If you've ever felt stuck in your swimming or wondered if it's possible to make huge gains as an adult, this episode is packed with insights that could change the way you approach your own training. So let's dive into it. I was always self-taught when it came to swimming. I never had a coach, never swam in a pool until I was, I think it was always in the sea, back in Romania or in France, where I lived for the first time, I saw the first time, and then I picked it up by watching people and just, you know, being able to crawl away. And you could see in that video what the result of that was, but I never improved. It was something that really my teens and then kept me from drowning. And there was a funny event once on a holiday, when I went to work with my wife in Greece, I was swimming away and I didn't think of myself as being a really awful swimmer, but someone just zoomed past me, swimming. I thought I must be wearing fins or some motor or something. They were so fast. And it got me curious. So I looked on the internet to see what happens on the water. They never picked my curiosity. When you look at swimming, you know, at the Olympics and so on, most of the footage is above water and most of the swimming happens on the water, right?

And when I looked it up and I saw the plethora of technique and things that happened and that can be improved. So that got me curious. And I said, fine, let's find a few videos and maybe I can try to mimic those and try to imitate them. And I discovered a few things that blew me away. One, because I'm a mathematician, you know, on my work side, on my professional side, and I discovered that for me, swimming is almost the opposite of mathematics, is that the theory is so simple is you look at a video and it forces your videos when you explain the drills and so on. It looks very intelligible and then very easy and so on. And the moment you try to do it yourself in the pool, it feels horrible because you can't replicate it. And you feel that it's not working as well. Whereas in mathematics, it's sometimes the opposite, is that you see something happening in real life like an experiment. And it just happens. You can see it works. You can see that it's true. And then when you try to prove it mathematically, it can be a horrendously difficult task. So when I was through that journey of learning technique, and I realized that it's an incredibly technical sport and the amount of things that the brain has to coordinate. And as an adult, they found out to be much harder than sports that I learned when I was young, when you rely more on your intuition. So here, my brain was constantly overloaded when I was trying to

do things or trying to focus on one thing. And everything else fell apart. Like my legs were not doing anything correctly anymore because I was focusing too much on the arm and the breathing and rotation. Everything else. So I quickly realized that it's overwhelming as an adult to try to coordinate everything. And you have to focus on things at a time, try to be patient and so on. You don't have the luxury of being a four-year-old and being told, you're doing that wrong. And then change that. And then you go, OK, I'll change it. And it's fine. And then no longer think about it. I was asking my mates at the swim club if they remember learning how to swim. And most of them said, no, I don't remember exactly. I don't remember the process. We just went away. We did it. And now it's muscle memory. So translating that mental effort, the brain effort into muscle memory was an incredibly rewarding journey for me. Maybe I'm a personality or because I'm an academic. But I found the challenge itself to reprogram the body, essentially. You have to fight with your brain at the same time to let go and to allow feeling to take over and then gradually translate into muscle memory if you know what I mean. And I'm sure you've discovered this while working with adults all the time. It's harder for them to change things. In my case, I might have been luckier that I didn't have swimming background to have to change something that I had been doing for a long time.

I kind of started fresh. But still, I have to change that horrible swimming that I have in the series or in my first video into what I'm doing now. It was very rewarding. In my opinion, I don't think humans were born to swim. Almost everything we do optimally in swimming, I found to be done nowhere else in life. And there's nowhere else in life where we do this. And all sorts of movements. You can't breathe whenever you want. That takes up 90-something percent of all of the sports. So it's an interesting challenge that I really, really enjoy the fact that I'm reprogramming my body and trying to teach my brain to let go, translate all that into muscle memory. And I have to trick my brain into doing that because I discovered I can't convince it to let go. And maybe that's just me. But the process in the end, it translates into finding or constructing sets that rely on that process of doing things gradually. So you focus on some things at first, or one or two technique elements, and then you maybe increase effort gradually and so on until your brain can't really keep up, think about it too much and so on, allowing muscle memory to take over. And I can talk about some of my favorite things later on, but that was, let's say that was the process. What actually happened was I progressed very quickly in the first two or three months. I found some more videos that I could give you. I think one or two months after I started with your videos, with your free videos online,

I was already able to swim maybe less than 40 seconds on 50 meters, which was previously unheard of for me. Within maybe four months or so, I was able to swim in the, like you saw me in that second video when I was in the flume. And I went to that flume session to try to discover things that I'm doing wrong and see myself, because in the UK, you're not allowed to swim in public pools. Sorry, you're not allowed to film yourself in public pools. So I had to find other solutions for that. But I would say within four or five months, I went from 230 to minister, put 100 meters down to maybe 130 and I can't say that I remember all the things that helped me improve along the way, but I remember some things very clearly, stuff that I struggled with. And the moment I realized that I can't rely on YouTube videos anymore, I need to see myself and I need other people to see myself and give me more prompt feedback. As in, I can see you're doing this wrong, now go back and do it this way. Rather than having to wait a few weeks, maybe someone sees my video, then come back and so on. The immediate feedback process I found to be extremely rewarding. So I flew out to different countries. I wasn't able to find much help within the UK. Masters clubs have a routine of their own and most of the master swimmers have swimming backgrounds. So coaches are already very full and there wasn't much available camps.

I found to be on the expensive side at first and I was really interested to be working with someone one-to-one and get that immediate feedback and then work together and so on. What you would do in a camp, I would imagine, but even more attention to myself. So I flew to Romania, found the coach. He's a former national champion, 400 meters by the way. His name is Alex Nexu. And brilliant guy, we bonded very quickly and we spent a few days together, but we were a few hours in the pool every day.

And I remember that as being one of the highlights of my swimming journey. The fact that you have that immediate feedback, but that aside, you get someone to see the things,

the biggest things that you're doing wrong or you could improve, telling you how to improve them and so on and going back again. And the other part is adapting to the swimmer, which is something that you talked about in many videos as well. There's no recipe, right? It's every swimmer is different and you have to be able to see what a particular swimmer struggles with and then adapt to be able to help them rather than prescribe things. Like you go through this program and see what you come up with. Because most of us as adults don't start from scratch and are no longer four years old.

So that improved a lot of things at the very beginning, but you learn a lot of lessons along the way, but maybe rather than allowing me to ramble on, we can let the discussion flow and take some questions from you. Because I'm very curious to see what you'd like to find out. Yeah, well, thank you very much for that. That gives me a lot to go with and a couple of questions that come to mind. So what did you first notice when you saw that video of yourself swimming or when you had that moment where you wanted to get better at swimming? What was the first one or two things that you thought you had to do to get quicker? Because that progression, that first three, four months is a very big jump in speed. So what were some of the main things there that you realized you had to change? That's a very good question. You're challenging my memory right now. It's easy to say now what I noticed in that old video, what are the big things that should be improved? But back then, when I looked at my video, I don't think I noticed that many things because I didn't have knowledge about swimming and didn't speak to anyone to tell me what the things should be, what the big things ought to be improved. But I was noticing that my arms were almost completely straight.

So the moment I was entering the water, I was just blotting along. And that was a big difference to what you were showing. So I learned many technical terms from you in the beginning, you know, the high catch and I learned so on, blah, blah, blah, all that. And I realized, well, it makes total sense. You know, you're just getting, first getting to a position, then you want to push water behind you rather than pushing down. Putting pushing down doesn't propel you at all. So I was one thing that I was trying to improve a lot. And I can answer one of your questions is that, I remember struggling with that side of my journey in the first weeks very much. The fact that I got so used to pushing water down, that I was relying on that motion for support to keep my body horizontal. And the moment I was trying to get into your high elbow position, I felt like I was sinking because I didn't have that pushing down in the water feeling and I had to overcome that. And that took a long time to switch from that windmilling, slow windmilling that I was doing to a proper propelling position. Breathing, I don't remember struggling with that much. Kicking was a struggle and still is. And body position still is an issue because now I'm trying to get very fast. And I noticed that I'm still not as horizontal that I would like to be.

But yeah, I think that sinking feeling, the fact I was windmilling and pushing down

rather than trying to push water behind me. And the moment I was trying to push water behind me, I felt like I was sinking because I didn't have the support anymore. And in terms of what you feel like you're doing in the stroke now, how does that change from a year, two years ago? Like what are the things that you're feeling for or trying to do now compared to when you first started? You mean what I'm working on to improve right now, for instance? Yeah, and how you, because one of the things you mentioned is that going from kind of overthinking to having to tune in to how your body feels. So what are some of the things you're working on and what are the sensations that you're trying to work towards that you know is a good stroke? Yeah, that's another very, very good question. So the thing is that the thing that I feel is holding me back a lot right now is body position. So I don't have, let's say, an optimal body for swimming in that my legs are very long. My torso is shorter. So my center of gravity, my center of mass is actually towards the legs. If I try to, let's say, float face down in a cross position where you're neutral and some people are just able to remain horizontal about what and the legs are not sinking. My legs go boom instantly, right? And this is a test that a new friend I made is a former Canadian Olympic triad

and an incredible guy, so he explained this.

Some people have the body for swimming and that helps them more and they don't need to rely on the kick. Those who don't, like me, need to rely a lot more on the kick and on the core to keep you up. You would want to be as horizontal as possible. In my opinion, I think if you were to rank what the most important things are in swimming, I would rank this to be very high. I'm not sure what else could be higher maybe, but being as horizontal as possible because anything else that sinks means you're drag water. You drag yourself through water, so you create drag. So you would want your, let's say, your head and your hips and your heels to break the surface when you're swimming face up and that would ensure a horizontal position. My hips and my legs are sinking and I've been more recently working more on that, trying to find a way to bring those up and to understand why that happens. And in my opinion, the reason why that happens is that I haven't yet developed a good synchronization between my stroke and my kick as well as the rotation. So, you know, that hip-driven stroke, so you would like your kick to drive your stroke and to drive the rotation. I'm trying to get there. Initially, I focused on learning a two-bit kick a lot more than any other type of kicks and I found that to be very hard because I wasn't able to coordinate the two-bit kick either and it's much harder than it maybe is for others. It was very hard for me. But I got there in the end somehow, but now I have this new problem because I don't really like long-distance swimming.

I know you're the opposite, but I like sprinting. And in sprinting, you need to have a very powerful kick and your legs need to be working over time. So, I would like to learn a six-bit kick and that six-bit kick to actually work with my stroke rather than just be erratic. And you need a good coordination. So, I'm trying to learn that coordination. So, what do I do or what I'm in the process of discovering what works for me? I have discovered some things that I think work better for adults than kids. The kind of sets that I've been designing for myself that helps from others is,

let's say you take an hour and I focus for the first 20 or 30 minutes on doing technique work. And I focus on just one or maximum two technique elements at a time. I don't try to do more because then it's too much for the brain. And if I do two elements, then they should be correlated. If it's maybe breathing and catch or stretch and catch, things like that. But if I'm doing kick or rotation, I usually stick to just one. The drills, so you do a lot of drills for the 20 minutes. And I think it's important to take time with the drills. I know some people say that you should do drills at speed in order to start learning. And that didn't work for me very well. But what I do is you work on drills for about 20 minutes. You mix drills with swimming. So you don't just do only drills. Then for the past, for the last 40, 30 minutes, I do, I try to do something that I was mentioning before is where I go gradual. Let's say 25, length of 25 meters or 50 meters.

And I start with them doing as slowly as possible. And I try to hit exact times. If I do 25 meters, I would start from maybe 20 seconds per 25 meter. And I try to hit exactly 20 seconds. So I force myself to go easy so that I can focus on everything I'm doing. But I'm mostly focusing on just that technique element that I worked on for the first 20 minutes. So I do that maybe five, six times. And I take enough rest between the 25s. I don't want my cardiovascular system to become a limiting factor. So I don't want to push myself too much because I'm working on technique skill.

On the next six lengths, I decrease that to 19 seconds. And again, I time myself. I want to hit exactly 19 seconds. It also helps me to learn pace. So what 19 seconds fail and so on. But again, I'm focusing on rotation. For every length, I focus only on just rotation. I don't care about my arms. Maybe my arms are not optimally doing things and so on. But I focus on that or the kick, the kick tempo, kick synchronization. I want to feel the kick driving my stroke and helping the rotation. And then I drop to 18 seconds. And I go to 17 seconds and 16 and 15 and so on until I reach my BB on whatever that length is. And every time I drop one second in swim speed, I also increase my rest time between legs. Again, because I don't want my cardiovascular system to limit me. And I found this to be very helpful for me. I was able to improve a lot with this kind of sense because it kind of tricks my brain. Going from one stage where my brain could think about everything that was happening, especially that technique element, to going full out, but very gradually losing control and allowing muscle memory to take over feeling. And you insist on this for maybe a couple of weeks. I think it's important when you work on drills to insist on things and to allow enough time to this. So that worked for me. That allowed me to progress a lot.

And you take one technique element and you insist on that. And you do just that with this kind of sense. In my case, it was speed because I like to work on speed. If you want to focus on other things, I don't distance swimming and so on. You focus more on efficiency, for instance. You focus on the technique of the stroke or your two-bit kick or no kicking at all if you want to work your core a lot to streamline through and so on.

It worked a lot for me. And even small things like finishing the stroke at the very end of past the hips, I want to still be able to push water, things like that. You shove one second here and there and it's rewarding enough. But yeah, that's one approach that really helped me. The thing I really like about that is when you force yourself to go a specific time, you're really developing those different gears that you can shift between, which a lot of people, especially who are newer, it's something that I see that they tend to struggle with. They have just got that one speed. And so when you're having to be that specific about what pace you're going, then you're going to figure it out what you need to do to get quicker. And especially I think in the early days when technique is usually the worst when you first start and it's going to get better as you progress as a swimmer. But in those early days, technique is such a big aspect of it that it's really worthwhile taking that time. And especially if you're sprinting, so if you're doing longer distance stuff, if you're doing triathlon, you're going to need to have that base level fitness and swim strength to get you through the event. But if you're sprinting, well, it's very much about being refined with your stroke and it's not about doing long, long distances necessarily. So I think that approach can be so much better for sprinting too. So… I like what you touched on just now because it helps during races as well.

So, you know, every race has a certain strategy to it. Unless you're doing a 50 where the focus is not to focus on anything, you just go. But if you're doing anything else from 100 onwards, you have some strategy on each length to follow. Knowing what each pace feels like, you know, having learned that and you can actually strategize better. If you want to go slower or faster and you want to bring your kick into the third part of the race or be more efficient, you have stronger, you know, longer strokes on the first part of the race, whatever you'd like to do, your body already knows how it should feel. So I think it's easy to strategize and it works for longer distances and there's more strategy on longer distances, obviously. For open water, I don't know. I never competed in open water. I just swam open water, but from mates that are doing open water, there's strategy there as well, depending on the race and if it's 5K or more and so on. But yes, I think you're perfectly correct. It's worthwhile teaching your body to know what each pace feels like.

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I would like to peek ahead on more things than this, but yeah, you're totally correct. Also, something that I would want to say is that I'm very enthusiastic about swimming because I'm still learning, you know, and I find it incredibly rewarding. And when I talk about it, it sounds like I'm talking with authority. I have no idea what I mean. I've learned a lot and I love it, but in no way I'm an authority on this, but it's just enthusiasm. I wouldn't want people to confuse it with trying to teach anybody anything I'm still learning myself. It just sounds repetitive, but it's not. I'm just thinking about it. Well, you can speak from your own personal experience, though, having gone from 230 down to 106. I mean, that's a big jump, and I think most people would be pretty happy to have that result in their swimming, so people can take a lot from that. I think it's very, very, very doable. As you probably discovered working with adults as well, there's a mental block as well where they start with the idea that, you know, I'm never gonna be an Olympian or you're never gonna compete against them, and it's fine, it's perfectly fine, but that doesn't mean you can't improve down to maybe even give them a minute. I think it's important not to put any limits when you start. You just discover how low you can go, and that's an incredibly rewarding journey itself, and then you discover that you can actually compete, you can go to meets, and then you meet incredibly gifted and experienced people as well, so you learn a lot. There are things that I would say are important that I would have loved to do or loved to know,

but at the same time, you can't discover everything at first, you know, it's a journey. But I wasn't taking, for instance, I wasn't taking warm-up seriously, not warm-up in the pool. I mean, warm-up, you warm-up your body because, you know, as adults, I think we need more warm-up time, and I developed a little bit of injury from straining my shoulders. I have an anatomy imbalance on my right side, my rib cage is a bit sunk on this side, so it impinges on my shoulder, and so my shoulder anatomy on the right side is a bit odd, and swimming doesn't cause any injuries, but it makes it worse because there's thousands and thousands of rotations in each session, so stretching before sessions I think is important. I think everybody should do that and take it seriously. Muscles are not that big of a problem with age. Apparently they adapt very quickly to age and to effort, depending on the age. The tendons is not the same ballpark. Tendons take a lot longer to warm-up and you want them to be elastic.

Most of the injuries are, I mean, most of the lasting injuries and the problematic injuries are in tendons, and that's where I've been developing. Recuperating, I've been working with physios and so on, so I've been doing that. And also then, besides that, some land training, those kids who started at four years old, they had a lot of land training as well, and they've been developing their shoulder muscles and back muscles a lot for swimming, and the bone structure also evolved with swimming, so it enables swimming in a different way. Someone who takes swimming out like me at 42 years old doesn't have those tendons and muscles already developed to help them, and so on, in my opinion, important to look after them and develop them. So besides swimming, so besides what you do in the pool, I would encourage taking time to work on the shoulder and back muscles, and if you lack the time to do too much, just do pull-ups. In my opinion, everything from all the land training that I've done, pull-ups are the number one exercise that I could do and drop everything else and to still cover a lot of what I need for swimming. And then you reduce the risk of injuries. You have your body there to help you more for swimming because you want to have that strength. You can then focus on the endurance part and develop in your cardiovascular system that swimming can do that for you. I don't think you need to take up running as well, but it helps, things like that. So there are plenty of stuff that I need to talk about.

I'm sure, like I said, I'm very enthusiastic by it, but I will now ask more questions because your questions are more interesting than I have to say. That's good. It's a couple of things you touched on there, like warming up before a session. Like I'll wake up, well, I get up way earlier than I need to before a training session in the morning, but I'll do five, 10 minutes of kind of like a yoga routine just to go through those different movements and warm up the muscles and the tendons and stretch a bit, particularly through the shoulders, hips, back, and I find that that makes a big difference prior to training early in the morning. And then strength training, I think like the last three and a half years I've started to be consistent with gym, two to three sessions a week. And the first six months were quite frustrating because I kept injuring myself from going too heavy, too early, so I didn't build up progressively enough. But then once I had a bit more time under my belt and then I just progressed a bit more slowly with the weights, now it's like I rarely, well, I don't get injured from the gym, but I rarely get like, pull my back, I rarely have those sort of injuries. And I think as we get older, and this is something that I realize now, I'm late 30s, but in your 20s, like generally, if you're active, you've got good strength, you don't get injured, things are good. But I think for adults, it's just, it's something that really should be considered during at least two sessions a week.

And there's science about it as well. It's not just what we experience or personal experience, it's the science that supports all this. In my swim journey, I also like to read a lot. So I like to read science, fix stuff about swimming and technique, but also anatomy, physiology, and biology as well. And one of the articles that I stumbled on was about this aspect, the aging process between, I mean, how the aging process affects muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones. And they all react differently. And I was surprised to find, I mean, maybe not as surprised because I was already feeling it, but the muscles have the least problem to adapt. Whereas tendons are one of the worst and then require more diligence. And in swimming, you want to make yourself as long as possible. So you want your tendons to be flexible. That means you want your tendons to be warmed up and there's no blood flow for tendons. There's no vascularized. So you need to worm up the muscles around them for that worm to translate into the tendon so they become more flexible. It's all the joints and so on. So the stretching part that you were mentioning, I believe it's really important, especially if you feel that you're developing injuries. Most of the injuries in swimming, as you were saying in many of your videos, they come from some technique element that you were doing improperly. And you're crossing the midline, then you start pulling, you're turning,

you have some outside rotation into an internal rotation, and bam, you start pulling on a tendon somewhere. And when that happens, it's very, it's both strange, but also difficult to fix because you want to continue swimming. You should find whatever you're doing, I can say wrong, the technique in swimming in order to stop doing that, but also work on outside of the pool to strengthen that part of the body. Shoulder is an incredibly complex joint, as you know, they have so many things, but one of the good side, one of the good things about it is the same things, because it's an incredibly complex technique, there are many muscles around it. If you damage one tendon, and again, this is scientifically supported as well, you can use or strengthen the other muscles around it in order to take over functions of the damaged part and continue over.

My physiotherapist was a very funny guy, but also incredibly talented. I showed him the MRI that I had just done a few months ago of my shoulder, and there's so many things happening there. Apparently I have two chronic tendonitis, a ligament that has a quasi-complete rupture. There's a slap tear, which is a labrum tear that started forming that, apparently that's the biggest one. And a few other things and so on. And I was scared, when I read that, I thought I should probably stop swimming, this cap go on, but I didn't feel that bad. But it got to the point where it was hurting during sleep, things like that. So I showed the MRI to my physiotherapist, Alejandro Torres is his name, just a shout out. And then he goes, yeah, don't worry about it, there's so many things happening in everybody's shoulders. Anyone who has an MRI in the shoulder will discover tons of things. Chronic doesn't mean permanent, so we can fix that and so on. Probably the slap tear is the most important. We should work on that. And you work outside the pool, but you have to be very careful what you're doing in the pool because you just bring it back if you continue doing the same things. And you spoke about this in many of your videos. Technique is such an important element in this sport because it's extremely repetitive. So anything that you're doing slightly off adds up and can become a big problem. Whereas many other sports where movements are much more varied, they don't tend to be big problems. And swimming may not cause problems,

but it can certainly make things worse because of that. So yeah, I completely agree with you. I wanted to mention this is I think is important, especially for adults, as you were saying, to take the time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, in terms of the shoulder blades and those muscles surrounding it, when people tend to fatigue, they lose the control through those movements. Like the shoulder blade starts to go into positions where it's not, they're not as strong and they're having to use these sort of weaker muscles and it puts them in that compromised position. So I think particularly with the TheraBands, if you can just build some strength through those muscles that are supporting the shoulder blades, that's a big one, as well as obviously the right technique. Because there's so many people that I see at clinics and like, I hope my left shoulder's hurting here. Is there anything technically related to that? And we look at their video and nine times out of 10, it's super obvious of like why they're getting that issue. Like it's just, it's in plain sight. So yeah, if you are having issues with the shoulders, yeah, good chance it is technically related. Alex, anything else that you think would be worthwhile for people listening to this in order to either get quicker, improve their swimming, anything that you've picked up along the way? Yeah, I'm looking through my notes because I found the questions to be very good and I made some notes on this. Let me see if there's anything that is worth mentioning now. I would say with adult swimming, we tend to focus on parts of the stroke

rather than, let's say, take a whole course of swimming and not think about just go through and finish the course and improve the whole thing like wholistically or someone who ends up looking at your videos is probably looking to improve some part of the stroke. And so what I think is important is to find a way to identify actually what you're struggling with. It's not always obvious. It's because if you have been swimming until a certain point, you already feel natural with whatever you're doing. So you should, I would recommend getting feedback from someone. Either you send them the videos and them pointing them out to you and then you work on those. But then the next step is when you're changing something, it needs to feel weird. If it doesn't feel weird, you're not changing it. And then I discovered this early on and then you insist on that weirdness for as long as you need until it doesn't feel weird anymore. And maybe with some coupled with feedback, while you're doing it such that you don't come back to what you were doing previously. So one thing was this, just look for the weird feeling and get feedback all the time because we can't see ourselves in water and you need to feel, it needs to feel weird. It shouldn't feel natural whenever you change something. The other part, maybe

when people look for drills. So I wouldn't recommend someone as an adult taking up swimming to do what I did to start with clips and insist on those parts and then find other clips and insist on other parts. That's what I was doing, essentially. I was looking at one technique element and then what in the pool the next day and working on those and so on until it felt a little bit better and then changing it and so on. Suggesting drills and perhaps this is one criticism I have with most clips that are available on YouTube is that a lot of them are suggesting drills and yours are better because you say if this hurts and so on then you might want to work on this and so on. And the aspect that I found I was missing the drill itself is helpful but because I'm a beginner I don't know how to incorporate that drill into a larger set or into a program that then helps me actually develop. So your full program is very good at this because it's very structured and you do this and you have sets to work on but for someone looking to take bits and pieces to improve one part of the stroke it would still need a full set. Don't just work on drills. As a beginner we don't know what else to do besides the drill and you always need to do some swimming between drills after you work on technique you just do some swimming as well to translate it and so on and so forth. I think we talked about this warm up and so on I have a few more notes here but probably running out of time.

Yeah, I think that's great. Yeah, in terms of drills like I think the mistake I see a lot of people making is that they see they do the drills without the thought of what they're actually focusing on and the purpose of it. Like they just do the drill but what am I actually trying to focus on here? But with almost every drill you could have five, six different things that you're working on with it so you wanna make sure that you're working on something that's specific to you. For example, like a six one, six drill or six kick switch, like I use that drill a lot but it depends on the person in terms of what I want them to focus on with it. Like it might just be your alignment. It might just be the position of your hand in front so you're not up too high. It could be the rotation. Like there's so much stuff you can work on with different drills so it's about knowing the purpose of it. Yeah, so the technique and the drills are super important and then in my opinion what I discovered was working and not working don't focus on too many things at a time. If you wanna focus on kick then focus on kick and find drills that focus on kick. The six one, six for instance that you mentioned is an incredible drill. Whenever I was doing just drills in the beginning it always felt okay. I didn't feel like I was doing it but when I was translating and I was trying to do swimming it didn't feel as great anymore so make sure that you're doing

enough swimming between drills and that you have this gradual transition between drills and swimming so that your brain can learn to let go and you rely on the feeling so you learn that

and maybe one other aspect that I would encourage is after you do enough drill with swimming and so on where is the easy part? Do that part where you allow yourself to feel the water very easily, very nicely. Don't do the drills at too big of a speed don't force yourself if you feel that the pace is too high, no doubt but after you're done with that technical part try to actually get into a regime where you are getting tired so swim enough so that your cardiovascular system is being pushed and then focus on the technique because you want to be able to maintain technique when you're tired. That's maybe one of the biggest aspects in racing, right? If you're not dead by the end you touch the wall then you probably haven't given it enough or you had more in the tank and the other part is I feel the learning part happens best when you're tired because that's when the brain can't actually think about coordinating anything anymore you're too tired to do it. So if you can force yourself to still maintain technique when you're tired, well, don't injure yourself obviously but I think the concept of what I'm describing is clear enough. I think it's important to get into a regime where you have to maintain technique when the body is tired as well and then you learn more. It cements the technique better and having the feedback. It's if you can have someone to look at you

and do that, send the video or someone with you in the pool will be even better than the progression would be almost as a given. Yeah, yeah, absolutely agree. Well, thanks so much for sharing your journey over the last couple of years and lots of good takeaways there and yeah, I appreciate you jumping on and reaching out as well because when I saw that before and after video it looks like a different person.

Like a really, really huge improvement. So the fact that someone can do that in a fairly short space of time as an adult is outstanding. So congratulations on that. I think it's doable and I think it's important and what you're doing I think is important. It's also very hard to make adults believe that it's possible. It's very possible. You just have to obsess a little bit, find the time and then keep to a schedule that's also important. If you don't feel like it, then maybe that's the right time to go and actually do it. Keep to a schedule and the improvements are there to be ready to, it's an incredible sport. It's hard, but that's the nice part about it. Yeah, that's right. There's always something to learn and it's always challenging. So Alex, thanks so much for being a guest on here. Thank you very much for having me, but it was lovely to chat to you. Thank you very much for the work you have been doing and thank you very much for the free videos that you're posting, which are incredibly, incredibly useful. That's my pleasure. Listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you'd like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

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