There’s so much different information and different videos and different coaching styles that it’s very generalized that approach and it’s not specific to what wasn’t specific to him. 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.

I had a swimmer come to a clinic recently and she was saying that her partner kind of came across effortless swimming from watching videos online and found our YouTube videos and she was able to come to a clinic because she was kind of visiting from overseas but he didn’t have the chance to. But she said that one of the problems that she found was that there’s so much different information and different videos and different coaching styles that it’s very generalized that approach and it’s not specific to what wasn’t specific to him. So she found that he’s going through, you know, he’s trying to work on all these different things that he finds with the next video. Like for one video I might talk about, you need to go wider with your elbow when you’re pulling through or you might need to recover wider with your hand or you might need to breathe differently. But if you’re trying to do 15, 20 different things and you’re working on something different each time, there’s very little chance that you’ll actually improve while a lot of people do improve by taking some of this stuff on board.

The best way to really do it is to get some specific feedback that’s specific to you. So, you know, when I’m doing analysis with someone at a clinic, we go, what’s the two or three main things that’s going to make a difference for you in the next six to 12 months? And we’re not going to, we don’t bombard them with, with 20 different things. Same thing goes like when we do run clinics, when I first started three or four years ago, we went through 20 or 21 different drills in that clinic. But I found that was just information overload. You come away from there going, that was great, but I don’t actually remember any of it. So now we’ve just simplified it, just a handful of drills, but the ones that are most important. So any individualized specific coaching for you is most likely we’re actually going to start to see those results come in. So some of the things that a lot of people say when they first come to me is my times haven’t improved in two years.

So I don’t get feedback from my, my squad coach, which I totally understand it’s, if you’ve got 20 swimmers in a squad, it’s very hard to have much meaningful time with each of those. I used to coach a, a squad here in Melbourne and the sessions would often be quite busy and there’s only so much feedback you can give during the session. If you’ve got a lot of swimmers, there’s only so much detail you can go into in a typical squad session. Cause most, most people are there to, to get fit and the technical stuff, yeah, it doesn’t get a lot of attention. So I understand how hard it is for a lot of, for squad coaches, trying to give feedback.

People also say, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I know what I’m doing wrong, but I don’t know how to, to fix it. And that’s a really common one. So especially if you feel like you’re slipping in your catch, if you feel like your legs are dropping and your feet are sinking, then a lot of people can feel that. But they don’t know how they should go about to try and fix it. And that’s what I’ve really tried to sort of talk about in the YouTube videos that we’re doing and give a bit of structure around an understanding around what causes those things and then what you need to do and what you need to focus on and practice for the coming weeks to make those changes. People also say, I’m putting in the effort, but my times don’t reflect it. And this is a really common one, especially for triathletes that I see there. The bike, the run, they’re working their butt off and their times are coming down, but the swim doesn’t reflect it.

And it’s because the swim is just such a technical thing that fitness and strength will only get you so far. Your, your technique is often the, the ceiling that, that will stop you from getting faster. So that’s why, you know, that’s why the, I think filming yourself is just such a, such a key point. And then, you know, you could spend the next 12 months focused on things that, that won’t make you quicker. And I’ve certainly done this before, I’ve just focused on getting fitter, but again, that technique was a limited for me. I, you know, I started to, to slip in my catch and pull through and my times were the same as, as previous years. So it’s really just, just about having someone show you exactly what it is that’s going to help you, whether that be technically looking at your training program. There’s a lot of different ways to do it, but try to not generalize coaching can be okay. But what’s worth actually kind of working on is this individualized stuff.

So when I’m working with someone, I often look at, like I mentioned earlier, was what’s their target for the next six to 18 months? And where are they now? And then, then it’s about how do we bridge that gap? All right, so we’re here, we want to get to here, what do we have to do to bridge that gap? And there’s a couple of different things that we look at. So there’s the, you know, there’s their technical flaws and how to correct them. And even if you’re with a squad or you’re already on a program with a, with the coach, you know, you can still make these changes to your stroke by really adjusting your warmup and choosing a couple of specific drills and focus points in your warmup and then go about your normal training session. So it’s possible to do that even if you’re already in that squat environment. We’ll often look at mobility and strength because those two things will kind of go hand in hand in a lot of ways.

But it’s one thing that I don’t think is covered enough. We’ll also look at training frequency and, and your workouts. So how often you’re training and if it’s less than three times a week, we’d want to look at increasing that. So the minimum I’ll find with most people is you’ve got to be swimming at least three times a week. Four, five, six times a week and that, that can make a big difference to most people because that consistency is what builds your feel for the water, builds your strength, it builds your fitness. Now, no, it’s not an option for everyone, but a minimum three times a week is normally that, that benchmark that I go for. And we’ll look at the type of thing they’re doing in their workouts. So like we, like we looked at earlier, are you just jumping in and doing two, three Ks straight? Are you swimming at one speed? And then we’ll look at what can we change? In your, your existing sort of workout structure.

We look at skills. So open water swimming, open water swimming is almost like a different sport. If you’ve never done it, you’ll find that when you do go open water, it feels very different to the pool. I started doing open water swimming when I was 13 or 14. And the first, but it took me until I was probably 21 or 22 to really, to really nail it. But from 13, 14, swimming in the pool could swim really well in the pool, but I didn’t know how to site. I didn’t know about turning boys. I didn’t know about drafting, all this sort of stuff. It’s, it’s really just a separate sport or a separate stroke until itself. So if you can develop those open water skills, I’ve found it to make a huge difference, especially when, when you’re in a big group or a big pack of swimmers, pacing as well. So the, where are we? Yeah, pacing too. So again, for new swimmers, they often go out too hard and then they die and they die.

And then they end up blowing out a lot at the end. Most, you know, most good races are swum negative sweat. So the second half is quicker than the first half most of the time. So it’s just about developing that ability to kind of sense where you’re at with your, with your pace and then swim faster as we go. So the last thing is mindset. So this is a really important one, not something that I’ve touched on a lot in our videos or anything like that. But just the mindset when we’re in Thailand for our whole week camp, we had our two coaches there. So it was myself, a guy named Phil Rush, who has swum, I think one of only two or one of only three triple crossings of the English channel. So it’s basically swim across England or France, yet five minutes on the beach, swim back and then five minutes and then swim back. So the mindset you have to go through to be able to do that or the ones that you have to have is just incredible.

So we had him talk about mindset and also Mitch Patterson, who was our other coach there. And he talked about his journey to make the Australian team and how we, he basically missed out on making the Australian team because of the selectors didn’t choose him and he didn’t kind of race as well as he’d hoped to. But then he raised some funds, he ended up going overseas to compete and ended up breaking a Commonwealth record. And so just that kind of mindset is a massive part of sport and shouldn’t be overlooked. And when we had growing up, when I was 13 to about 18, we had a talk almost every year from a sports psychologist because it’s such an important part. 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.