Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer, and live a better life. Here's your host, Brenton Ford. Bob Bowman, the legendary coach of Michael Phelps and Leon Marchand, he was recently on the Exponential Athlete Podcast. And I listened to this episode and it completely changed the way I thought about some parts of swimming. So in this video, I'm going to share with you 12 powerful ideas I got from that podcast so you don't have to listen to the whole thing. What's actually relevant to the amateur triathlete or swimmer that you can take away and practice that's going to make a difference in your swimming, rather than wasting the next six to 12 months, not progressing in your swimming. Consistency beats perfection. Michael Phelps and Leon Marchand never really had many 10 out of 10 sessions, but they had a lot of eight out of 10 sessions. So he found that they would never really have these standout sessions where they were just absolutely smashing it, but they were very, very consistent with the high level of training that they did. Very rarely would they dip below their average. Occasionally, if they're sick or didn't get a good night's sleep, they might, but over the, over the course of many, many years, most of those sessions were an eight out of 10. So we're not looking for perfection every single training session, but we do

want to maintain a very high level across the board. And if you've got that consistency, more times than not, that is what actually makes a difference. Practice performing under pressure. Bob Bowman, one time accidentally broke Michael Phelps' goggles before a race. He accidentally stood on them and Phelps didn't realize this until after the race. So he did the turn of butterfly, I think it was, and the goggles leaked. But he said to Bob, I like, I just counted my strokes and that's how I actually knew where I was in the lap. And so if you can create these environments and these scenarios in your training, where you are putting yourself under pressure and you're having to adapt and you're having to be challenged by the time the race comes around, you've experienced it and you know, you can handle it because more times than that, you are going to find yourself in a race situation where there's something that is thrown at you left field and you have to deal with it. And so if you can put yourself in that situation in training as often as possible, then you know, by the time the race falls around, you've experienced every scenario that could possibly go wrong. And so you know how to deal with it. Process over outcome. Bob Bowman said that Michael Phelps slept like a baby before every big competition because he knew the work had been done and there was nothing more that he could do by the time the race rolled around. And so he said that anything that you want to do can be achieved.

If you make the first step small, whether that's winning an Olympic gold, whether that's doing your first Ironman, if you make that first goal small enough to achieve, then you can build up that momentum to reach that final outcome. And so that age old saying of how do you eat an elephant? It's one bite at a time. He said, just even that would really help them think about these big goals that they've got for world records, for gold medals at Olympics. It starts small and then you just tick those things off each and every day. Relax and focus under pressure. Bob shared that Leon especially was not initially great at staying calm in these high pressure situations of well, championships and Olympics, but he got himself to that point where he found that he could stay in that relaxed state of mind, even when he was at the highest level of competition, but it's something that is trainable and doesn't necessarily need to be an innate skill that you've got. The power of underwaters, the fastest that elite level swimmers can move in the water is when they are in a streamlined position and doing dolphin kicks. Now this is not necessarily something for the average triathlete or the average adult swimmer where they have these great underwaters that can generate a lot of speed. But for Michael Phelps, for Leon Marchand, these guys, they have incredible underwaters, but it's something that they would work on all the time. And that's when it became really a, a real weapon of theirs.

And they were able to surpass the competition because they worked on these great underwaters. Even if it might not be the thing for you as a triathlete, it might be your ability to adapt the stroke to open water. It might be a different skillset, but they were very intentional about the skills that they wanted to work on. And those underwaters were a key part because they felt that if they could generate great speed off each turn and get themselves close to 15 meters off every single wall, that would give them a huge advantage over the rest of the competition. Different approaches can work for different people. Bob Bowman shared that Michael Phelps and Leon Marchand were very different in their approach to how they trained and how they performed and rested and all these different things. So he said that Michael was very intense. Once the session was set, there'd be no deviating from it. And he felt like that was partly upbringing in culture, being American, being brought up in the household he was brought up in. He was very much set in those ways and wouldn't miss a training session for many years on end. Leon, on the other hand, being French, being European, he has a much more relaxed style of not training necessarily, but how he approached things. He would take six weeks off after a major competition. Once the session was set, it would be okay if part of that main set was changed. He would be okay with it, but he had very different personality to Michael.

And so the thing I took away from that is there is so many different ways to skin a cat, so many different ways to get from A to B. And it probably depends a lot on your personality, how your body responds to things and perhaps the way you see things. And so that's good to know, I think from a coaching perspective, but also as an athlete, you may not have to necessarily train the way or do the things that you see some of the elite triathletes doing or the elites from us doing, everyone's got their own different approach and it can work depending on the person. The seventh big idea I got from this is training volume and breaks. So I referenced it just before, but Michael spent something like five or six years where he didn't miss a training session, didn't not train for a day, even over Christmas, they would do something like 1500 meters just to get in the water and say that they'd trained, whereas Leon was okay with taking weeks off after a major competition. And I think we saw this through COVID where a lot of the swimmers couldn't get in the water, but we actually saw some of them had incredible Olympic campaigns, even though they'd spent several weeks or sometimes even months out of the water. So again, it just depends on the person, but to me, it shows that rest is very important for, for everyone, but for a lot of people, you may actually need to rest more than what you think if you feel like you are overtraining. And I see that a lot with some triathletes, Ironman athletes. They really have this idea of, I've got to train as much as possible,

but they forget how important rest is. And I speaking to Kat Matthews and her husband, Mark, it's interesting to see their balance between work and rest. She is very smart about the way she approaches her rest, where she sees that that is a very important part of her ability to perform. And I think for a lot of people, they just have this go, go, go mentality, which for some people, it's not the right approach necessarily. Michael Phelps started visualization at 11 years of age. And by the time he had gone to his main competition, he had swung that race in his head more than a hundred times and he'd actually visualized the things that could go wrong. Every little situation that could go not in his favor, he pictured going through that experience and coming up with a plan B or what would happen if this, this challenge is presented to me. And so I think it's an important way to get ready on race day is look, you may not have the ability to get into a pool anymore. You might not have the ability to fit in any more training sessions and your body might not have the ability to recover from any more training. But what you can do is you can visualize the race in your head and you can put yourself in that situation and your body doesn't know the difference between living it out in real life and visualizing that in your mind. And so by picturing yourself on race day, what's going to happen? What do you want to happen by the time you stand behind the blocks or

you're standing behind that start line, you are going to find this level of comfort that you wouldn't have otherwise. And so I remember when I was 14 years of age, I was training for the 400 IM every night before I'd go to bed, I would picture myself swimming this 400 IM and by the time my nationals rolled around that race pretty much played out exactly how I pictured it in my mind, I was about half a second off the time that I'd set myself and pretty much just felt like living out a movie that I played in my head multiple times. And so I think it's one of the most undersold parts of performance when it comes to swimming or triathlon. At Effortless Swimming, our mission is simple. Make swimming more enjoyable. Whether you're training for your next race, swimming for fitness, or just love being in the water, we're here to help you swim faster, smoother, and with more confidence. And one thing that can make or break a swim is your goggles. If you've ever struggled with foggy lenses mid-session, you know how frustrating it can be. That's why we created the Effortless Swimming Hydro Clear Anti-Fog Goggles for long lasting crystal clear vision. I've been using them myself and the difference is night and day. And I'm not the only one. Deborah swam 36 kilometers down the Derwent River and the entire time her vision stayed crystal clear. No fog, no frustration, just an uninterrupted swim. So what makes a Hydro Clear Goggles different? It's all in the technology. Unlike ordinary anti-fog coatings that wear off over time,

Hydro Clear Super Hydrophilic technology is built into the lens material itself. Here's how it works. Instead of fog forming as tiny droplets, water spreads evenly across the lens, creating a thin film that prevents fog from even starting. And the result? Consistently clear vision, swim after swim. And the durability? Our lenses are CNAS certified. Tests show that even after 2000 rubs with a wet cloth under a 200 gram load, the lens stays fog free. No gimmicks, just serious performance that lasts. Using them is simple. Just wet the lenses before putting them on and you're set for a fog free swim. Ready to see the difference yourself? Get 15% off your first pair of Hydro Clear anti-fog goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlessswimming.com. That's 15% off your first pair of goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlessswimming.com. We also have a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're not happy with the goggles for any reason, you can simply return them for a refund. Don't let foggy goggles ruin another swim. Try Hydro Clear today and experience clear vision from start to finish. Bob would use the term of making deposits into a swimming bank account. Every session that they would do, they would be making a deposit so that when it rolls around to the end of the season, you can take out this deposit from the bank and you can put that into your final race. So that simple analogy is a good way to think about your training.

You are not looking to spend your money there. You're looking to put these little deposits into the bank account. And if you can have that delayed gratification of all this work that you're doing will eventually pay off, then that is when you'll find yourself swimming better 12 months down the track. And I find the same thing when it comes to technique, the swimmers that are trying to fast track their improvement and be swimming 10 seconds faster next week often don't make the changes that are going to stick. And so the ones that work away at their stroke for two months, three months, and they're not too concerned about their times because they're just focused on the technique. If they can delay that gratification, it's three to six months down the line, they find that they're actually a lot faster. The techniques have become their habit and they lock those in. And so I think that delayed gratification works in many different ways. Bob Bowman saw his role as a coach as creating an environment where success is inevitable. So he said that whenever someone would come to him and they were looking at potentially moving to his squad, he said, the one thing I can promise you is that if you come through our squad, you're going to be stepping into an environment where we are performing at the highest level. And if you do, as I say, you will achieve these goals that you've set because the standard that we set in our group and in our squad is of excellence. And I think that is such an important thing to note because what are the other training partners that you're swimming with like?

What is the, what are the other people like that you're hanging around? Who are the club members, your, your squad, your coach, what's their expectation on you and what level are they performing at? Because I think that culture and that position that you, you put yourself in, uh, can really make or break whether or not you're going to hit those goals that you want. So who are those people that you're surrounding yourself with? Always be willing to experiment. Bob Bowman shared that they would always be trying some new things inside of the things that they know would work. So if you're coaching the same program for 10 years in a row, those swimmers that have been doing that program for 10 years, they're probably going to lose some interest, but they know what works. So how do you keep it interesting? Well, the way they keep it interesting is that they do either change the way that they explain things or change how they do things slightly. So that adds a little bit of novelty to it, but they'd also be throwing in some things that are brand new. And he would let them know that this is something that we're going to try. If it doesn't work, we can always go back to what we were doing, but I have a feeling that this is something that's going to help us going forward and quite often when you change anything, you will have regression initially, but if it's something that's ultimately going to work two or three months down the track, you're likely to see the results of that thing. And hopefully that's in a positive way, but it's very normal to experience some sort of regression initially when you're looking to change any part of your program or your technique or the things that you're

doing. And the last idea I got from the podcast is the importance of feedback and data. They do a lot of lactate testing and they want to see whether or not the work and the practice that they're doing in training is helping the athletes clear lactate from their blood faster. And so with their lactate testing, they want to see basically the level of lactate that they get and then how quickly that clears from their blood. And so what we want to be doing in training is being able to train in a way where we are working hard. We're building up this level of lactate in the blood, but it's more important to make sure that we're clearing it and how quickly do we clear it. So for some of these guys like Phalx or Leon, they are doing multiple races on the same day. And if they're not able to clear that lactate from the blood, it means that they're going into their next race as with fatigue and it means they're probably not going to perform at their best. And so they wanted to use this data to make sure that the training they're doing is actually working. And then when they saw that it was working, it not only was good to know, but it showed the athletes that it works and it gave them the confidence in the program. And so that builds up on itself, not only with the confidence, but they have more buy-in to the program. And so that's a big part of how they use that data and that feedback. So I hope you enjoyed this video. I'll link to the full podcast below if you want to take a look at it. But I think it's great to see how two different people from who have

achieved very similar things, have been able to do that with the help of a coach like Bob Bowman. 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.