I need to be very patient with myself and thanks for your patience with me. And I need to try many, many stuff to do this fine tuning thing. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. This is episode number 173. And my guest today is someone who’s been in our stroke analysis membership for about the last 12 months. Chung Wan, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, I appreciate to be here. I asked you to come onto the podcast to share your story and your improvement over the last 12 months because you’ve had a pretty significant game and you’re already starting from a quite a good pace I think with your swimming. But really over the last, I’d say maybe four months that you’ve really started to bring your times down and bring your speed up. So I want to ask you a couple of questions

around what it was that you have changed in order to do it because I think it’s a really interesting way for people to see how someone like yourself can make such a big improvement. So in terms of where you started when you first joined, I don’t know if you sort of remember where you were about a year ago in terms of your paces and those sorts of things. I’ve had to look back in the membership to find it to see where you’re at. But do you remember where you were about 12 months ago? Well, my time 12 months ago, I think we can check in this way is that I checked my 400 meters. This is actually a bit more than seven minutes. That was my time. And now it’s somewhere like last time I talked to you is like six minutes and four seconds. So I improved the basically a whole minute for my 400 meters. Yeah, and that’s equivalent to about 15 seconds per 100 which is a big improvement. And I know one of the sets that you would do

on a regular basis is the six 200s. This is a set that I really like as well. But so six 200s with about 30 seconds resting between I think in August, your last time you posted was about three minutes 22 for each of those. And I think the recent one before I made a note was yeah, down to 307s for that set which again is, you got 15 seconds while per for 200 there. But yeah, just a really big gain. And when you first start the membership, did you know what was some of the flaws in your stroke and where you could improve? Well, actually I had no idea. To be honest, I’ve loved to swim in for my entire life. But you know before the past two decades because I actually live in different country, I just lost swimming at all. It just in the last year I started to pick it up back. And the original motivation is just to lose weight simple like that. But then check my, I asked myself, if swimming is just for losing weight,

I will lose the motivation real, real soon. So when I changed the approach, I said, hey, I start thinking about losing weight. I start to think about how to improve my swimming so I can keep motivated in myself and keep doing it. And the parent that is working because you know, I lost basically more than 50 grand in last year. So that’s also part of it to motivate it all myself is build on each other so that I can swim faster. I have more motivation to lose weight. And you know, then it sort of work out.

Yeah, so they go hand in hand, isn’t it? Like the fitter you get, the faster you get, it obviously helps with developing a building muscle and losing weight. And I think exactly right with the motivation side of it. There’s only, I find it hard to get motivated to just try and lose weight. For me, there’s gotta be something else behind it. There’s gotta be something driving me to lose weight or to get fitter, like whether that’s an event or whether that’s just wanting to get quicker or improving in something. There’s gotta be something else behind it, I find. And it sounds like you’ve found that thing for you was just trying to better your times. Cause I remember when you first joined, yeah, you said like weight loss is really number one and you just want to sort of better style and technique but you’ve really, it seems as though you’ve changed that in the last, yeah, maybe six months, nine months since you joined.

Yeah, now I only think I care about is my third shoulder workout. And actually, you know, last weekend I checked again in my short course course, a short and short course pool and the extra swimming time is in average is lower than three minutes already. It’s two minutes and 58 seconds. I was very proud of myself.

Yeah, geez, that’s great. That’s, yeah, that’s awesome. It’s such a good improvement. And I want to go into what it is you changed and looking back at your original video compared to where you’re at now and you might be able to sort of show people those differences that the first video that you sent the way I’d explain your stroke was like you were, it wasn’t sloppy, like it was quite smooth but it wasn’t well balanced. There was quite a bit of over rotation happening. There was like, it was a quite a slow cadence and the arms that in the catch in the pool they were coming under the body a lot and just not very effective or efficient compared to now where like your balance is much better your stroke rate is up. We’ve talked about like a purposeful kick as well. It’s changed in a lot of ways but the way I’d sum it up is your stroke is really tightened up. It’s become a lot more like just all heading in the right direction.

Whereas before it was just kind of a little bit like lazy in a way I guess compared to how it looks now. How would you describe it? Oh yeah, so actually before, well here is the thing. I never had a coach like ever before. So it’s the first time like somebody really like showing me or coaching me how to swing. So at the beginning actually I didn’t even know what to expect. So I just sort of like try and see how it works. And so when I see my video, okay actually to be honest every time when I saw my video I don’t really see what’s wrong is going on with me. And every time after your analysis it’s sort of like I still have a lot to improve. The only thing I know is I’m slow but I don’t know what to do. And what you said actually, you know while watching the video everything makes sense. And the start I just try to work on it. But you know the thing is that I didn’t know what to expect. So I just tried to take like a lip of faith.

I just do it and see how it works. And I think it’s working. It’s working. And you know my actually my best experience my experience that you know make me really have a big impression about this coaching is my shoulder pain. Because I didn’t need to have shoulder pain before and like half a year ago or probably longer I had a first shoulder pain. That’s my first in my life had that. So I was a bit panicked. Because you know two decades ago I tried to train myself. So I mean I stopped after a year is exactly because of the same reason the shoulder pain and then nobody coach me. I didn’t know what to do. And you tell me I still remember you tell me that my problem is during the recovery you ask me to recover like a bit wider instead of just go higher. And it helps a lot. And also you show me some workout and I actually somehow crawl through the short shoulder pain and start to keep training. That’s the part that actually you know

impress me more than just you know all these drills to make me faster gives that really the key thing to make me able to move forward more further. And for this balance thing

well to be honest I took me a real, real long time. I need to be very patient with myself and thanks for your patience with me. And I need to try many, many stuff to do this fine tuning thing here. And for this balance the first thing you showed me is that you put a pool boy between my ankles. That I’d never tried before. I was struggling. There was no fun. But after that you know I could really feel that. I can feel that. You point in your drill if I suffer that means that you’re probably picking the right drill. And so I just again I just took a dip of faith I just tried to do that and it started improving. And there’s a big improving part is the kicking. I hate myself kicking. My kicking is always slow me down. And I love to work out when I’m having a pool boy between my legs because I can just forget about my stupid legs and I can swim better. But now I think the important drill you show me is from kick. The thing is that it sounds like city thing

but you know all three of us look city. But it works. So I also I swim better now. I feel more confident. And you call it a purpose for. I don’t feel that. But I feel better with my kicks now. And now I don’t have to have this pool boy to my legs to to push myself a step before that. I need that to remind myself that I can still swim. Now I’m very comfortable when swimming with my kicking. That’s that’s a very big difference. And we saw in your videos prior to you improving your kick that the legs, particularly on your breathing stroke where it would really kick out wide and splay and increase increase your dragon. I could say it when you send in a video every time you took a breath. It was kind of like your whole body just slowed up, slowed down and then it sped up and it slowed down and it sped up. And we just we wanted to try and keep that momentum going. And so the way that they’re able to do it is just by

like doing drills with the pool boy between the between the ankles to keep the kick really small and tight. And and we worked on a number of other things as well. But it’s and now if you look at your kick, if we’re looking at you swimming towards the camera, we don’t really see your feet at all. Whereas before it was we saw the feet and the legs come out with. And so if you’re thinking from a drag perspective, it’s like, wow, there’s so much less drag happening there. So it’s no wonder that the the speeds increased as well. One of the things I like about like what you have done throughout the last couple of months is you’ve pushed me to you’ve asked good questions a bit after you’ve got an analysis back. So I’ll do an analysis and I’ll say, this is what we want to focus on. And then you’ll you’ll dig a little bit deeper on some of those things to ask, you know, to ask why, why is this the case and so on? And it’s good, you know, that not necessarily it’s not

pushback, but it’s like you’re wanting to know more about some of those things that I’ve suggested. And it’s good because it makes me think as well. It’s like and it makes me question. I need to be certain of the advice that I’m giving. So I think that’s been really good on your behalf as well. Is that it’s not just one way. It’s it’s back and forth and it seems as though, especially in the last four or five months where you’ve really improved, it seems as though that’s helped a lot because one of the things that we worked on was increasing your stroke rate a bit from where it where it was. And what what have you done to improve your stroke rate and to increase it a little bit and to do that where you’re comfortable with a faster stroke rate? OK, yeah. Before that, I want to answer this this back and forth question. The thing is that, you know, the work is for swimming is a lot easier. You just follow what coach does.

You just do it. But for adult swimming, I don’t think that it’ll work. At least that doesn’t work for me. And by the way, I’m a nerd. So everything I have to go back to physics and I feel much more comfortable about it. And swimming, I think it’s all about physics. So that’s why I need to understand the physics behind it. And that will help me to convince myself better that I have to do that and also have to convince me better. So I know how to do it. Because if you go back to books, that’s what I know. So that’s the reason that I have to, you know, dig a bit deeper. So so help me actually understand better for myself or for the reason in why you do that. For the stroke rate, the stroke rate is actually a big thing. I never thought about a stroke rate until you pointed out to me. You said that, you know, I did like 40 strokes per minute. You said that that’s very, very slow. I never thought about it. And I started to work on it.

The first thing you ask me to do is that you ask me to do this finish tempo trainer. And that, I’ve never seen that ever. And that works out. So you have just have this bit in your cap that forces you to do that. At the beginning, again, I was just surviving. I was dying. I think I probably, when I send your messages saying, you know, Brandon, I can’t breathe.

But that I wasn’t wrong. After practice and practice, I feel more comfortable about it already. And also together with the drills. Only the training is not enough. You also send me like the drills. I have to do that before the men’s set. That also works out. And that also brings me, makes me more comfortable about the faster stroke rate. And actually, you know, you said something that really you make me think is that it’s like you’re riding a bike and you just change your gear. And that’s right. When you have a slower mode, doesn’t mean you’re easier actually because you have a larger gear. Actually, you pull bigger pressure on your body to push forward. But you have a faster stroke rate. Actually, somehow it’s not, I won’t say it’s easy, but not as painful as it looks. It gets better. And the second part of it, I would say is the speed workout. Originally, you gave me three types of workout. Like aerobics and the threshold and the speed.

And, you know, I hate threshold workout. I don’t think anybody does. But, you know, like really the one pushes me. This 200 times six. I’m still doing that. So every time I does that, I just have to like talk to myself like, John, you can do it. John, you can do it. John, you can do it. Before you do the workout. But actually, honestly, I didn’t never, I didn’t really do speed workouts. Well, I just confess I didn’t really do that. And after like quite a few months ago, you emphasized that again to me, you send me this speed workout for me. I say, okay, again, John, you have to do it. And I think it’s well paid off. Because there’s another thing I didn’t think about. Also, you mentioned it in one of your videos is that, you know, your threshold speed is just a percentage of your top speed. So it means that if I can’t push my top speed third faster, there’s no way I can push my threshold speed faster. So when I did that,

that was also my first time to do that. Instead of like feeling this struggling, I feel very, very satisfied actually. After this speed workout, I feel real good. And that’s probably just because you put a very long interval for me. I think you were very nice to me that you put a very long interval. So I have time to catch my breath. And actually I feel good about like sprinting. So I love this workout. The only thing is that this workout takes longer. And then that means like, okay, only do that a weekend. So I only do this workout once per week. But it’s really nice. I feel good about it. And afterwards, I also feel more confident. Because I think it’s also about mindset. Before the mindset, you just have to set up a speed. And you’ve got code fit about if you can finish that. So you automatically lower yourself in your mind. But after this speed workout, I’m confident that actually I can keep this pace longer.

So I just do it and I made it. So yeah, there are the two parts. I will say change my swimming, also my mindset.

Yeah, that’s great feedback. I think with those threshold workouts, it’s I have a similar perspective is when you go to the pool, you’re going, oh, all right, this is gonna hurt. You know, it’s gonna hurt and you’ve got whatever it might be, 20, 30 minutes of a bit of pain ahead of you. But it’s so good for your fitness, those threshold workouts. And we saw that with your improvement in your times there. And then with the speed workouts, from my experience, most people who I’ve spoken to and coached, at least when they have first joined me, most people don’t take enough rest in their speed workouts. They’re on short intervals, so they don’t actually get to recover. And so they’re going faster than they normally would, but they’re not going fast enough. That’s, it might be at 90% of their capable speed when if they gave themselves a little bit more rest to get the heart rate down and they can reset, they can really go at maximum speed

and maximum effort with enough rest. So yes, it takes longer and you don’t get as much done. And so I think that’s often the thing that people look at and they go, I don’t really want to do that speed workout because I might only get a kilometer done in 25 minutes or whatever it might be. And I could get a kilometer and a half done. So it’s about changing the mindset with that as well. But one of the other benefits, I think of speed workouts too, is when you’re swimming at those fast speeds, you get a good sense of what’s slowing you down. Like you’ve got, you obviously swimming quicker and so you’ve got a, the drag is higher because those faster speeds. And so you become aware of where things might be falling out of place and creating more drag. So I think it’s very good for that also. Cause I think when you first joined you were, your workouts were 40, 45 minutes or so. And it was mostly a bit of a warm up and then just swimming straight for 20 minutes.

Is that correct? Yeah. So I didn’t really have a plan when every time I did a workout for the lunchtime and you set up this plan for me. I think now another thing is that I think a planned workout is very important, especially you have a different workouts. Cause you know, I also, sometimes I met people in swimming, your most of people, you know, swimming is not a really a big thing in Taiwan. So you don’t really meet people with a coach. And they, unless that’s a very big difference that I have a different workout and you know, I swim different workout every day. And I think that helps a lot. Also it helps in quite different aspects for me. It looks pretty much the same for, for, for people, you know, not swimming, but for me it really makes a lot of difference that you have a planned workout and you need to, for me, I need to put a lot of discipline to myself, like today, John, what you do is, cause I’m the, well,

when you are not really looking over my shoulder, right? So I’m the, I’m also part of the coach of myself. So I need to be disciplinary for myself. And I need to be really persistent, like, you know, because this is thin, it’s really the progress. I don’t know. It’s very slow.

And sometimes you don’t have progress like at all. For example, I, I think I also expressed some frustration to you like a healthy year ago, is that I have like, like four or five months without any improvement, practically no improvement. But I still did it pretty much the same workout like I’m doing now. I feel really frustrated and I didn’t know what to do. And now this is the mindset starts to kick in, you know, you need to have this persistence and you also need a lot of patience for yourself. Like you keep doing that a day, you’re gonna see a difference. Well, I didn’t know that. And yeah, I still kept doing that. And by the time I tried to swing different strokes like backstroke or breaststroke, so that to help me, to help myself, to help myself feel still motivated and positive about the swimming. And after like five months and suddenly, okay, but then you probably can tell me, tell more about it. I have no idea what’s going on with me, but I’m better.

Yeah, it’s, well, I think it’s great that you stuck at it. And obviously you’ve seen the results of it. And it’s, look, it’s, as a coach, I’ve worked with so many different, so many people over the years that for me as a coach, it’s hard to pick when people will have that improvement. Some people happen straight away, you know, they’ll come to a clinic and they’ll improve within the next week. And then you’ll have people who have similar to yourself, it might be like five months, six months down the track and then they’re seeing the results. So you just can’t pick it, but that’s why I try to work with people on a more long-term basis. Like who are willing to stick with it and they’re not just doing swimming for the next year and they’re done. I like people who are willing to stick with it because then we get those results whenever that tends to happen. And yeah, it’s great that it all finally clicked for you. And yeah, it’s such a difference

in terms of your before, your very first video compared to now. Like it hardly looks like the same swimming away. It looks like someone who’s swam for a much longer period of time. So congratulations on where you’ve gotten to and I’m excited for what’s to come. I don’t think you’re finished with where you can get to. I think there’s still a lot more that we can do there. And I’m looking forward to seeing what that entails in the next six to 12 months.

Thank you, appreciate that. And thank you for the interview. That actually also motivates myself. Yeah, thanks for sharing your story because I know when I’ve had previous members on, I’ve got a lot of great feedback from people who have listened to it. And for them, I think they’ve got a bit more belief about that they can become better swimmers when they hear that other people have done things like you have. So yeah, I think it’s great that you’re able to share it. So thanks very much. And yeah, looking forward to working with you in the future. Thank you, thanks. 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.