Welcome to Effortless Swimming, the podcast for swimmers, triathletes and coaches. Join Australian swim coach Brenton Ford as he reveals the latest techniques and information to improve your swimming. Let’s dive right in. Hi Brenton Ford here from Effortless Swimming. In today’s podcast we’re looking at mistakes to avoid when doing your workouts. When we have an athlete join the Effortless Swimming membership, we ask them what they’re doing in their swim sessions. And if that athlete hasn’t come from the swim squad background, there’s usually a few mistakes that they’re probably making in their swimming sessions. You need to think about your swimming as though you’re a race car team. There’s a lot of different variables that you can play around with to find extra time. In a race car you’ve got the driver, you’ve got the engine, tuning, what tyres you choose to drive, how efficiently you choose to drive that car, who you have on your team to work on the car.

So there’s a lot of different things that you can play around with to find extra time. And the exact same thing goes for swimming. You’ve got your technique, your fitness, strength and flexibility. You’ve got the skills, how good are you in the open water, how good are your starts and turns, and how good are you at siding and drafting. So there’s a lot of different things that you can improve upon to find extra time in your swim league. So fitness and your swim sessions are one of those things. And it’s a really important part of the puzzle when it comes to improving as a swimmer. So if we have an athlete come to us and they don’t have a swim squad background, these are the four main mistakes that we see being made. The first one is taking the warm up too hard and not wearing fins. In 90% of the sessions that I coach I have my swimmers wear fins for the first four or five hundred metres of the warm up.

Now it’s definitely not a requirement, but we’ve found a lot of benefit to doing it. If you have no chance to do any dry land warm up before you get in the water, then wearing fins is going to allow you to ease your shoulders into it, because that’s what tend to tighten up first is your shoulders. So if you’re wearing fins, it allows you to take the pressure off your shoulders and your pull phase, and you can just focus on being in the right body position and just starting to get your technique right. It also sits you in a much better body position than if you didn’t have fins on. So at that slightly faster speed, it allows you to sit that little bit higher in the water and get a feel for the correct body position. And last of all, by swimming that little bit quicker with fins on at the start, then you get a feel for what changes you need to make to your stroke to be more efficient. So as you’re going faster, you have a better feel for what’s creating drag,

and by having that better feel for what is creating the drag, then you know what kind of adjustments you need to make to your stroke, to your head position and body position in order to be in a more efficient position. So they’re the three main reasons that we wear fins, and the number one rule in warm up is to always take it easy, except at the end of a warm up where you might need to get your speed going. The second one is always training in the gray zone. When I was a young kid growing up, I thought I’d get the most out of each swim session by going as hard as I could for everything in the session, even if it was meant to be done easy. But the problem with this is it trains the wrong zone. So if you’re swimming for 60 minutes or 90 minutes, and you’re going everything at the same pace, which is maybe 85% or 90% effort, then you’re probably training the gray zone, that area where you’re not quite going all out

or you’re not quite going at race pace, and you’re not quite going at an aerobic level either. So you’re training somewhere in between there. Then if you’re swimming your whole session in that sort of zone, then you’re probably not getting a feel for what kind of effort you need to put in to go for different paces, but you’re also not getting the training in the different heart rate zones. For example, if you’re doing a set of 1,200s, which are designed to be done at an aerobic heart rate, so let’s say it’s 60% effort, but if you got that set at 80% or 90% effort, then you’re not getting the benefit of that swim set. And as an athlete, this is something that’s very hard to do. You’re used to pushing yourself. You’re used to going hard. And just logically, you’d think that by going harder, faster, you’re going to get more benefit from that swim set. But the opposite is true. As long as you’re doing what the set’s designed for,

whether that’s building your aerobic base, whether that’s looking to change up your pacing or increase your speed after going easy, then as long as you train what that set’s designed for, then you’re going to get the most out of that workout. So coaches know what they’re putting the workouts together for. So if you go faster or if you go slower than what they’re talking about, then you’re probably not going to get the benefit from that session. We do a lot of variable pace or ascending pace work in our swim sessions. For example, we might do 4-150s, building 1-4, so the 4th 150 is the fastest one. And as you get faster, you want to track your times. You want to see how much effort you have to put in to go at different paces. But it also gives you a feel for being able to change your pace in a race. So if you’re doing a 2K open water swim, then you know that you can increase your pace for what might be 2 minutes.

And then you can bring it back down a little bit. And then if you need to get on someone’s feet, again you can increase your pace and then bring it back down a bit. So being able to change up your pace in a race only comes from doing that in training. The third one is swimming continuously for the whole session. So if you haven’t come from that swim squad background that we talked about, then you may not be breaking up your workouts. So rarely will I have my swimmers do anything longer than 400 meters. Most sets are broken into anything between 25 and 200 meters. Occasionally we’ll do some 3 or 400s. But most of the time it will be a much shorter distance that we break it up into. And this is good because it allows you to get some rest to recover and regain your technique. So if you’re going 2 kilometers straight in your swim session, you’ll probably find that your technique starts to fall apart a bit.

You start to get quite fatigued and quite sore in your shoulders. And it’s very hard to regain your composure when you’re swimming. But if you break that 2 kilometers up into a set of 10, 200s or 2, 100s with 20 seconds rest in between, then you’ll find that with each rest that you get, you get to recover and then you get to refocus on what you should be doing with your stroke and you also get to have a look at your pacing as you go. So if you’re swimming your workouts without breaking them up into smaller sets and without changing the pace as you go, then you’ll probably find that you’re likely to train in that gray zone that we just spoke about and you’re also likely to have your technique fall apart towards the end of a session. So if that’s happening to you, make sure you break down your workouts into smaller components of anything between 25 and 200 meters. In the effortless swimming membership, we have over 100 workouts

that you can download, print off and take them to the pool, which are designed in a way that we find helps not only your technique, but is really good for your fitness. The last one is having no intent behind each part of your workout. So if there’s no reason or purpose that you’re doing each thing on your workout, then there’s no real reason to do it. If your coach can’t answer why are we doing this part of our swim session, then there’s no reason to actually do it. There should be a real intent behind everything that you do, even from the warm-up to getting ready for a main set to each part of the main set to even the swim down. So whether that’s focusing on a certain part of your swimming stroke or a certain part of your fitness or your race pace or your skills, there’s really got to be a reason to be doing everything on your workout. So ask your coach, why am I doing this part of the workout? If they can’t answer it, then there’s no real reason to do it.

If they can’t do that, then just make sure you find a reason to do it. You might focus on your breathing for that lap or you might focus on a certain aspect of your stroke for that part of the set. So if there is no real purpose that you can see with the part of your workout, then find one, create one for yourself and have something to work on because there’s nothing less motivating than having no reason to be doing something. So if you can somehow tie that to your goals, whether that’s an Ironman swim or whether that’s an open water swim or a pool swim, tie it to that big goal that you’ve got in your mind and then you’ve got a real reason to be doing things. If you need help with your swimming, look at joining the Effortless Swimming Membership where you can upload a video for analysis where myself or one of the other coaches can do an in-depth video analysis for you and we can give you some specific things to work on

so that you’ll swim faster and you’ll swim easier and you’ll actually enjoy swimming because that’s one of the biggest components of improving as a swimmer is enjoying when you’re in the water. You can also download from the 100 plus workouts that we’ve got available where you can print them off, take them to the pool and actually have some structure to your swim sessions. You can also access all of our video programs from the Art of Triathlon Swimming to Effortless Freestyle to Swim Gym Pro, which is our strength training program. So if you’d like access to all of our products, all of our workouts and access to myself and the other coaches, then join the Effortless Swimming Membership at EffortlessSwimming.com. I’ll be back next week with another podcast with some more tips to help you swim faster and easier. My name is Brenton Ford. See you next week. Thanks for joining us on the Effortless Swimming Podcast.

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