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 back to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. I recently returned from the male lives. We had a swim camp there and had 14 swimmers along with myself and three other coaches. We had Gary Haring from New Zealand, ex-Olympic swimmer and coach. Phil Rush from New Zealand as well who has the fastest double and triple crossing of the English Channel. And also a friend of mine, Ben Geard, who’s an ex-national swimmer and also an age group coach and has a number of athletes at the national level. So we’re all there along with the swimmers and I wanted to talk about some of the key things that I got from the other coaches on that camp and from talking to a lot of the swimmers as well because one of the things that I find really helpful is sharing ideas with other coaches and

the camps are really good opportunity to do that. So there was a couple of things that stood out to me that reiterated some of the things I knew came up with some new ways of teaching things. So I wanted to share those with you on this podcast. The first one is rotation. One of the things that Gary was talking about was there’s a lot of power through your rotation, through your hips and through your torso. There is a lot of power that you can generate through the hips and torso without much effort. So if you are able to rotate the right amount and you’re able to connect that up with what your arms are doing and with your kick, then you can really be very effective and powerful without needing to force things and put in a lot of work. One of the ways he demonstrated this was you got people to partner up, stand face to face with each other. One person will put their hands on top of the other person’s shoulders and he got the person who had

their hands on top of the other person’s shoulders to hold them as still as possible. And the other person had to force their shoulders left and right. So forcing a rotation side to side and the other person had to try and keep them still. You can’t do it. There is to the other person is too strong with that rotational movement. So no matter how strong the other person is holding you, you cannot keep them still because of that power that can be derived through the hips and the core and torso. So it was a good way to demonstrate the power that can be generated there and with freestyle, which is the main thing that we tend to focus on that rotational movement. You don’t want to be flat swimming is not done flat. It’s done side to side, but you also don’t want to go too far and often when I see someone going too far, they’re going all the way to 90 degrees on their side, which is just too much. We tend to like 35 to about 40 degrees rotation

through the hips and shoulders sometimes a bit flatter through the hips, but typically 35 to 40 degrees somewhere in that range is really good. A drill that I quite like to develop that rotation and connecting that up with your through all the way through your hips and shoulders is front kick rotation drill. And back about 20 years ago now. I went to a clinic with Bob Bowman who is Michael Phelps’s coach and if my memory serves me correctly, he said at that at that at that clinic that when someone joins his squad, he gets them to do this front kick rotation drill for an entire week before they join him with the rest of the group. So this front kick rotation drill is on your front arms by your side with your face in the water, preferably using a snorkel and you may need to use fins for this as well and you’re just going to rotate from your right side to your left side and you can go to 90 degrees for this drill.

That’s fine and it’s not a bad thing to do for the drill. Yes, it’s more than what you’ll do when you normally swing, but for this drill, that’s okay. So he’d get into his front kick rotation drill for for an entire week and I think it is used for a number of reasons. One you’re going to develop a very good and effective kick that way, but you’re also going to get that feeling of driving your rotation from your hips in your core and making sure it’s all connected up with your your shoulders and your upper body as well while keeping your head still because your head should be dead center unless you’re turning to breathe. So head say still the body rotates around it. That can be a really effective drill for developing that. So I found that to be quite a good way to demonstrate the importance of rotation. The next thing that I picked up from from Ben, one of the other coaches there was the we’re talking about the catch and the and the pool and

we’re talking he focused a lot on the skinny S shape that your hands should make as you go through the catch in the pool. So 30 40 years ago, there was a big emphasis on a big S shape pool. I think that led to too many people going out too wide and in too much under the body. So too much of a curve with the catch in the pool. But if you look at the path of the hand with all really good freestyles, it’s like a skinny S. I would sometimes call it like a long S where when the hand starts moving when it begins the catch, it’s going to go outward. So away from the center and then come in a bit towards the back and that would make this long S shape or skinny S as you go through it. And one of the things you mentioned there was that when you do that, you cover more distance with you with your hand as you do it compared to if you’re pulling completely straight. And Gary had this good exercise where if you were in water that’s deeper than you are and you have

your elbows into your side, you head out of the water and you try and just push straight down with your hand. So you push down, bring your hand back up, push down, bring your hand back up on both sides. So it’s like this left, right, left, right pushing motion. It’s quite hard to keep your head above the water that way, but if you do this sculling motion, this left, right, left, right sculling motion with the hands you can lift yourself up much easier. And I found that to be quite a good way to demonstrate the importance of a curved motion with the hand as you’re going through the catch and through the pool. So not too much, but that is where you can generally feel the water better. You travel, your hand will cover that little bit more distance so you can get a bit more out of it and your hand will find the right position where you can be most powerful through all the different phases of the stroke. Another good example that Ben had there was

that when he said he’s teaching beginners, he’ll get them to face, be in the water, face the wall, put the hands up on the deck of the pool and get them ready to jump out of the pool as quick as they can. But when they do that, their hands are a bit outside their shoulders and their elbows are out to the side as they’re ready to push out of the pool. And he said he then gets them to look at where their arms are in that position and that goes to show where you’re going to be most powerful through that catch position, which is very similar to that power diamond that I like to talk about. This podcast is brought to you by Form Goggles. Form empowers swimmers at every level to reach their goals, whether they want to get stronger, faster, swim further, or be more efficient. Get lap by lap motivation with real-time metrics and workout instructions right in your goggles. And Form’s recently released Form Plans, which included progressive series of workouts

to help you achieve your fitness skills or triathlon goals. You can follow along with the plan and your weekly swims will be automatically synced to your goggles. So you’ll swim through your workouts with real-time metrics and workout instructions all in your goggles. So it’s like having a coach right there with you. And I’ve had to look through these training plans and I think they are excellent for people who want to train for certain triathlons or reach certain fitness goals. It will build on each week and a really good way to progress, progressively build up your fitness. So if you’d like to follow along with some plans to help you reach your specific swimming goals, then check out Form Goggles at formswim.com forward slash effortless. And this will give you $15 off your purchase of Form Goggles. So formswim.com forward slash effortless to get your pair of Form Goggles. The other way you can sort of figure out

where your hands should be too is if you’re face down the water and you’re doing a front skull drill. So where you’re face down, horizontal and the water, your hands are sculling left to right out in front of you, just a normal front skull. If you do three or four skulls and then you do a big pull-through with both arms back to your hips, where you will find that you feel strongest and you hold the most water is if you have this skinny-ess shape or you could think of it as like an old keyhole. Think of like a really old house. They’ve got this long key that goes into this keyhole. One of those old-style keyhole shapes where it’s kind of got a half circle in the beginning and then it’s like this almost triangle out the back similar to the skinny-ess shape that we’re talking about. That’s where the hands should follow through the path of the pull. So I quite like that. So there’s the rotation. There was the skinny-ess pull.

The other thing that stood out to me was the kick timing and connection. And I’ve had this feedback with our online course as well with the eight-week faster freestyle course. In week seven, we cover the kick timing and connection and getting that to match up. And the feedback there and the feedback at the camp from what people were saying and from me working with them was that it’s one of those things that if people didn’t have it initially, it was quite frustrating in the beginning and it took them quite a while to get things to sync up together. But then once it did, they could really feel the difference. And I had this comment in the eight-week faster freestyle course from a swimmer who was going through it too, who said it was practicing it, practicing it was frustrating. It felt really awkward. It felt like I was going backwards with it. But then once I finally got it, swimming freestyle was so much easier and much quicker.

So the kick timing and connection is something that a lot of people do right, but a lot of people don’t. And if you haven’t got that timed well, then that’s really going to impact your speed and your speed and your ability to kind of get faster. So the kick timing and connection there, one of the key things is you can either think of your kick timing is when your left-hand enters, your right foot should be kicking downward. So you can think opposite sides. Or for some people, they prefer to think left arm catch and left foot kicking down at the same time. So two different ways to think about it. It’s the same thing, but just see whatever works best for you. So it’s a really important thing to get, but can be frustrating initially. But there was a couple of swimmers there who the kick timing was the complete opposite. But then with enough practice, they eventually got it. And I added this, it’s not a new drill necessarily,

but I added this single-arm freestyle drill that you can do where you have one arm in front and the other arm is pulling through. So just normal single-arm freestyle. But if you do it with two kicks only and you time your kicks correctly. So let’s say your right arm’s out in front, you’re just holding your line with it and your left arm’s doing the stroke. When you are going through the stroke, you want to make sure that your right foot kicks down when your left hand enters and then you do the left foot kick when you start to catch with your left. I’ve added that drill to week seven of the eight-week faster freestyle course in our membership there. So you can take a look at that video if you want to see the visuals of it. But that’s a good way to break it down to get used to that sort of timing. And again, it took quite people quite a while to get it. But again, once they did, made a huge difference. The other thing that became apparent

talking to a number of swimmers is sometimes you do need to do more. I know you’re effortless swimming. You want your swimming to feel easy. You want to be comfortable. You want to be smart with what you’re doing in terms of your technique and your training. And you don’t want to overdo it. But it still requires the work to be able to get to that feeling and concept of effortless swimming. So minimum, really, should be three times a week if you want to see good improvement. But sometimes you will need to do more than that. Four sessions a week, you might really notice a difference. I know for me personally, if I’m doing four or five sessions instead of three, I notice a big difference in terms of how I feel, my fitness, my swim strength. For me, four or five is a really good number to be swimming at my best rather than three or sometimes two. So sometimes you do need to be doing more. Sometimes you do need to be doing more distance as well

in your sessions. So depending on where you’re at, if you’re only doing 1,500 meters in all of your swims, if you were to step that up to two or 2,500 meters, good chance you’ll notice a difference there. So it just depends where you’re at. It depends what your goals are. But you might need to be doing a bit more or maybe changing the type of training that you’re doing. So that’s another thing to consider is are you swimming enough and are you swimming far enough as well? And the last one is the time it takes to see improvement and thinking long term. So the feedback I got from quite a few swimmers a week, two weeks after the camp was things felt awkward and clunky when they got back to their normal training. And that’s expected when you make any changes to your technique and to your stroke. So it takes, it really depends, but it can take 6, 8, 10 weeks sometimes for things to really fall into place and to feel natural.

So if you’ve got the mindset of I’m in this for the long term, I’m willing to give up my faster training pace for now for the next couple of weeks while these changes start to become more of a habit for me. And I’m willing just to commit to these stroke changes with and sticking to the drills and the focus even if my times are going to be a bit slower initially and I might get a bit frustrated along the way because I’m maybe not quite as quick as I was initially. But with that long term thinking, it will eventually click and it will eventually start to become natural and you’ll look back and go, I can’t believe I was swimming like I was two months ago or three months ago and I’m glad I stuck with the process. So think long term with the results. Everyone’s different. Some people get faster straight away, which is very common too, but it’s not always the case. So if you’re just willing to have a little bit of that short-term pain

or as Gary likes to call it, the pit of discomfort where things don’t feel natural, feel a bit awkward and clunky and it’s uncomfortable. If you can make it through that pit of discomfort, you’ll come out the other end a better swimmer. So that was some of the key takeaways from the Male Lives Camp. We’re running that again next year. So we’ve got two dates. This is the time of recording. We’ve got August 29th to September 3rd and then we’ve got another camp straight after it, September 4th to the 9th. I think there’s only one spot left for that second camp and a handful of spots left for that first camp. So if you would like to come along and swim in Paradise with us in the Male Dives, it’s all open water. There’s no pool swimming. So we do all the underwater filming, the analysis, the technique work and swimming around the islands, swimming to sandbars. There’s tons of fish. There’s reef sharks. There’s turtles, manta rays.

There’s all sorts of sea life you can imagine. It was amazing over there. So we’re running two weeks next year. If you’d like to join us next year, go to EffortlessWing.com forward slash Male Dives and there’ll be a link in this podcast as well to be able to join us next year. So I’d love to have you over there if that’s something that’s appealing to you and I hope you enjoyed this podcast as well. If you haven’t already left a review, if you did enjoy the podcast, I’d love if you left a review on Spotify or iTunes and that helps us get higher in the rankings which exposes us to more people. Thanks again for listening. I’ll talk to you next week. 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.