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 episode number 221 of the Effortless Swimming podcast. On today’s episode, I want to talk about five things that have helped me break out of a swimming rut because for the last three months or so since coming back to the pool from our most recent lockdown and time out of the pool here, it’s taken me ages to get back much longer than what it had in the past. And so I wanted to share a couple of things that helped me finally get back down to the times that I was doing prior to prior to taking some time off in the water. So before we go into this episode, if you’ve got 15 seconds and can leave a review on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you listen to this podcast, I’ll be hugely appreciative because that’s what helps us get found by more people. And any new assistant to the show will often look at the reviews and the ratings. And so if you could leave an honest review, I’d be very grateful for that. So if you can spare 15 seconds,

thank you very much. Now, in this episode, those five things that I want to talk about, the first one is the first thing that helped me get back to where I was. You know, because prior, you know, since November, I was basically swimming between two to eight seconds slower per hundred compared to where I was prior to it. And I just like really finding it difficult to to come back. So the first thing it helped was to do a blowout session. Now, what I mean by a blowout session is a session that’s a fair bit longer than what you’d normally do. So typically when I’m training, my sessions would be around about 4k, sometimes a little bit less, sometimes a little bit more, but around about 4k. And I wasn’t doing much aerobic work before that. And one of the things that I respond really well to in terms of my fitness is longer aerobic sessions. So I started to do a couple of those. And I found that by in those sessions, which are around about

5k, so, you know, about 25% longer than what I’m used to, around the three and a half K mark, my mind was coming up with excuses to try and get me out of it. I was thinking, I could tell the group that I swim with, I need to go and take the kids to school, I need to get back home and look after the kids so my wife can go for a run. I was just coming up with all these excuses and I knew that’s what I was doing. But and thankfully I didn’t get out of the water when, you know, when I just was trying to come up with reasons why I should. And I just stuck it out. And I actually came good after about the 4k mark, like why strokes started to feel a bit better. And I just got better and better from the fourth to the fifth K mark. So that’s the first thing that helped was a blowout session. So it’s something that’s a fair bit longer than what you used to. The whole session was pretty much just aerobic pace. So it was really comfortable.

And it, yeah, that was the first thing that made a big difference for me. The second thing was a sprint session where we’re doing lots of repeat 25s. So we’re in a 50 meter pool where we train. We were doing, I think it was like about 30 or 40, 25s at almost max effort. And and I found that that really helped. So rather than doing like hard 50s and that kind of thing, just much shorter intervals of 25 meters with a bit of rest in between, that was the second thing that sort of just helped me start to start to feel good. So I’d mixed it up with some flyers and backs and breast and free. And and then I was starting to find that like throughout that that session that yeah, I started to get fatigued and my stroke was starting to fall apart a little bit towards the end. But it was just lots of those, you know, repeats at fast speed, high intensity, with enough rest in between. Where it was just kind of like a bit of a shock to the

system compared to what I’m used to doing. Now those first two, all right, they’re pretty simple ones. They’re types of sessions that helped. Now the third one that I think really helped was I got back on a Monday from a big weekend of coaching. So I coached her close to probably 20 hours and I trained a bit that week before and I was pretty exhausted. And so I booked in to get a massage and I went and got a massage and it was one of the hardest ones I’ve ever had. Where in pain, you know, through most of it. And I just got beat up basically. And that, the following two to three days after that, I felt so loose, so flexible. And when I was swimming it just, you know, I just felt like I could move like I was when I was 16 years old. So a really hard massage and I just got like a I got like a time massage that was had the person walking over me and just like, yeah, just like going very hard compared to, you know, I guess the usual one that I

would get, made a big, big difference. So don’t open me up through my hips and lower back and shoulders. And I found that when I did swim the following days after that, that I sat much better in the water. Like my hips were higher, my legs were higher. Because I think for me, you know, I get fairly tight lower back, I think from often sitting down and sometimes from surfing as well. And so that freedom through the, through the hips and hamstrings made a big difference just with body position. So I felt a lot better after that. The fourth thing was kicking. So doing some kicking, some pure kicking, so without a, without fins, without a snorkel, without a kickboard, just doing more kicking within my warm-ups. I find that I swim better when I do that. So that’s, you know, something like 8-25s of fairly hard kick. Because for me, and I’ve seen this with other swimmers too, when you’re kicking well, you’ve got much better balance and stability in the

water. Now you’re probably not going to get that much of your propulsion from your kick if you’re an adult swimming or a triathlete. But it will give you great balance and stability. And when you have that, then you typically will be much better through the front end with your catch and pull and those other things. So with a good kick, then I found that I again sat better in the water with my body position and things just felt better coordinated throughout the stroke. The fifth thing is, in some of my sessions, like I think a lot about technique, obviously it’s the thing that I talk about the most and it’s what I coach and I teach day-to-day. So I’m always thinking about it. Now in one of the sessions, and the session where I actually got back to the times that I was doing, I was thinking about my stroke early on, but then I was just, I just thought, no, what I probably need to do here is just forget about my stroke and just tune into the

effort and the rhythm of my stroke. So don’t worry about my catch, don’t worry about my entry, just tune into how you’re feeling and the output and the rhythm of the whole stroke and of the set. And I found that that made a huge difference for me because then I wasn’t overthinking anything and I was just more conscious of and more aware of what my times were, how I was feeling and then being able to tune into that rhythm, it’s almost like that, you know, the dancing part of swimming, that that actually helped me hold slightly faster times because I was aware of that, because you speed the combination of your technique and your stroke rate. So I found there I was able to hold a slightly faster stroke rate, have it feel comfortable and I could just keep my breathing under control and I was really pleased with the times, I was back to where I was prior to that that recent lockdown. So it was actually not thinking about

technique for at least some of my session and just just focusing on how I felt and the rhythm of the stroke that actually helped me sort of get back there. So I just want to share those five things with you because speaking to a lot of the athletes that I coach through our stroke analysis membership and also some in the membership is it’s like it’s a pretty common thing for a lot of people from from what I’ve heard and what I’ve with the people I’ve spoken to that quite a few people have been sort of stuck in a little bit of a rut lately and and so hopefully some of these things might help you get back to where you should be or far beyond it. So thanks very much for listening to the podcast and if you haven’t left a review I’d love it if you could and I’ll be back with another episode 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

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