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. One of the mistakes I would make when I started coaching was to think that I could change someone’s stroke and change someone’s swimming in one session. And while you can absolutely make some changes to your stroke in the space of one hour, two hours, three hours, if you’re going to make that change a habit and if you’re going to be able to maintain that when you’re racing, it’s going to take you more than thinking about it for one or two hours. It’s probably going to take you a little over two months. And there was a study released in the European Journal of Social Psychology by a researcher, Philippa Lally, and her team of researchers. And they surveyed 96 people over a 12-week period to find out exactly how long it takes

to start a new habit or to form a new habit, or to look at that differently, how long it took them to replace an old habit. So if you think about that in terms of technique, well, how long is it going to take you to be able to maintain any changes that you’re looking to make? And what they found over the course of 12 weeks was the participants, they chose a new habit and reported each day how automatic the behavior felt. And at the end of the period, they analyzed the results and found that the average time it took for the participants to pick up a new habit was 66 days. And this is pretty much along the lines of what I’ve seen with swimmers who have come along to clinics or who join us in the membership. That’s pretty much the length of time that it takes someone to really see dramatic improvements or dramatic changes in their stroke. So to think that you’re going to be able to think about or make a change to your

stroke in the space of a couple of hours and be able to maintain that, it’s very unrealistic. Certainly you can make some improvements in a short space of time, but to then to be able to maintain it and not have to think about it, it’s going to take you a little over two months. So the rule of thumb I like to use for becoming a better swimmer or becoming better at anything really is 66 days and 18 months. So the 66 days is how long it’s going to take you to replace or change a habit. And the 18 months is how long I like to give something before you expect to see a dramatic improvement. Most people don’t stick with something long enough. So let’s say you want to train for the English Channel. You want to prepare for it to try and do that without too much of a swimming background to try and do that in six months is an unrealistic target. In all likelihood, you’re going to have to prepare for 18 months, if not

a little bit longer. I know swimmers who have had this goal in mind and they’ve started two, three years out to build up to it because they want to be certain. They want to have that certainty that when they get to they get over to England and they’re ready to swim it, that they’ve done everything they can to prepare. So if you have the mindset of I’m going to stick at this thing for 18 months and if at the end of 18 months I’m not going to I want to stop it or it’s not something I want to do, then that’s a pretty good benchmark to know whether or not you’re going to succeed at this thing. But give it enough time to actually make a change. And if you think about how long it’s going to take you to become stronger, to become fitter, to learn what you need to when it comes to racing in swimming or triathlon, to make mistakes and learn from them. It’s going to be quite a long cycle. So have that long term mindset and think 66 days as how it’s going to

take you to replace any habits that you need to replace. And then 18 months is the length of time that you should really give something to give it a good shot to know whether or not it’s something you want to stick with or it’s the length of time you need to be able to really see a dramatic improvement in whatever you’re working towards. So I got an email from someone who came along to a clinic in Sydney in July and this was about 40, 45 days ago. And she was training for she wanted to go into nine minutes for the 400 freestyle, which is the requirement that you need to get your your bronze qualification basically to become a surf lifesaver. And and she was around 922. So she was just above it. Needed to take off about six seconds per 100 for a 400. And she emailed me today saying she was down to 842. So that’s 10 seconds per 100 quicker in the space of about 40 days. And so now she’s looking pretty she’s going to be pretty confident

when she does the test to swim the 400 under nine minutes. So think about that in terms of right how long is it going to take me to make these these changes. She was able to do it in 40 to 45 days. Now we should be able to to maintain those changes to her stroke without having to think about them too much in just that amount of time. Well maybe everyone’s different but if she keeps focusing on that for another 20 odd days you can be pretty certain that if she’s been thinking about those technical changes every session that she’s doing and she’s been swimming consistently then there’s a really good chance she’s going to be well clear of that nine minute mark when it comes to doing the test. So keep that in the back of your mind 66 days and 18 months. And I think about that in terms of when I did the Ironman in New Zealand about a year and a little bit ago a year and a half ago. My swim was exactly where I wanted it to be.

My run was pretty much where where I wanted to be as well. But my bike was a long way off and if I look back at it I’ve really only trained for eight months on the bike and probably not properly for only probably for about six months. So if I wanted to get my bike time down to you know where I’d really be happy with it it’s probably going to take me another 12 months on top of what I what I did. Because to think that I’d be able to come from no cycling background to then be able to you know ride down close to let’s say it was you know five hours for an Ironman it’s it’s quite an unrealistic expectation and looking back it’s easy to see that I just didn’t give the bike enough time to develop. So it’s just an easy way to sort of think about whether you have given something enough time to to make the change there. That’s why I changed the effort of swimming membership to an annual membership. So this is where people from all over the world upload videos for analysis.

I’m in there coaching them so they’ve got their own private coaching thread. There’s workouts there’s a lot of technical videos as well. It used to be a monthly thing where people would join up on a monthly basis and you know the people that I want to work with people who want to stick with something for at least a year. So I switched from monthly to to annual because if I’m going to dedicate my time and I’m going to work with someone I want it to be a long-term thing. I don’t want someone who’s got the mindset of I’m going to try something for a month two months and just see how it goes. Now if you really want to make a change it’s not going to happen in a short space of time. You’ve got to give it a longer period of time. So to to join the membership it’s an annual thing because I’m going to give my time to you. I’m going to put together a plan and a and a bit of a framework for you to sort of work within for the next

12 months and onwards because I can see where you can go from where you are right now but if you don’t have the right mindset then it’s not you’re not going to have the success there and it’s not going to be very fun for either the coach or the athlete to to work with you. So that’s that’s why I made that change in the effort the swimming membership and if that’s something that you would like to do if you’re overseas or you’re in Australia and you want to start improving your swimming then the effort the swimming membership is where I coach people in an online way where you can get your stroke analysed and you can get a plan for becoming a better swimmer and a faster swimmer and we’ve got a lot of triathletes in there who are training for sprint triathlons all the way up to Ironman distance. We’ve also got masters athletes who are training for 50-100 freestyle up to people who are training for open water events up to

about 20 kilometers long. So there’s quite a wide spread or quite a big mix of of athletes in there but that’s that’s what makes things interesting and that’s where you can learn a lot of different things from people who are training for for different events. So to to have a look at that it’s effortlesswim.com forward slash membership and it’s not open at the moment it’ll be opening in the next couple of days but you can join the waiting list there and that’s the only way to to join the membership. So keep that in the back of your mind 66 days to change your habit 18 months is a period of time for you to really see success in something. 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