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. Hey, welcome back. It’s Brenton here. And in this episode, it’s a solo episode that I’m recording, so no guest. But this one is about the best way to return to the pool. In Australia, there’s a couple of pools that have started to open where you can book individual lanes for a certain amount of time. So pools are starting to open back up and I thought I’d do a podcast talking about the best way to get back to training once your pool has opened. How you can do it without getting injured and how you can do it so you start to get that fitness and strength back that you had before it all stopped. How you can get that back quickly and do it in a way where you can also improve your technique as you go through it. So there’s seven things here that I’ve written down.

And the first one is for returning to the pool is what timeframe are you looking at? One of the things that I’ve found over the last sort of 10, 15 years is that the times I’ve taken time out of the water of a number of weeks or I haven’t swum much at all. If I’ve done enough swimming in that time that I have gotten back into it, I can usually get back pretty close to where I was within about six weeks. So I think for most people, for most adults, if they train well enough and intense enough for six weeks, they can get back to where they were earlier. Now, for elites, most of those guys will be looking at four to six months because obviously they are training eight to 12 times a week and it’s a different level that they are at. But for most people, I think six weeks is a good benchmark. You might be looking at eight or 10 weeks depending on how many sessions a week you can do. But that’s what I’m sort of bargaining for is about six weeks provided that I’m training enough.

The second thing is how many sessions and how much distance should you be doing per session? Well, obviously it’s individual depends what you’re doing before this. But what I’m looking at for most systems that I coach is somewhere between 3,000 to 4,000 meters or yards a session. Now, for the first week, you might look to do a little bit less than that somewhere in the sort of 2,000 to 3,000 mark is probably a good way to begin. But if you have been able to either swim open water or do some strength work, yes, somewhere in that sort of 3,000 to 4,000 meters or yards will be a good range to stick to. And if you can swim four times a week, that’s going to be ideal. I mean, my rule of thumb is typically three sessions per week is a minimum for people, but there’s a noticeable difference with four sessions a week. So that’s what I’d recommend provided that’s what you can do. I know some people have got a limit on how much they can swim

because some of the pools aren’t allowing more than, say, one session a week. But that’s what I would aim for is four times a week. Then what are you likely to experience getting back into the water? Well, for the times that I have taken a bit of time out of the water, when you do get back in, the number one thing you’ll find is that the very first lap feels great. It feels amazing. You feel like you’re fresh, you’re well rested, and then as soon as you hit the turn, you feel heavy and you feel weak and it all just turns around. That’s what I find every single time. But expect yourself to feel very sluggish and slow and heavy, particularly after like three or 400 meters. That’s going to happen. You’re going to feel weak and wobbly and disconnected and is not going to feel good. So you need to be willing to persist through those sorts of feelings for usually three or four weeks is how long it will probably take you to overcome most of those sorts of feelings.

But if you know that it’s coming and you’re prepared to persist through it, then you come out the other side of it feeling so much better and feeling like you can swim again. But don’t be disheartened. Look, that’s just all part of it. And for whatever reason, when you do spend time out of the water, there’s nothing that can substitute actual swimming. No matter how much swim specific strength you’ve been doing, there’s nothing that actually substitutes actual swimming. So just know that it’s going to not feel great for a number of weeks. Then what type of training should you be doing? Well, in terms of what type of training, I wrote a six week return of the pool training plan and that’s inside our membership for members there. And I’ve also made two weeks of that available for free. So if you go to our website at effortlesswimming.com, find this podcast and I’ll put a link there as well so you can get those two weeks for free.

But within that sort of six week program, some of the things that we’ve done, like we start out very comfortable, but one of the first things that we really want to do is start fairly slow with some of the swimming. But as we progress through those six weeks, we do have a few efforts where we’re building or we’re progressing the effort. So it’s not like for six weeks, we’re just going to do completely slow swimming, all slow swimming. That’s not the case because for you to get back to where you were, we want to start to be able to change the pace a bit. Now you’ll probably find as we do these building efforts, an example of this is 4100s, building one to four. So the first hundred is the easiest one. The fourth one is the fastest one. Now as you do something like that, your times may not change that much because you’ll probably find that you’re very limited with the different gears that you can use. Your effort might increase but your speed might not change that much.

But we want to start to get used to changing the speed a little bit. So there are certainly some building efforts within those first six weeks. We even do some sprints. Even the very first session I’ve got in there 425s all out with I think it’s 15 or 20 seconds rest in between. Because what I personally find is that when I’ve had time out of the water to get back in, something that helps me get back quicker is by doing all out short, sharp sprints like repeat 25s. And it doesn’t need to be a lot, but that real top end, that real high end work, you tend to develop your swim strength a lot quicker than you would if it was all slow swimming. So for every sort of second or third session, there’s at least some 25s in there where I find that helps you kind of get back to where you were a lot quicker. The other thing that we do is there’s a fair bit of kick in there. Now, if you’re a triathlete, you probably might be wondering,

well, I don’t need to kick much if normally we’ve got a wetsuit on. But with kick, that’s what can provide you the stability through the rest of your stroke. So even if you are doing triathlon and you feel like kick is wasting your time, it’s not, it can really help you with the rest of your stroke. So it is worth doing the kicking there and doing it on your side, on your front, on your back, mixing it up, changing direction. And that’s what’s going to help you develop an effective kick. Because we know you don’t need a hard kick, but we want an effective kick. And that means upwards and downwards pressure on the kick. We want to keep it relatively narrow within the line of the body and keeping the toes somewhat pointed. And that’s what’s going to give you the stability and control through the rest of the body, through your hips, through your core, and be able to connect that up with the catch and the rotation.

We’ve got some skull in there just to start to get that feel and that awareness on the hands and the forearm again. And with the skull that we do, quite a bit of it is with a pull buoy on and a band and ankle strap. Because that way it can also help develop that upper body strength through the deltoids, through your forearms and through your hands that’s needed for when you start to get some more distance going. And we also do a reasonable amount of, I’d call it strength work, but pull work. So you’ve got the pull buoy, you’ve got the paddles on and sometimes the ankle band as well. Just to isolate the arms and the pull to start to fast track that a little bit. So obviously taking the kick out of it and most of that strength is, or most of that work is going to go into the arms. So we really start to build that up through those six weeks there. So that’s what we look to do. And then in terms of drills, most of the technique work that we do

in that training plan is done in the warm up and we change the drills as we go. We sort of follow those five core principles that we’ve got on how to swim fast. We follow those throughout the six weeks. So as we start to get into week three, four, five and six we start to do a bit more of the doggy scoop drill, YMCA drill, some of those catch and pull drills as well as sort of rhythm drills and things like that. You start out with the basics, finding your balance, getting the kick working, getting the scale happening and then we start to progress to the later parts of the stroke. Another thing that I would recommend for most people is warm up with fins. The purpose behind that is with fins on it’s going to take a lot of the load off your upper body and your shoulders. And one of the issues that people can come across is just getting a few niggles here and there through their shoulders or getting injured through different parts of your upper body.

And sometimes that can come from either not warming up before you get in the pool or by just kind of having too much load in the beginning. So I think it’s really worthwhile doing some warm up with fins on. Even if it’s the first two to four hundred meters in the session that’s a good way to just work into it and build into it. So most of the sessions that we’ve got are with fins on for the warm up part of it. And when I used to coach the master squad that I used to coach I’d say probably four out of five sessions that we did we would warm up with fins. And I think it’s a really good thing to do particularly now when you haven’t been swimming for a number of weeks. The next thing is it might be worthwhile doing a bit of theraband work before you train. So there’s a five minute theraband warm up that I’ve got inside the membership. It’s this five minute routine that I will go through as often as I can before I train

because it’s going to help not only warm up the upper body but strengthen those smaller controlling muscles through the shoulders by using the theraband. So it’s an easier routine. Most people can find that five minutes to fit it in and it’s something that particularly anyone who’s had shoulder issues or anyone who just feels like it takes a long time to get going it’s something that can be useful for them. And the very last thing here is I’d recommend doing a time trial in your first week back something like a 400 meter time trial. Now the purpose behind this is one of the things is humans that we want to see one of the things that makes us feel good and be motivated is seeing progress. So if you do a 400 time trial in that first week that you’re back see how slow you are, realize how slow you are since you’ve been out of the pool and that’s going to give you a good benchmark to then work from over the next six weeks

whatever it might be for you a good benchmark to then look to improve upon. So let’s say that first 400 let’s say it takes you eight minutes in the next six weeks if you get it down to seven minutes 30 or quicker then you’re going to be pretty pumped up you’re going to be motivated to continue to make that improvement and in when was it November I came off the mountain bike and injured my shoulder and I couldn’t swim for a number of weeks or I could only kick basically and when I was able to swim again my hundred times or my hundred pace was 20 seconds slower than what it was before I came off the mountain bike and that was frustrating but I knew if I just kept persisting kept training that would eventually come down and it was good to see it come down and I think it took me two or three weeks to get it down to sort of 10 seconds 15 seconds slower than where I was and then it was probably about about eight weeks down the track

I was able to get it pretty close to where I was before that but obviously an injury is a little bit different than not being able to swim but it is good to see that progression so doing a time trial having some sort of benchmark to measure yourself against is a good approach now I wouldn’t normally recommend that but I think that kind of thing is good to see and that’s what might keep you motivated coming back into the water now as I mentioned earlier if you want to get the first two weeks six week plan for free then visit the website have a look at the post that this podcast is on and there will be a link there to be able to get it or if you’re a member jump inside the membership it’s under the workouts and you can download print off the six week plan it’s a PDF that you can just print off there and we’ve got links to all of the drills so we’ve got videos of them all and there’s sort of some comments under most of the sets that we do

explaining the purpose of it how to pace it how you should be feeling and what’s the reason that we’re doing it so go and check that out that’s our six week return to the pool training plan and that is what I would recommend now some of you I’ve also had the question what if we can’t get back in the pool and we can only swim open water well I’m going to answer that on another podcast that will be out in the next couple of days and I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast I’ll see you next week thanks for watching to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com