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 263 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. Today we’re looking at why you should look for the cause, not look at the symptom. Recently, I’d say a couple of weeks ago it was, I had really dry and red eyes like that. They were so itchy, they were really red, and I just could not fix them. So I went to the doctor, went to the optometrist and they just said, take these eye drops and that’ll fix it. And I tried that for several weeks and nothing was changing. So I thought, what the hell, I’ll go, there’s this Chinese medicine place on the freeway in my town. I saw the sign, I thought, I’ll just, I’ll try anything at this point because it’s really bugging me and I want to get it fixed. So I go and see this guy and he sort of asked me a couple of questions around diet, what I was drinking and so on. And he said to me, for the next week, I want you to have no alcohol and I would rarely drink anyway. He said, no alcohol, try and avoid most

sugar and don’t drink coffee. And I haven’t gone a day without coffee for probably a decade. It’s been a long time where I’ve never gone without coffee at all. So I thought off, all right, I’m willing to do it because I just want to get this thing fixed because it’s really, it’s quite annoying. And first day, I had no coffee, had headaches, had to sleep for an hour and a half. And mentally, I was not there. I just was not there at all. And then the second day, a little bit of that, but for the most part, felt all right. And then for the next six days after that, so I think I went eight days total, no coffee. Felt amazing. My body felt good. I was much more alert and didn’t have the cravings that I did the first two days. So took it a couple of days to kind of come off it. But I could feel that my body needed it. Now, the whole point of this, and since then, essentially, my eyes have been pretty much fixed. It took about three days, maybe four

days for the redness and the chin to go down. But then since then, it’s pretty much been perfect. Occasionally, I’ll get a little bit of it, but nothing like it like it was. I am back to having coffee on a on a daily basis, but I could feel that my body needed it. Now, the whole purpose of this story is what I was doing was initially treating the symptoms had nothing to do with the cause, which is why it wasn’t getting any better. When I eventually treated the cause finally got better, big surprise, right? So that’s it’s a fairly obvious thing. Looking back when it comes to your swimming, we’ll often see be looking at an aspect of our stroke, like maybe you’re zigzagging through the water, your hips are wriggling side to side, maybe your arms crossing over and we look at that and go, okay, well, that’s what I need to that’s what I need to fix. So I’m just going to think about being straight with my body.

But sometimes crossover with when your hand crosses a centerline, that is a symptom. That’s not the the cause. It’s not if we think about just going wider, that might not be the thing that’s actually going to change the crossover because it there might be something else in the stroke that’s leading to it. So we need to look at the cause. And I was speaking to my dad on the phone the other day, and he said, we’re just talking about this podcast. And he said, you should have Lee Nugent on the podcast. He’s he’s been a coach in an elite level for a very long time. He’s on the Australian team as a coach with Ryan Taylor, highly experienced decades of experience as a coach and a very good communicator and really knows his stuff. And so I’m looking to get Lee on the podcast and I’m sure he’ll be in an episode soon. And what he was talking about was when Lee came and did a clinic or a day with some of my dad’s athletes and some other athletes in the area, he

was talking about how he likes to analyze the stroke, what order of things that he goes through things in. And he said, this is really simple approach. So this is a good way to diagnose issues with your stroke and in what order. And it’s somewhat similar to our five core core principles. But this is a, I’d say, a really simple way to remember how to look at things. And he said that Lee explained that when he’s analyzing the stroke, first thing he looks at is body. So your body position, your body line, how you hold yourself in the water, which is your posture, where you are with your hips. Make sure you long through the spine. So looking at our body and just how you hold yourself. That’s the first thing. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form Goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles, meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improve with FormSmart swim goggles, including a free one year

membership when you purchase your goggles for only $228 US dollars. Now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the goggles and you have that one year membership included for free. And then if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to their workouts, training plans and their custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data of the goggles. So you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your goggles, including your time, distance, pace, they are right there in your goggles with form goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now. And I’m a huge fan of these goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort and my pace. And I think it’s a very

helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work with. To get your pair of form goggles and save 15% off, use our link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout. And that will get you 15% off your pair of form goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout. Second thing is head. Right. So what’s the head doing? And what’s it doing when you when you breathe? Is it moving around? Is it looking up and down? Right. That’s the second thing. So we need to get get that in place. The third one is the kick, making sure the kick is effective and it’s not too big, making sure the toes are pointed, ankles are relaxed. So making sure that there’s nothing going on or going wrong with the kick fourth ones rotation and making sure you’re not under or over rotating. And then the last one is the arms, what you’re doing

with the arms there. So that’s an easy way to work back from your stroke and see what might the cause be. So if we look and see we’ve got that crossover with the arms. Okay, maybe it is you just swing your hand around too wide and then it comes across. Maybe that’s the case, but also might be that you’re over rotating. And that’s causing you to or you like you’re over rotating that’s kind of throwing your timing off and causing the answer to swing around. So you can work it back from those couple of things to work out where should you focus. So to go through those one more time. The first thing we want to look at is body and its head, kick, rotation and arms. So I think that’s a great way to analyze the stroke and what’s the order of things I should be looking at them in. And if you are looking at a video of yourself, you’re recording yourself, you’re comparing it to some of the videos on our YouTube, some of

the analysis videos there, then you can compare some of the aspects that we like to look at there and compare it to perfect stroke like Dan Smith or Kim Alverton. But you can also go through that order and look at things in that way. And if your head is moving all around the place, but your body position or your body line, your body positions fine, then you may just want to start with your head position. So I thought that was a really good way to approach them. And so we want to look at the cause and not the symptom. Another example of this is I was getting a really really tight like mid back, sort of thoracic and sometimes lower back. And I would only get on the days where I was sitting down for three or four hours at a time. And so I would try and stretch, I’d go get a massage, you know, get it fixed. That’s great. But the cause was I had a really crappy office chair and it’s taken me way too long to make a change to this.

But finally, I saw a friend post about a chair that he had good success with. So I bought this chair and since switching over to this chair had no back issues, so much better. But it just took me a long time to realize that. And I think speaking personally, for myself, I know that when we do look at these, when we do have things that come up too often to try and fix the symptom, the thing that’s come out of it, but we don’t often look at and treat or change the cause of it. So this is this is my way of wanting to show you that there is maybe a better way for you to approach the things that you’re doing in life, because I know that when I have actually tapped into the cause and made a change there, life spent a whole lot better. And you can do that with your stream of stroke. You can do that with other aspects of your life. Thanks again for listening. Catch 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.