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 the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My name is Brenton Ford. And today’s episode is about when to be in the moment with your swimming and when to be out of the moment. And if you’ve listened to any of our podcasts from the past or watched any of our videos on YouTube, or the things that we put up at effortlesswimming.com, you know we’ve got a big focus on deliberate practice doing and concentrating on the right things with every lap that you do every stroke that you take in order to change your habits and improve your technique. So when it comes to swimming, being in the moment is really important to continuous improvement and making those little gains over time to become a better swimmer. But there’s also times where you’re going to need to be out of the moment, you’re going to have to project 5, 10, 15 years in the future and even two or three months into the future. And also look back at things that

you’ve done and be grateful for some of the things that you’ve been able to put yourself through. So for example, if you’re in the middle of a training session, you’re towards the end of a set, and you’re needing to dig deep, needing to push hard. Sometimes it can help if you can look at that a race or your big event that you’ve got coming up, and to be able to sort of draw on the expectation that you’ve got for yourself and draw on the feelings that you want to have and the results that you want to have in that race, to be able to think about that and keep it in the back of your mind as you’re having to push hard at the end of a workout or a training session. Whereas if you don’t reflect on that, sometimes there may not be enough meaning or enough motivation there to drive you to work as hard as you could in that set. So being able to project into the future and be out of the moment for at least a little bit of that session or a little bit of

that time when you’re swimming, that can make a big difference to how hard you push yourself. And it also helps to look back. So looking back over the last five years, 10 years, maybe 20 years, and be able to reflect and be grateful for some of the things that you’ve been able to do and being able to achieve. So for me, when I look back at the early mornings that I had as I was going through school, where I’d get up at 4.15 in the morning, would go through a 45 minute to an hour gym session, and then an hour, hour and a half training session in the pool, be finished by 7.30 before most kids have actually woken up. I look back at that and think how lucky I was to have that opportunity and to go through that sort of development and chance to push myself and challenge myself at such a young age when it’s not something that’s available to a lot of people. When I have that sort of mindset and look back on it that way, it’s very different

than if I think, well, I missed out on so much sleep or I missed out on a couple of parties here and there as I was growing up. Very different way to think about things. So being able to be out of the moment, where you’re projecting forward, you’re looking at what you’ve got coming up and what you want to achieve over the next five, 10 years of your life and being able to look backwards as well and reflect on how much you appreciate or how grateful you were for the opportunities and you’ve had in the things that you’ve done in the past. It changes the way you think about your exercise, your swimming and your sport. So for me, if I have to get up early in the morning and I missed out on a few hours of sleep and I might have only got five hours, if I think about how lucky I am to have this opportunity to test myself and challenge myself, I think about that workout very differently than if I’m begrudgingly getting out of

bed, think about how much I want to go back to sleep. So it just changes the way you think about things. So to have that balance of being in the moment and being out of the moment can help you develop as an athlete and if you’ve looked at any of the videos that we’ve put up on YouTube recently, one of the things you know is we like to, I like to avoid extreme ideologies. So if you go too far one way or the other, chances are it’s not 100% correct. So to be somewhere in the middle when it comes to, you know, for me I think of the different ways that we like to teach swimming and coach freestyle. Not everyone’s going to swim exactly the same. There’s very different styles when it comes to freestyle technique and teaching people what works best for them. So that’s why I don’t like to teach there’s only, this is the one way to swim fast. We adapt what we’re coaching to whoever we’re working with. So to be able to, to be able to sort

of go back and forth and find that optimum for each person is, is what we like to aim for. It’s not black and white. And so that’s why it’s sort of, you’ve got to be in the moment, you’ve got to be out of the moment and you’ve got to sort of switch between the two and you’re not going to have to be in the moment all the time. One of the best chances to really try this and experience this is at our Hell Week swim camp. This is coming up soon. We’ve got two camps running this year starting mid-October and so they’re they’re about to begin. And what we do at Hell Week camp is one of the things is we sit down and we, and you set your goals, your swim goals and even some personal goals and we put together a pretty detailed plan of how you’re going to get there. And we get you to think about, consider things that you may not have, that you might have missed and we look at what can pop up for you in the next six to twelve months that might stop you

from achieving these goals and what can you do about those things to either avoid them or reduce the, reduce the impact that they’ll have on you. So getting away from your day-to-day life, stepping out of that and getting off your phone, getting away from the TV and just being able to sit there with your thoughts and reflect and and also look at what you want to achieve. It’s a really good way to help your goals come to fruition because we’ve had people who have come to camp and they’ve achieved things that they’ve wanted to achieve for a very long time. Whether it be completing their first half Ironman or Ironman, making an Australian team for triathlon, swimming the English Channel, swimming the Rotnest Channel, there’s a lot of different goals that people have when they come to camp and just being able to take that week out of their day-to-day life and look at why they’re doing things and look at what it means to them and then being

able to sort of set a pretty detailed plan and have and work with us on that, then it’s a really good opportunity that most people don’t get. So those camps are fully booked for this year, but if you’re looking to be able to experience something like that, our 2018 Howe Week camps are now open for booking. So if you go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash Howe Week, you can book online. The camp is going to be at the end of October in 2018. There’s not going to be very many spots available. So I mean this year we had two camps fully booked and we’ve got people trying to get in, but we just don’t have the space unfortunately. So if that’s something you think would suit you where you go away and we basically train quite hard for a week and we also do a lot of technique work and development with underwater filming. We go and swim open water at the beach there which is just completely stunning. It’s like a postcard and we also do a

lot of other activities and things that if you’re a swimmer or a triathlete you’ll absolutely love. So go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash Howe Week and that’s a good chance for you to experience being in the moment and also being out of the moment. My name is Brenton Ford. I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes if you haven’t already and leave us a review. If you enjoy this leave us an honest review on the iTunes store. It helps us more than you know. 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