15 months of staring frustratingly at 130 on my watch every 100 yards, I said I got to fix that core weakness because it’s either just plain old weakness or it’s a lack of attention span through folk fully through the strokes. And long story short, the attention to that paid instant dividends. Developing that kind of cue for me has been fantastic because I could do that every lap. I could do it two or three times a lap. I could do it every kick if I wanted to. 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 guest today is someone who was on the podcast in late 2021 and I wanted to get him back on the podcast to talk about a recent breakthrough he’s had in his speed and his times with his freestyle because we’ve been working together for the last couple of years and the swimmer who I’ve had on has hit a bit of a plateau, but managed to break through. So I thought it’d be great to dig into that because I know a lot of people listening to this experience the same thing. They get stuck at a certain pace and they’re just banging their head against the wall trying to figure out what they can do to see a breakthrough. So Chris Scott, welcome back to the podcast. Well, thank you. I’ll start by correcting you. We’ve been working together for six years now. Six years, isn’t that crazy? It was 2018 when I first started in triathlon and after my first horrible race, I figured I needed a coach and I found you. So we’ve been at it

quite a while. It’s been great too. It sure does.

In terms of the recent breakthrough you’ve had, could you dig into the details there, like what pace you’re stuck at or that kind of thing? Yeah, for sure. So just a sort of a brief total history started six years ago doing triathlons. First time I was competitive swimming ever in my life. Not first time swimming by any means, but first time competitively swimming. And I had one pace, 210, 215, somewhere in that neighborhood. And when I started with you, we took a whole bunch up right away. That’s perfectly normal, you know, big jump downward. And then I was on this really steady progress trajectory down to 150s, down to 140s. And then leading up to about 15 plus months ago, I had hit a plateau at 130. And I found my top end speed and my all day speed sort of compressing, right? And instead of everything dropping, I was getting to this point where my top end speed was was not much better than 130, but I could cruise at 132 for a really

long time. It was really bizarre that everything wasn’t coming down together. Now, if I went all out, I could, my best at that point was 117. So like gas, fully gas, I could get down into that fast. But, you know, any tempo work, any race, pace work, whatever, what it was, every time I looked at my watch 130, 130, 130, 129, 131, it was just so beyond frustrating. And we were working on a lot of stuff. And I was not like I wasn’t putting in the time I was swimming at least four times a week, sometimes five or six. And I was doing, I’m focusing on at the time, primarily stroke rate, and a mild amount of strength training and stretching. Because I had, I had sort of recognized that those were weaknesses of mine. But in terms of in the pool swimming, I had been focusing on stroke rate. Because as, as you’ve said to me many times, like there are two variables here, there’s stroke rate, and there’s distance per stroke. And whatever you’re doing

needs to be attending to one or both of those. And, and the more directly, the better. So you and I were working on some, you know, some small things and focused things. But the real focus for my, for my work during that time period was stroke rate. And I had had a really slow stroke rate when I started in the fit, like mid fifties, maybe, and I was gradually working it up. But here I am working it up, I’m getting to be comfortable with 64, 65, 67, 68, pushing it a little bit. And the pace isn’t moving. It’s, it’s hard to work, but I’m not going any faster. And it, it ultimately ended with, I think, for lack of a better phrase, sort of an aha moment. The, the videos that I was taking myself and sharing with you, I would replay those all the time, you know, partly out of frustration. I’ve got, I’ve got to figure this out. There’s got to be something that’s holding me back. And it’s two variables. What is it that’s in the

way? And what really has resonated in my mind since the, the new succamp that I went to with you guys was something that one of your other coaches said to me, that’s rattled around in my head since he said it. And it was your back end looks like it’s along for the ride. And in the front view, you can see the back end wiggling. And in the side view, you can see it undulating. And enough, not a pretty undulation either. It’s not like a, it’s not like a combo of a butterfly stroke and a freestyle stroke. It was more like what, what it looked to me in hindsight was, it was, I’m taught as I’m going through the catch and the pull, as soon as a pull is done, my back end just sort of gives up. And that was causing this undulation of the back end. And the mind is a funny thing when you’re, when you’re watching yourself, or anybody else, for that matter, when you’re watching a video, you see what you want to see. And you overemphasize

in many cases, good things, and you sort of overlook some of the bad things. And the more I looked at it, the more I slowed it down. The more I freeze framed it, took snapshots. I finally got to the point where I took a snapshot and I sent it to you and I said, look, this is really bad. It was a pun fair snapshot because it was the worst possible undulation where if these are the hips, you know, the legs were like that.

But that was the low point of the undulation. And in a freeze frame, it really highlighted not a big problem. Even if it’s coming back up real quickly, you’re dragging your legs like a seahorse through the water. For some period of time, a half a second, a quarter of a second doesn’t matter. You are a dead weight anchor pulling through water for part of your stroke, every single stroke, because you’re not keeping your body taut. And that was the light bulb that went off. And so I took that and I coupled it with two things, stroke rate, distance per stroke, I put aside all the work on stroke rate, and that drag through the water has to be, I figured, has to be affecting distance per stroke. So winding back a little bit to come back to where I am now, I have always felt since the day I started swimming competitively that I’ve had a weak core and a weak upper body. But in this particular case, it’s the weak core

that matters. And so my 15 months of staring frustratingly at 130 on my watch every every 100 yards, I said, I got to fix that core weakness, because it’s either just plain old weakness, or it’s the lack of attention span through folk fully through the stroke. It’s one or the other or maybe both. And long story short, the attention to that paid instant dividends. And I was giddy. The next time I pinged you, and so I just, I just did, you give me a workout to do. Whenever 12, somewhere between 12 and 20, 100, whatever you can do, out of VO2 max pace, 30 second rests, tell me what you’re going to hold. And I went and I nailed it at like 124. 12, I think I did 12 in a row. I was a bit winded after that, but I figured 12 in a row. And staying in a narrow window 124, 124 and a half, whatever, I think it was a home run. And I thought, this is it, this has to be what caused the problem. And so, you know, long, long story, eventually the Aja bulb goes off,

you realize what it is, it’s been staring me in the face probably for 15 months. And once you sort of admit what that big problem is, and, and focus all your attention on it, you know, the other mechanics were decent. So it’s not like something else is going to be a problem. Once I focused on that, and it just, it just clicked and I took 345 seconds off that kind of aggressive, but not, not overly aggressive pace.

And was it, was it a combination of strength training for the core or just more about what you focused on in the, in the water? Well, initially it was simply paying attention. So there’s another thread here I can talk about in a minute, which is the ongoing works I’m doing to improve the body line in the water or the core strength, et cetera. There’s a program set there now that hopefully will continue to pay more dividends. But in the short term, it was simply, I can tell from the video that I’m letting go of the back end as my pull finishes. But before the next one starts, just simply staying focused on that and, and trying to try to discover cues in the water that allow me to know that I’m paying attention. It’s not, it’s not, I’m not losing it. Now, there’s no rear view mirror in swimming when you’re in the pool. You can’t see your legs. And so depending on how good your appropriate assumption is, and your awareness of, of how

you’re sitting in the water. And I don’t think mine was that good. I could sort of feel the undulation as it was recovering, but I wouldn’t feel it as it was, as I was going into it. So I’ve, what I’ve done since this aha moment was every few strokes, I will make sure that my, my legs, my feet, my heels are not that far from the, from the waterline. And all it takes is a little bit of a bend. Oh, it should take is a little bit of a bend in the knee for the heel to pop out of the water. If I had to bend the, a lot to feel the air, then I know that I’d let it go. And developing that kind of cue for me has been fantastic, because I could do that every lap. I could, you know, I could do it two or three times a lap if I, I could do it every kick if I wanted to. Periodically, I will, I will exaggerate the slap of the, of the foot to really feel like I’m out of the water and slapping it just to make sure that as I’m swimming, I’m not losing that connection between

the head, hip and heels. It’s been fantastically helpful because I catch myself losing that connection to the back end every once in a while. And it over time, you do it whatever every last trip every hundred several times, you’re eventually going to get to this point where it’s baked in to the muscle memory and your feet are never dive bombing, like they have meant in the past. I find, I find it, you know, the numbers don’t lie. I didn’t magically get faster or stronger. I changed this one variable and the pace dropped several seconds. So it’s, it’s been the easy cause and effect relationship. So it’s really interesting to hear, but like the only thing essentially you’ve changed is that body awareness and making a change to, to how you hold the body so that you’re just reducing drag. Because whenever I’ve spoken to, whenever I’ve had elite swimmers or really good swimmers who are triathletes on the podcast, they often talk about that body awareness and

just recognizing when they’re out of position. And so if that’s what the very top athletes are doing, I think for those that aren’t at the top, those that are maybe age group triathletes or whatever it is, it’s like, you probably need to do that times two or three, like you really need to have, try and build that, that body awareness because it can go so easily. And I mean, I’ve been doing a few analysis sessions with, with a couple of pro triathletes lately. And now you would think at the very top level, they generally would have quite good technique and be aware of the head position and all of that. But there’s a lot of them who still just have to get the head position right. Like we’re looking at it and going, okay, you’re lifting your head up too high as you go to breathe, probably just a consequence of swimming open water and siding. But you can see the hips dropping a lot. So it doesn’t matter what level

you’re at. It’s just the basics. I think if you can get those right first, have those front of mind, then you can build from there. But body positions should always really be number one. Yeah. And speaking as an adult onset competitive swimmer, a category of people that need some sort of support group, I think body awareness is terrible in the, in the water. Right. And walking around, running, cycling, perfect body awareness. But put yourself in the water and legs drop, the hips drop. And if you know, no, no offense to coaches out there who are, who have been doing this forever. But when you say things like engage the core, those of us that are adult onset swimmer is just sort of nod and say, yeah, sure, whatever. I have no idea what you mean, but I don’t want to, I don’t want to say that I don’t because I’ll be embarrassed. So there’s this to me that, that other thread that I talked about before of the, the strength training, the flexibility training, et cetera, that’s become

an extremely important part. And I think as importantly for the body awareness as for the pure strength and flexibility that it delivers, and to in, in air, rather than water, to be able to control the, the hips and the heels in, in air, being able to do that through various exercises, what one of which I’m focusing on right now is handstands of all things. If you look at somebody doing a perfect handstand, you would say, if only that dude looks like that in the water, that would be great. You know, it’s perfect shoulders, hips, heels in a vertical line. And when you’re really bad at that proprioception and that control of the hips and the heels in air, where gravity is way more your enemy than water, you get on the wall and you can’t even pull your feet away. You don’t, you don’t have the muscle awareness to even pull your heels off the wall, gently, like for a quarter in a handstand position you’re talking in a handstand position.

Right. So over the last several months, as I’ve been doing this more and more, I can feel that, that core engagement getting so much better. And if I can do it in 100% gravity, then I can certainly do it in the water where, you know, what a one-tenth your weight or something like that. I don’t remember the number, but you know, you’re a lot less your total weight and it’s so it seemingly should be a lot easier on the muscles to be able to manipulate the heels and the hips to the position that you’re after. But it’s just, it’s trying a lot of different things, both in and out of the pool, cues in the pool, using certain new muscles, feeling them as you’re using them to bring the heels up and it’s doing it out of the water in various calisthenic type activities to just continue to build that awareness. So I think I have to imagine that a lot of adult onset swimmers who just don’t have that experience

have never had to use those muscles in that way, that, you know, they, like me, they didn’t realize they had a problem there until it stared them facing the video. And they had to try to do something about it. And 15 months of being stuck at 130 finally finally made me shake it up. Talk to me about where you have picked up some of these dryland exercises. So one thing that I find quite funny is we had another athlete, somebody who’d been to one of our clinics who had done Jay Mueller on the podcast and he’d made some really good improvements in a pretty short space of time. And he said one of the things that helps him was hanging, just dead hangs off a bar. So now we’re into handstands. We’re just getting people to go, yeah, all in all different directions. There’s no shortage of directions you can be hanging. Yeah. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Form Smart Swim Goggles. Form have recently released their new Gen 2 version of the product, which includes an

integrated heart rate monitor, as well as a swim straight digital compass for open water navigation. They’ve also updated the ice seal. So they’ve got a new proprietary ice seal that accommodate a wider variety of facial structures and they ensure for a more comfortable and secure fit. I’ve been testing these new goggles for the last couple of months and I’m a huge fan of the new heart rate monitor. This is the first time that I’ve been able to see my heart rate in real time when I’m swimming. And that’s allowed me to adjust my effort and my output based on my training zones. So if you’re a triathlete or someone who wants to make sure that they’re not going too hard or too easy within a session, this is a really good way to do it. You can see your heart rate in the top corner of the goggles. So it’s always there right in front of you. And that can make sure that you are actually training in the right zone where I find a lot of swimmers do go either too hard or too easy.

So this has been a real revelation for me in terms of the effort that I’m actually putting in when I’m going at certain speeds and certain paces. So if you’d like to grab yourself a copy of the new Gen 2 version of the Form Smart Swim Goggles, go to formswim.com forward slash effortless to get yourself a pair of the new Gen 2 goggles. If you’d like to get the Gen 1 goggles, you can save 10% going through that link at formswim.com forward slash effortless. I have been doing dead hangs too. Based on your suggestion, I’ve always had an upper body strength, not problem, but just lack of lack of upper body strength. Prior to swimming six years ago, my endurance activity was running and cycling only. No swimming. I ran for 20 years. I never needed upper body. In fact, I wanted less upper body mass to be really good at running. So even before the 15 months of frustration, I knew this was a problem and I started doing

a little bit about it. I was kind of dabbling. It’s called program surfing. You find one guy’s program on YouTube and you do that for a while and you go do something else. It’s so horribly inefficient way to do this. And finally, I stumbled on this book called Overcoming Gravity, a well-known huge multi-inch thick book by a guy named Stephen Lowe and a bit of a biblical text for calisthenics. And I just built a program, just push exercises, pull exercises, some flexibility, and then a group of handstand related things. I stumbled on the handstand thing not for swimming. I just thought it would be cool if I could do it. I knew that it would help with shoulder strength for sure. It’s a little hard to be upside down on your shoulders for a minute at a time. That’s not easy work. So I figured it would be beneficial, but I was just doing it because I was intrigued by it. And he leads his book by saying people

that are the best at calisthenics are the ones that are the best at handstand. It was a lucky confluence of activities. The general calisthenics, calisthenics instead of, say, weights because I can do it at home. I don’t have to drive 20 minutes to the gym. And I’m so weak with my upper body. I don’t need weights. So just body weight was plenty for a while. And to put that in perspective, for the first 59 years of my life, I couldn’t do a single pull-up ever, not one time ever. And as part of this training, now I’m doing five sets of six. So not lightning the world on fire, but that’s a big jump in a small amount of time for an old guy. Yeah, it was just sort of lucky the connection between swimming. And I figured that calisthenics and weight training in general couldn’t hurt. Muscle mass is a predictor of longevity. And I’m not getting younger. So I might as well make sure I still have some muscle mass before it all wastes away. So I figured it would just be generally

healthy. And it turned out to be ideal with certain groups of exercises, ideal for swimming. Yeah. And it seems like it’s paying off big time. And it makes so much sense that just that control, especially through the core, the phrase that I, for the cue that I heard was you’ve got to swim from the inside out. And to me, that just means strong core. If you haven’t got control over your core and your hips, then everything else is going to be operating without much connection to everything else. So I think that strong core makes a huge, huge difference there. And I just want to shift gears a little bit here because you had a race recently where those good swim times were reflected in training in a race. And, you know, you’ve only had sort of one race since then. So you’ve got another race coming up soon. Just make sure it wasn’t a fluke, but talk to me about that race, how it went, how you paced it, because there was a couple of interesting things that you

mentioned in our coaching thread that stood out to me that would be useful.

Yeah. So it was us, Half Ironman in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And it’s a river swim. So I wasn’t going to be happy or sad at the time because I don’t know how strong the current was going to be or what have you. I was judging performance solely versus the rest of the field. And lead from six years ago to today, I’ve been making steady progress as a place within the field that do a little better in local races, obviously, do a little more mediocre in some of the either national or big time Ironman events. But it was steady progress down as a percentage of the world field. And I surprised myself with this, where I finished in the top 5% of a field that based on overall finishing times was very strong. 124 finishers, I finished seventh out of 124 in the swim. I’ve struggled, and this goes back to like two and a half years ago, the focus of our previous podcast, I’ve struggled with open water swimming. I’ve generally done

significantly worse per 100 in open water than the pool. And I think out of frustration, I’ve said a few things like, I don’t think I can swim slow in the pool if I tried. So to have a good result in open water was great. To be top 5% in a really top field was just over the moon. The hindsight 2020 criticism I’ll give myself for previous open water problems is not quite panic, but tension, I guess. And so this time around, job number one, chill out. Chill out a lot. There was going to be no warm up based on the logistics of the start. It was just you’re going to get in and go. And so I had to clear your mind. Think about nothing. Don’t think you’re not right. It’s just a casual swim in a river. Casing wise as part of that, I’m going to, I’m going to start at a pace that’s a little bit richer than all day. And I’m going to gradually turn it up. Because I got in hindsight, in prior performances, if I start too fast, I don’t recover from that. Even if I slowed out, even if I break into a

backstroke, whatever, I never recover from going out too hard. So I had to definitely dial back the beginning, make sure I wasn’t going too hard. If I, if I nail it perfectly, I’ll get to that point where it’s just a little bit faster than the all day pace, and it’ll ratchet up to somewhere north of the temple pace. But I’m done. And so clear the mind, chill out, laugh a couple of times, make jokes with some people, just relax, that’ll work great. The next, the next decision was where do I seed myself? It was seeding by your estimated time in a normal 70.3. So they said, you know, whatever you would normally do in 1900 meters, seed yourself there, you’re going to go faster than that per per 100. But, you know, the current is the current and it will be different depending on what they it is. So anyway, my strategy for seeding is put myself in the proper seeding. If I think I’m going to do 32 that I’m going to put myself in the 31 to 33 group or whatever it is,

don’t overseed yourself and don’t significantly underseed yourself. And there’s a reason for that, that became really obvious during the swim. And that is, there’s a tendency for other participants to oversee themselves. Some people didn’t go to the course talk and hear the instruction, seed yourself by your normal 1900 meter pace. They said, oh, this is a river swim, I’m going to be really fast. And they got themselves in the 25 minute group, right? But other people, they generally think I’m having a great day. And I’m going to, I’m going to out swim my, my, my times, you know, so I better, I better put myself up in the two, two pods ahead of myself, whatever. And if you, if you do that, people will pass you all day long and it gets really depressing. You don’t have a maybe with form goggles you do now, but without without form goggles, you don’t have any indication how fast you’re going, except relative to other people. So by seeding myself properly, if I’m having a decent day, I

should be passing way more people than are passing me because I’m having a good day. And I’m probably doing a little bit better than my seeding, but everybody else is overseeding themselves. And I’m not in the water. And it was a 20 to one ratio of people that I passed to pass to me. And it felt fantastic. I felt like I was flying. It’s annoying. When you, you know, you get into this, you hit a wall of three people swimming side by side and you have to decide that I’m going to go around them or even go over them, whatever. That’s not fun, but that only happens a few times when you carry on. But to me, that strategy works great because like I said, mentally, looking back on old performances, it’s a mental problem. It’s not a physical problem. I can, I can swim way faster than I have at races. But I get tense. I get pissed at myself. I, you know, all the, all things go wrong. So to, to try to maximize things going right, I don’t want to be passed a lot because then I’ll feel

like I’m having a bad day. So that was, that was number two. So stay calm, seed yourself properly, pass people all day long. I pushed for negative splits. So just gentle increases in pace every time I watched buzzed and my watch would buzz every, I think I had it set for like every 200 yards or something where it would buzz. And you feel most of them, you don’t always feel it, but it’s sort of a cue for, okay, you can pick it up a little bit as long as you’re not feeling really tight in the chest, you’re not, you’re not breathing too hard whenever. And looking back on my, the race was actually longer than 1900. It was 2,500 yards. And a negative split, the whole thing, every, every 500 yards was faster than the previous one, except for the very last where there was a traffic jam at the exit. So it was a really well executed race. The mental strategy during the race was one, the pool cue that I talked about with my, with my feet coming out. So it’s harder to feel

the wind on your bum when you’re lifting your hips out of the water with a wetsuit on. But your heels are still bare. So every once in a while, I would just lift my heel up. Am I close to the water and close to the water? Obviously I got some help with the wetsuit. But I just, like, I liked that cue. It works in the pool. I’m used to it. I’m comfortable with it. And it’s comforting mentally to know that, yep, I’m not letting go. I’m doing fine. So that was part one of the, of the swim mechanics. Part two was just metronome. Just get into a rhythm, full reach, catch, pull all the way through, and just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. And it worked out great. And I had another benefit with the sighting. We were swimming under bridges so you could sight off of the bridge instead of buoys that are barely above the surface. And it was a straight line race down the river. So it was really easy to stay straight, really easy to sight.

And I got into that metronome, passed the people left to right, feeling really good about the swim and gone out of the water. And, oh my God. To put it in perspective, the current must have been really strong because I did, my fastest 100 yards in the pool is 117. And my average pace was 112. So there was no doubt a really strong current. I’m comparing myself against everybody else. Everybody else swam in the same current and I beat all but six of them. So it was just a phenomenal result. And for the other two disciplines, at least for me, I end up doing way worse on the bike and the run if I have a bad swim, no matter the reason. Beat just gets in my head. But if I have a good swim, then I come out, I feel great. I can chill out a little bit at the beginning of the bike and recover the heart rate a little bit. And everything goes better after a good swim. It really sets the tone for the rest of the race.

Oh, there’s so many good things you mentioned there. One of them is just in terms of comparing yourself from previous races. Events are different distances, conditions are different. So I think you’re best just to use your general rankings against everyone else as a way to figure out where you’re at. But I think the mental thing is a huge one. I have, I work with a lot of different swimmers and they either go one of two ways. Sometimes they’re too tense and they tend to panic a bit in races. Then sometimes people are just too relaxed and they go too easy where they haven’t even gotten out of zone one really for their swim.

And we kind of want to meet in the middle somewhere there. And I think certainly that’s the, it’s almost like a, you just get this boost of energy. Every time you pass someone, you’re going, yeah, I’m swimming well. Like I feel good. You probably feel like you’re going faster than you are just whenever you’re overtaking someone. That’s a really sort of nice boost to have. So I’ve given the advice in the past, you know, see yourself up a bit to try and hold times. But in terms of mentally, well, that’s a, that’s a really good way to go about it. Yeah, I think if I were, if I were a lot faster, if I were way up towards the pointy end, I would say, yeah, put yourself up further because that’s where you’re going to find people that you can actually latch on to and draft off of. But further back, and it’s, I mean, I’m not, I’m not back in the pack if I’m finishing seventh out of 124, seeing my age group, but in terms of the overall race,

I’m probably, I don’t know, 30, 30% of from the front, they’re probably another four or five groups ahead of me, maybe more, I don’t know, but in any event, if I were faster, I would say stay, go up further because you’re going to draft. But where I am, you have no idea if the people that you’re starting with are draftable, they’re probably going to swim slower, and you’re going to leave them in the dust right away. And so it’s just a, if you’re looking for somebody to draft off of, it’s a coin toss in that sort of 30 to 35 minute range and a half Ironman, and you’re, you’re better off, my opinion, at least I’m better off going with feeling good about my swim. And if I get some drafting benefit, as I’m passing people great, but I’m not, I’m not looking to latch on to somebody’s legs and hang on for 500 yards. And the thing is too, you actually get, you do get some sort of drafting benefit from about

like a tiny bit, about eight to 10 meters away. But yeah, if you’re, if you’re coming up behind someone, I’d recommend, you know, come up like right behind them, get that draft, and then just as you’re about to overtake them, you can just kind of go around the side of them, because you are going to get that, you know, that draft off them. If you think about pushing off in the pool, if you’re going five seconds behind, you might be about five, six meters away from them, you still get pulled along quite a bit. So, you know, if you’re getting that little bit of draft every single time you’re going to overtake someone, that adds up as well. So, let’s say almost a way to actually get some draft as opposed to other times where you might not get any if you’re setting yourself higher. So, I think that, I mean, there’s so many, so many good things there and I love to dig into what’s caused a breakthrough for someone.

And for you, it sounds like it was the thing that was staring, I guess, both of us in the face was this body position, that undulation and just then addressing the problem and going about making a change there. What do you see as being, what do you foresee in the next six to 12 months as being the thing that will sort of help you continue to progress?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m going to ask my coach. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, if we’d sit in six years, we’d been working on a couple things at a time for at any one time. And I’m going to keep that strategy because I think it works. There’s a second coaching phrase that’s stuck in my head for all these years besides the one that Mitch told me in Nusa. And that’s one that you told me, which is, if it sounds innocuous, you’re going to be really disappointed that this is when it’s stuck over six years. But there’s a lot going on in freestyle. You said that to me once and that’s been in my, so there is a lot going on there. And it’s easy to focus on one thing and then let something else suffer or type, digress, regress. So I have to keep reminding myself, you know, check in on all those other things that I’m supposed to be doing well. Am I breathing right? Am I rotating enough or too much? Et cetera, et cetera. So I have to keep sort of going back and focusing

on those things. But in terms of what’s next, once I’ve eliminated that undulation, I just think it’s, all right, it’s back to blank drawing board. It’s time to look at new video and see where I am and see what the biggest bang for the buck is. And maybe it’s back to stroke rate. Maybe I, maybe we’ve got some room there. I think the leading candidate though, now that I think about it, is the first thing that you corrected in my stroke six years ago was front quadrant. I was horribly not front quadrant. And true to form, I overdid it. I got too good at it. And to the point where I have a pause out at the front of the stroke and, you know, it’s not bad. It looks good. It looks like a nice stroke. I think it looks like a really nice stroke, except for the back end and the undulation part. But in terms of the front end, it looks really good. And I had been working on fixing the cues that will fix that. So I think I’ll be heading back there. My guess is I’ll be

heading back to that, if not trying to incorporate it at the same time I’m keeping, keeping my hips and heels at the surface. The cue that I adopted to get front quadrant was keep your hand out until your, your pulling arm is doing its recovery. And there’s not to be too late. So what I’m trying to do is switch that to you need to start your catch as you’re finishing the exit. So it’s sort of counterintuitive. If you’re thinking front quadrant, you know, like, you should exaggerate it so that there’s definitely an arm out there. But it causes too much of a pause. And so there’s this, this speed up during the pull and then a slow down from not having any stroke going on at all for a fraction of a second. And then you speed up again, you slow down. And it’s, it’s not super perceptible, but it’s there. You can, you can see it. And I think eliminating that cause is going to be really important next. That would be my prediction. But again, we’ll look at the video, we’ll figure it out

and see what the biggest return ends for either stroke rate or distance per stroke. I think you’re right on there. Because the undulation there is still some undulation, as you know, like it’s not, it’s not completely eliminated. So I think that’ll take a while to really iron out completely. But already those results are great to see. So when you get that even better, there’s still another couple of seconds there, I think. So that certainly should be number one, just working on better body position. And one thing that I was thinking about recently was we posted that footage of, I posted that footage of Dan Smith a couple of years ago. And most, most people have probably seen that if you haven’t just look up Dan Smith effortless swimming, he does a really easy one minute, 10 hundred freestyle looks like he’s going about two minute pace. And I heard him talking the other day, because he’s doing a little bit of

coaching with some junior swimmers. And he was really focused on their, on their body position. So he was talking about the downwards pressure through the chest, drawing the belly button into the, in towards the spine. And just, yeah, he talks about that, like downhill swimming. And I’ve always kind of avoided that term because whenever I’ve seen someone thinking about it, they tend to bury their chest and head too deep. But everything’s got its right place and time. And that pressing down the chest to help raise the hips can be a really useful tool for a lot of people. And I’ve, I’ve been thinking about that as well. What, what is the cue there that works for me? I think everybody mentally processes those cues differently. And for some people, they’re slowing down, you know, that sounds dumb. I’m not going to do that. For me, I’ve been thinking of it in terms of finding the right balance point in my body.

So I think that the goal of saying swimming downhill is, is really to affect the, the balance point. Because I think there, at least for me, there was a tendency to have my, my head pointed a little too high, which would bring the hips and the heels down. And if, and by telling somebody who’s doing that swim downhill, they’re actually going to swim straight. So it’s sort of, it sort of depends on where the person’s coming from. And, and if you’re in that adult onset club, then, you know, that phrase swim downhill could actually work, not because they really are swimming downhill, they might overcraft and sink their head in the water. But there’s this natural tendency to, to be swimming just a little bit upright. At least that’s been my experience. And I’ve been thinking about just, just get the balance point further back so that, so that your hips and heels are coming up a little bit more naturally. And if you focus on that in the water, you can, you can feel, you know,

like you’re coming up with that no effort at all, just because you, you’re adjusting ever so slightly to change that balance point.

Yeah, absolutely. The most adult swimmers that I’ve worked with who are, who are really new, they hold their chest and hold their head like their face is just in the water. They’ve got to have their head like an iceberg, 10%, 20% out, but the rest needs to be in. And for whatever reason, I think it’s just comfort and not fear necessarily, but it’s just, it’s uncomfortable for them to be that much submerged in the water with their head or even, even just having their ears out. I think it’s like sometimes it’s that too. They don’t want to have their ears in the water because maybe they get a bit of water in there and it’s uncomfortable. But yeah, that, that useful cue of just sinking downhill can, can rise the hips. Yeah. Well, well, we, we don’t walk sideways. We don’t walk backwards. You know, our silly little eyes are always wanting to be focused on where we’re headed and swimming is different in that regard. And it’s just a, it’s a hard thing to fight. And I think it’s,

it’s just a matter of finding the right cue that works for you to get you to the right balance. And I’m, I’m bullish up on swimming downhill as a cue because I know what it’s trying to achieve and I know what it’s not trying to achieve as well. But yeah, I just, I just play around with the different cues and see what works and, and whatever sticks, sticks and it sort of doesn’t happen. Once you’ve, once you’ve equated the cue with the immediate physical changes necessary to achieve what you’re after, it doesn’t matter what the cue is anymore. It should be banana and, you know, be great. Swim like a banana. As long as you’re getting the results out of it. And, and I think that’s why so many different cues for the same thing have, have evolved because they just speak to people differently. Yeah, totally agree. Although I can’t believe it’s, it’s been six years, how time flies. I haven’t given up yet.

Hopefully look back in another, another six years and you’re just getting, you’re getting fitter, you’re aging backwards and you can tell you’re going to get faster. So yeah, thanks so much for being on the podcast. This has been terrific just to get your experience because I know how much you think about your stroke and your swimming and you’re looking for different avenues to find speed in, in all three sports. And you’ve been able to convey that I think to, to people listening. So I’ve got no doubt that this will be helpful for people. So thanks again. And it’s been, been great work with you. Well, thanks. It’s been fantastic work with you and let’s keep doing it.