When you enter and you’re at full extension, be that accordion that’s at full length and then you can compress it or contract it back in. We want to have that kind of accordion effect with every stroke that we take. Otherwise, it’s these really sort of short and fast in and out movements, but that doesn’t make good music. 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 number 169 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. In this episode, we’re talking about developing your gears as a swimmer. When people come to clinics, one of the most common things that I hear when we do the filming section of it is, I’ve only got one speed. We want them to swim there at their main event race pace if they’re a competitive swimmer, and often they’ll say, well, I’ve only got one speed, so I’ll just swim at that speed.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you want to develop your ability and your skills as a swimmer or as a triathlete, then it’s going to really pay off to be able to adjust the effort that you put in and the speed that you get back as a result of it. So in this episode, we’re going to explore that and have a look at some of the common mistakes that people make when they really struggle to increase their speed when they put in more effort. Now, one of the very first things that I’ll see is that when people try to pick up the speed, they start to spin the wheels. And what we mean by that is when they enter the water and they go to start the catch, they’ll pull through straight away. They will forget to reach forwards, like they’re reaching forwards for the wall in front of them, and they’ll forget to reach forwards and rotate and stretch out from their hip to torso through their shoulder. They won’t have that in the stroke. They’ll miss that

reach portion of it. So they’re essentially just entering and pulling straight through. But it’s kind of like, I picture it, it’s like an accordion, that musical instrument that we stretch apart, you bring back together. When you enter and you’re at full extension, be that accordion that’s at full length, and then you can compress it or contract it back in. We want to have that kind of accordion effect with every stroke that we take. Otherwise, it’s these really sort of short and fast in and out movements, but that doesn’t make good music. So we need to be able to really lengthen out still, even when we go to to speed up. So that’s the first thing. Make sure that you’re still reaching and rotating with each stroke. Now, the second one is, when you do swim faster, you’re going to need to apply a little bit more pressure and power at the front of your stroke. So the catch is still certainly the setup phase of the stroke, but you’re going to be applying more power earlier on.

Now it doesn’t mean that when your hand’s out at full extension, and the palm is facing down, that we want to rip hard straight away then. No, we want to point the fingertips down, tip them down a little bit before you start putting power into it, but it’s not long after that that we want to start to apply the power. So you may have heard this on one of the YouTube videos that we did recently. If you’re not a subscriber on our YouTube channel or on our Instagram, go and check that out at Effortless Swimming. And one of the videos I talked about, Michael Sage, who’s an open water swim coach, someone asked him on a recent webinar, how do people increase their speed? What are some of the things that they do? And the first thing he said was, you’ll increase the pressure. You’ll increase the power at the front of the stroke. So you need to make sure that you do apply a bit more pressure through the catch phase of the stroke. So you just get into it that little bit earlier.

Now the next one is, it’s quite minimal, the increase in speed that you’ll get when you increase the effort. So again, on this webinar that he did, he was looking at the different, basically the different gears that his elite swimmers have got. And now I’m sort of looking at, I think they call it like A1, A2, A3, as like the different sort of zones that they need to swim in. And it was one or two seconds difference per 100. So with a lot of his elite guys, you know, if they’re doing a training set that will get them to swim in three different, at three different paces, for example, it might be three to, oh, sorry, it might be nine 200s, where you’re doing three at one speed, three at another speed. And then the last three at another speed, he’s getting them to go like one minute 13 per 100 for that set for the first three, then one minute 12, and then one minute 11. Like it is very minimal, the difference

in speed. And I think sometimes when I’ve spoken to people about this, they think that difference needs to be like two minutes, 150, 140, it shouldn’t be that much of a difference. Now, obviously,

it’s less of a, it’s the same percentage that we want to sort of change it by. So it may not be one second difference, but it might only be two seconds, maybe three seconds, if you’re around like a two minute swimmer. So it could be like a 206, 203, two minute pace. It’s going to be much less than what you may think. And that’s often one of the mistakes that I see people making is that the gears are really sort of tuned a long way apart, instead of having them quite finely tuned. And they know the exact effort that they need to put in for that slight change in speed. So the more you swim, the more you sort of tune into this. And the more that you watch your times that you’re doing throughout a set, whether that be on your, on your watch, your Garmin, your Apple Watch, or looking at the clock at the pool, the more you start to tune into what times you’re doing in training, then you’ll get, you’ll get really good at it. And I find that particularly helpful when

you’re racing. So in a race, you know, we’re not going to be swimming at the same speed the entire time. Usually we will need to pick it up a bit at the end. You might need to go out a little bit quicker depending on whether you’re looking to join a group or sit on feet, whatever it might be. But being very good at finally tuning into that is a really important skill if you are racing. Now, if you’re more swimming for fitness, it’s still a good skill to have. Because as I said, if you want to develop your, your skills and your ability and your experience in the water, then it’s going to pay off to be able to vary your pace. So if all of your training at the moment is at one speed, perhaps you start to introduce some variable pace sets, kind of like the one I mentioned, the nine 200s, but the simplest version of that could be something like three 100s, build one to three, meaning the first one’s easy, second one’s medium, third one is fast,

but you don’t need to have that 10 second drop every single time, make it two or three seconds difference for each hundred that you do. So if you were to say, do that three 100 set, you might take 20 seconds rest after each 100, get your times, whether you look at the clock, where you get them on your watch, and you can repeat that set over and over until you’re really tuned in well to being able to know what time you’re going to go for the effort that you’re putting in. That’s a really important skill as a swimmer. And you might have found this already if you’ve only been swimming for a year, as you’ve gone sort of later on into that year, 10th month, your 11th, your 12th, you’re probably starting to get a good sense of what your times will be when you do come in and touch the wall, and you can really continue to develop it. Now, another thing that that we often need to do is tighten up the kick. So when people are trying

to swim quicker, they’ll often increase the the amplitude of their kick as in like the size of it. We’ve got to keep the kick relatively narrow, not much bigger than your body line. So while we still often need to increase the the effort and the speed of the kick, we don’t want to increase the amplitude of it too much. So you need to keep the kick fairly narrow and fairly tight. So make sure that you’re not kicking really, really big. And the other thing that that I often see happening is people will try and have most of their propulsion come from their kick, but it’s really got to come from the catch and the pull and sinking that up well with your rotation and your kick as well. So if you find that you’re completely gassed after a fast 50 or a faster, faster 100 from over, overusing your legs, then maybe just back off the effort of the kick a little bit and let your upper body do a bit more of the work.

That can be a really good, really good approach. Now, when you get good at this stuff and when you’re doing some sets in training that might be quite challenging. The other thing that we that we want to tune into is our breathing. So for example, I was training at squad this morning. One of the sets that we were doing was a heart rate set. Now in this heart rate set, the main set was basically 100 at best average, which just means like 100 as fast as you can hold followed by 450 best average. So as fast as you can hold. And then we had 200 recovery. And we did that four times through. So it’s basically like 100 plus 450s of like close, not max effort, because you want to sustain the speed across that whole part of it. We don’t want to blow out at the second or third 50. So it’s about 300 meters of some real work and then some recovery. Now in that heart rate part of the set, the hard part, one of the things that you’ve really got to do to do that set well

is to keep your breathing relaxed. If you’re panicked, if you’re like really sort of trying to try and to increase your speed and you’re really sort of frantic about it, you’re not going to last for that 300 meters. You’re going to blow up very early on. So what I always try and do when I push off the wall, I’ll just try and sort of tune into my breathing, keep it as controlled as possible and as sort of rhythmic as possible as well. Because as soon as I start to go into like a panic style of breathing or a rush style of breathing, then I know that I’ve lost it and I’m going to start to gas out pretty quickly. So just tuning into how you’re controlling your breath is kind of one of the next

phases of it because as you get quicker, you’re obviously going to be needing a little bit more oxygen, a little bit more air. So your breathing is going to start to get a little bit heavier and a little bit more intense, but we don’t want to blow out to the point where it’s, you know, where we’re really skyrocketing with our heart rate. So they’re just a couple of things that you may find will help you when you go to change your gears in training. Now if you’re looking for workouts that you can use to increase your fitness, your endurance and your speed and improve those skills as a swimmer inside of our video membership. If you go to the effortlessswing.com website, inside of our membership there, we’ve got a hundred and we’ve basically got a 12 month training plan there. You can download and it’s got three workouts a week there that will take you through sprint sessions, threshold sessions, endurance sessions

and it will help you get really good at developing this sort of stuff. So that’s inside the workouts section of the Effortless Swing membership. So if you enjoyed this, enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to it, whichever platform you’re listening on and I’ll be back next week with another episode. And if you’d like to get in touch with me, go to our website on the contact form. You can send a message and that’s the best way to get in contact directly. And we’ve got clinics happening all around Australia. We’ve got them in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and soon Perth and Adelaide as well. So and we’ve got them in Cairns and Townsville too. So check the website for those dates. In terms of our camps, we’re going to start those back up next year in 2022. And if you are located overseas, if you’re not in Australia, we do online coaching as well where I can help you with your stroke. So you can see that on the website under the membership option. So thanks very much for listening. See 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.