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.

Do you want to swim smarter and swim faster? Then you need EO SwimBetter, the only swimming device that lets you see the previously unseen. Because the first time, you can understand exactly what your hand is doing on every stroke, analyze and adapt your technique, see the effect of every single adjustment, and all with the device that you won’t even know that you’re wearing. Swim faster, faster with EO SwimBetter, a stroke of genius. Dive into the swimming evolution at eolab.com forward slash swim better. Use the code Effortless a checkout to receive your first 12 months free on an annual gold membership. Hi and welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. On today’s episode, I’m going to cover CSS training and how you can use it to improve your aerobic capacity when you’re swimming, so that you can sustain faster times for longer distances. So if you are training for any events that are 400 meters or more, this is the real fundamental training that you should be including

as part of your workouts at least once a week, but ideally twice a week. So we’re going to dig into that and see what it is, how you can use it, and what types of sets that you can do to make sure that you are improving and increasing your aerobic capacity. And this makes me think of an athlete that we’ve had on this podcast before, Josh Sally, and Josh started swimming a bit over 18 months ago. And when he first started swimming, he was struggling to swim more than about 25 meters at a time without running out of breath. Fast forward to today, and he is averaging in the 120s for his half Ironman events, massive improvement in quite a short space of time. What comes to mind with Josh is there’s two things that he’s really improved. One, technique, massive improvement in his technique. Number two, his aerobic capacity when he’s swimming. Now the reason I make that clarification there for his aerobic capacity when he’s swimming is that

yes, overall his aerobic capacity is improved with the training that he’s been doing, but swimming fitness is very different to running fitness. Now if you think of the athletes or the cyclists who are racing in the Tour de France at the moment, which is going on, if you have a look at their legs, they have very strong, very muscular, well-defined legs. And the reason for that is the amount of training that they do, their body gets very efficient at pumping blood to where it needs to be used. And that’s why they have those strong muscular legs because they’re using them a lot. And if you think of a river that has lots of different branches and outlets and it goes out to sea, when that river gets a big influx of water, so that rains really heavy, then you see all of those rivers getting pushed up high and sometimes expanding into new rivers and estuaries, similar thing with your capillaries and your blood vessels.

When you are using certain types of muscles more, then you’re going to get more blood flow there and you’re going to develop the pathways to be able to deliver the blood where it’s needed. So if you’ve just begun swimming and you’re finding that you’re getting quite fatigued quite quickly, especially through your shoulders, that’s normal. You’re probably not used to using your shoulders and your body in that way if you’re new to the swimming. So we just need to get over that initial hurdle of having our body become somewhat efficient at delivering the blood where it needs to go. But once we’re past that, then we can really start to work on our aerobic capacity in the pool or in the open water. And that’s what CSS training can really help you with. So what is CSS training? It’s known as critical swim speed. And you can think of it as your aerobic threshold. So you can do a test called a CSS test, so critical

swim speed test. And it’s supposed to be to give you an idea of what your 1500 meter race pace would be. So if you were to do a 1500 meter time trial, what pace would you get? And the way that we do this CSS test is it’s a 400 meter time trial with some recovery in between, followed by a 200 meter time trial. Now with those times, we go, we take the 400 meter time and we take away the 200 meter time from that 400. And then we divide that result by two to get your 100 meter pace for what we would assume to be your 1500 meter race pace. So let’s throw some numbers in there. Let’s say it takes you eight minutes for the 400 time trial. And it took you three minutes 50 for the 200 meter time trial. That would give you four minutes 10. And then we divide that by two, which would be a 205 pace. So that 205 would be your critical swim speed. And we can now use that number to start to design some training so that we can over time improve that 205 and and work that down

hopefully towards a two minutes 155 150 and going down from there. So with this CSS test, how often should you do it? I would recommend doing it every four to six weeks, because that’s going to give us ample time to be able to make some improvements, especially if it’s every six weeks. So every four weeks, you should start to see an improvement over that time. But certainly after six weeks, if you’re doing the right type of training, then we should start to see your CSS pace coming down. Now, why should you do it? Well, we want to measure our progress. First of all, if you don’t know where you’re at, it’s very hard to know where you want to go from there. So I find for most athletes that I will work with, which large majority of them are triathletes or open water swimmers doing events in the one to four kilometer range, most of them are. Well, this is a really good way just to get an idea of what your aerobic threshold is and to put a number on that and start to use that in training.

Now, the way I would approach this or the way that we want to use this number to then start to train and be able to improve upon it is if you have looked much into zone two training, and we’ve had very well known triathlete on this podcast, Norwegian triathlete, and he is quite famous for doing a lot of their classified zone two training, which is aerobic training and doing a lot of training in this zone two, particularly the upper range of that, that is how they start to develop this engine where they’re able to be able to sustain good pace for a very long period of time. Now, if you think of your CSS pace as kind of like that very top, very, very top of your aerobic capacity, if you can do training around that CSS pace or just below it, so let’s say it’s a 205, if you can do quite a bit of your training for around between to say 205 and 215 pace, if that’s if 205 is your CSS pace, then that’s going to help you develop your aerobic fitness and that’s going to help you

work that down. So let’s take a look at what type of sets you could do. Now, let’s say you’ve done your tests, you’ve done your CSS tests, you know what your CSS pace is. An example of a set that you could do to begin to work this down would be say 3100s, and this is a set that I did with MySquad this morning. We did 3100s, broken into three lots of 10, and the first set of 10 that we did, we took 10 seconds rest in between each one, and that was at CSS plus 3, and then we took a minute rest after the first 10, then we did the next 10 at CSS plus 2, and then we took another minute’s rest and we did the last lot of 10 100s at CSS pace plus 1. Now,

this plus 1, plus 2, plus 3, this is plus in terms of seconds on top of your time. So let’s say it was a 205, well, we’d go that first round of 10 at 208, second round of 10 at 207, and then the last round at 206. Okay, so that’s how we’d work it. Now, there’s a couple of things I really like about this type of set, this 3100 set. It’s first of all, it’s a progressive build. So I love those sessions where you’ve got to be able to sustain your pace the whole way through and just gradually building up. It’s like a crescendo. We’re at the end, you’re kind of working the hardest, but you’ve got to maintain your speed and ideally get a little bit quicker towards the end. I think those sets are great for for confidence, and also just really encouraging you to be able to maintain your your pace through the through an entire session. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, form smart swim goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles,

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split for the first 50 and the 100 and the 150. So every single lap, I’m getting that feedback on what my pace is. And I find it’s such an important tool for being able to not only have different gears where you can switch between the different speeds that you want to swim, but it helps you develop those gears and it helps you intuitively know how fast you need to go to before you’re going to blow up or before you’re going to go a little bit too hard. So it helps you just get really good at judging your pace for when you do go to a race. And even if you’re not wearing the goggles in a race, it’s that intuition and that ability to develop your pacing that these goggles can really help 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 goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or the code effortless at checkout.

So that’s a one example of a set. Now another set that I quite quite like is a similar sort of set up to it where we’ll go you go 400 and then two 300s, three 200s and then four 100s a decent set depending on what your ability or your level of swimming. But with those cycles there, I’d go the 400 at CSS plus, that just depends where we’re at, but normally like CSS plus six seconds. And then I’d go the two 300s at CSS plus four seconds, the 200s at CSS plus two and the four 100s at CSS pace. So again, just gradually getting faster throughout. And it’s just another nice gentle build into the into the set. So by training at just below your aerobic threshold, that is how you develop your aerobic engine. And that is how you can have your swimming fitness start to increase over time. And I’d recommend doing usually two sessions like this a week, because if you’re time poor, and you’re only able to get in a couple of

sessions a week, then two of those ideally should be this CSS or threshold type sessions, because they give you big bang for buck on on what you’re actually doing in the water. And I find for most people, this is how you can really work on that type of fitness. And this is going to help you deliver that blood flow to the muscles that need it. And it’s going to help you become efficient in those swing movements. Now, what I’ve just added to our effortless swimming membership is I’ve got our calculator there. So you can explain how to do the test. And you can just put your numbers in. And that’ll spit out your CSS results there and what your pace is per 100. But more than that, I’ve added my top 12 CSS workouts. So if you’re not sure what types of sessions you should be doing, I’ve got my top 12 CSS workouts that I’ve done through through the years and ones that I will often refer to. And and use as part of my

training. And if I’m prescribing sessions to people, these are ones that I would often give them. So they’re inside the effortless swimming membership. Now, when you combine this type of training with better technique, you are kind of getting twice the return on your investment. So what I mean by that is if you think of someone, let’s say Josh, for example, who didn’t have really bad technique, but he certainly didn’t have great technique early on. Over time, he was able to really swim like swim. He looks like a looks like a very high level triathlete in the world. Looks like he’s swimming very, very well. If you’re able to develop your stroke and your technique alongside your aerobic fitness, then you are going to see some pretty incredible gains if you can do those two things. So if we think about what does it look like for you to be a strong, efficient, fast swimmer, well, they’re going to comprise 80% of those things, those those two things, your aerobic capacity and your technique.

Now, what else is in there? Your skills, the way that you move, your flexibility, your strength, those things are certainly factors. But I’d say the majority of it is your aerobic fitness is a swimmer and then the technique. So that’s why we have a big focus on those couple of things because they are what will give you your biggest return on time spent.