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. If you’ve ever taken several weeks out of the water and you’ve come back and you feel like you’ve forgotten how to swim, you’re not alone. There’s something about our body that needs to get used to being in the medium of water, that needs to have this consistency of swimming and doing laps on a regular basis to feel comfortable, stable and balanced and in control. And so one of the hardest things to do in swimming is to be consistent, but if you want to get better then consistency to me is the key and consistency is doing ideally three swims a week without taking a week off. Now I know here and there you often have to travel, things come up and it might be say two sessions, but you will notice a big improvement in your swimming if you can swim

three times a week for weeks and weeks and weeks in a row without taking time off. Even if you’re sick or injured there’s usually ways around it. Maybe if you’re sick then you can’t push as hard, you have to swim easy, or if you’re injured maybe you’ve got to do purely kick or you’ve got to wear fins or there’s something else you can do there, but having that time in the water there’s no shortcuts around it. That is one of the things that it sucks, but it is going to make your swimming feel easy and it’s going to allow you to feel like you belong in the water because your body just gets used to holding itself in a balanced way in that medium of water. And so if you think about why people who grew up swimming just can always look and feel just so comfortable, it’s because their bodies just gotten so used to being in that medium and so if you can have that consistency over ideally like six months or 12 months where you’re just doing it on a consistent basis

you will start to see that gradual progression. Now one of the ways to fast track that feel for the water or at least enhance it is doing something like front skull. So there’s exercises and there’s drills that you can do to help build up that connection with the water. And to me one of the best ones is front skull where you’re scaling with your arms out in front and you’re sweeping side to side. That will give you that feeling of keeping pressure on your hand and your forearm which is your big paddle. That’s the main thing that’s going to move you forwards and scaling really enhances that feeling of connection with the water. So let’s say you do take a week out just for whatever circumstances arise. Well by doing some front skull and that might be something like 1225s of front skull with a pull buoy between your legs. Doing that is part of your session. That can help you enhance or regain that feeling for the water. And so one of the hardest things to do

but one of the best ways to get better is to be consistent. It is the key to being a better swimmer and if you look at some of the some of the pro triathletes that I’ve watched and some that I’ve worked with they didn’t grow up necessarily as swimmers but because they have swum for five years six years seven years very consistently they’ve just progressively gotten better because I’ve spent that time in the water. So if you’re looking for the magic pill or you’re looking for the secret to swimming a 115 pace you’ve got to put the work in. There’s no shortcuts to that and consistency is the way to do it. 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