Welcome to Effortless Swimming, the podcast for swimmers, tri-athletes and coaches. Join Australian swim coach, Brenton Ford, as he reveals the latest techniques and information to improve your swimming. Let’s dive right in. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is a friend of mine, Kevin Koskala from Tri Swim Coach. And Kevin’s been on the podcast before and we actually caught up about a month ago in San Diego when I was there. So Kevin, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks, Brent. It’s good to be here. And there’s a couple of things I want to talk about today. So if you’re a tri-athlete listening in, then we’re going to talk about a few different ways that you can get faster, find some improvement in your swimming. And Kevin, you also run a podcast called the Tri Swim Coach podcast. And I want to talk about some of the takeaways that you’ve had from guests who have been on your show

because you’ve had some pretty high-profile guests and you’re up to episode number 100 now. Is that right? Yeah, it’s about 100, I think. I forget. I think I’m close to it. So yeah, I mean, you’ve had a lot of guests on the podcast. So do you want to talk about some of the people you’ve had on and some of the best things you’ve sort of got out of them? Yeah, absolutely. So when I do interviews, I try to mix it up between people that are kind of high-profile, like professional triathletes and coaches, like famous kind of coaches, and then just people that are doing triathlons that are more at the amateur level, that can talk about their experiences and some of the challenges they have. And yeah, I’ve learned a ton from everyone. And so yeah, I think that when I look back at all the people I interviewed, some of the funnest interviews are the open water swimmers. So like Lynn Cox, who’s got so many records and has done just some amazing, amazing things in the open water,

like swimming in Antarctica and swimming across the Bering Strait and all this stuff. Talking to her, she’s such a nice person and just her stories and everything was just really, really interesting to be able to talk to her. And she’s sort of famous in the open water swimming world. So it was nice to have the podcast to be able to get her and other high-profile people on. And as far as coaching goes, I’ve had… So one of the people that I met through my podcast was Sheila Tormina. And I learned a ton from her because I think before I met her, I wasn’t as focused on the pole and freestyle, but her entire teaching is centered around the freestyle pole. And because she’s only five foot two and when she was in the Olympics back in like 1996, she was competing with women that were six foot. And she’s a freestyle, I mean, she does several events, but one of them is freestyle. And so she’s able to explain how she was able to compete at this high level

with people that were so much taller than her and even doing like the sprint and middle distance races at her height. So that can be applied to everybody because most people that you and I, Brent, are kind of talking to are not the professionals or the elite athletes. They’re more either kind of beginner level or intermediate sort of middle of the pack type people and they can learn so much from her. So what I got was that the pole is vitally important in swimming and to develop that high elbow catch is one of the most important things you can do. So having talked to her, just getting all her information, everything, I incorporated a lot of that into my training. And yeah, and just having a few other folks on it that had either competed at some of the high levels of triathlon or that coached some of these people like Gary Hall Sr. I had on, I think, a couple months ago. And it was just amazing being able to talk to him because I grew up, I knew who he was.

I mean, he was an Olympian, I think, back in the 70s. And so he was, to me, he’s kind of like a famous guy. And I know he’s doing some incredible things out in Florida with some of his athletes. And he focuses more on like the age group swimming, like sprint, you know, kind of sprint in the middle. This is like 200 meters, 400 meters, swimmers and that kind of thing. But he knows an incredible amount about stroke technique. And there’s a lot of things that I picked up on that interview that are just like, they’re kind of like extras with swimming. But it’s so interesting how, you know, you can do things with stroke count and with different tools in the water that can really make you a faster swimmer. And so that, yeah, that was a pretty impressive interview as well. But, you know, again, it’s like the amateurs have given me a lot too because, you know, it’s like I can learn from what they’re telling me

in terms of what they’re struggling with or what was working for them. You know, like I just talked to someone the other day. It was like, yeah, I always start, I always wait till the pack kind of goes and then I wait like five seconds and then I get in the water. And, you know, that’s something that a lot of people would never think of. And they just go in with the pack and they just get totally crushed and it kind of kills their race. So, yeah, there’s a kind of a variety of topics and people that I’ve learned from. Yeah. And that’s what you’re saying about learning from all different levels of swimmers and triathletes. And that’s how I kind of learned what tends to work with the clinics that you run. So when someone comes back to me a few weeks after they’ve been to a clinic and they say, oh, look, I did my next race and I swam this much quicker and this is what I focused on and this is what helped or this is what worked for me.

Then, like just using those things and just feeding that back into the clinics more and what I teach, I find that really helpful. And a lot of times I think with people who are very new to swimming, a lot of it tends to be like just the fundamentals, just the basics of swimming. So, you know, you start with posture and then just making sure they’ve got the right head position and alignment with their entry and their extension. And just really going back to basics because someone who’s only been in the sport two years and they’re an adult, they’ve never been taught just those very basic things. But a lot of times, you know, if you just keep it simple, that’s what’s easy to implement and that’s what’s easy to remember when you train, when you race and that’s how you can sort of make it a part of your stroke after a few weeks of practice. And then with, I guess, the more high level guys like Gary Hall Sr.

and Sheila Tiamat, how do you say Tia? That’s a tough one. It’s Tor Mina. Tor Mina. So, I mean, she’s got a great book out, Swimspeed Secrets, which you can get on Kindle, I think, as well as hard copy. And for anyone listening, that’s a really good resource to find more details out about the pool that you’re talking about. And I mean, I’ve learned some really good stuff from her as well. I mean, one of my favorite things that she teaches is as you enter the water, so bring your arm over the top, fingertips hit the water, then basically just straighten your arm out or almost slap the elbow down on top of the water. And that just gives you that, the drive out the front to sort of keep that momentum going into the water. And I’ve never heard it explained that way where you’re almost slapping the elbow down. And when you come to think of it, you can actually hear good swimmers, when they swim in, you can actually hear their elbow almost slapping on the water there.

And that’s usually a difference between a good swimmer and someone who’s not quite as quick. So she’s got some really, I guess, different insights into the stroke that I’d never sort of heard before. So yeah, she’s got a lot of really good stuff. And then, I mean, same with Gary Hall’s senior, he’s mostly coaching pool swimmers, but there are a lot of differences between someone who’s doing triathlon swimming compared to someone who’s swimming 100 freestyle and seeing those differences from how you should sort of teach or explain things is really interesting. And as you grow and develop as a coach, it’s good to have that wide range of knowledge so that when you’re working with all these different athletes, it’s not just the same information, you can tailor it to whatever their goals are. Yeah, exactly. That’s the thing that I think you and I do that a lot of people don’t do is that a lot of swim coaches out there will just kind of get narrowed in

on one method of teaching and try to apply it to everyone and everything they come across. And that’s where it pays to be open and to be looking at what other people are saying and not take it as competition, but take it as like these people have something to offer. And there’s, I mean, there’s a lot of good coaches out there, but you know, I don’t look at any one of them as the one guru that knows everything. And I think that’s kind of how you approach it too. And that’s where, you know, it does pay off. And one size doesn’t fit all, but there are some, some definite parts of swimming that are, you can apply to just about everyone, especially the stuff that Sheila teaches because in her book, it’s, you know, one thing I was going to mention about her book too is that it’s swim speed secrets. So it’s, you know, people always come to me like, oh, I want to go faster. And, you know, maybe they’re beginner level and they just need to get their stroke in place,

but they’re saying they want to go faster. But really that’s the fastest way is to focus on the technique and then build it from there. Yeah, absolutely. And especially if someone is around the, you know, around the two minutes per hundred pace, then technique is really all you should be focusing on. You know, of course there’s an element of fitness there, but if you’re around the sort of two minutes or slower per hundred, then, you know, technique is what is stopping you from going quicker. And there’s a lot of times it’s just, you know, body position and just some basic sort of balance drills that can help some of us, you know, get to that place. And I mean, techniques obviously really important. Then what are some other things that you would look at to help some of us find improvement in their swimming? So what outside of technique would you suggest some of us work on? Well, the one thing that I’ve gotten really big on the last few years,

I actually interviewed a guy named, what’s his name again? Brian McKenzie. He’s a guy, he does CrossFit endurance. So, you know, a lot of everyone probably, those listening here knows what CrossFit is and he tailors those kind of workouts, those CrossFit type workouts to endurance athletes. And some of them are, some of his people are triathletes. And I kind of looked at, you know, I interviewed him and I looked at what he does. And, you know, it is obviously a combination of strength training, but the stuff that he does in the pool is pretty basic. It’s not like in the back in the 80s, like when I grew up, it was all about like massive yardage and just doing so many laps in the pool and we just killed ourselves and that’s why I have shoulder problems today. But his thing was really focused and the strength workouts that they do are for endurance kind of activities, not so much for bulking up or doing the sprint stuff.

But there’s a lot of sprinting involved in the workouts. So once a week you’re doing some all-out sprints. And that’s something that I used to do that a little bit. I used to coach that way a little bit, but over the last couple of years, I’ve been way more interested in teaching this, you know, kind of sprint type workout. So we’ll do like sets like maybe it’s eight or so let’s say six 200s and the 200s are done at kind of a moderate to hard pace, but you get a lot of rest and then you do a sprint 50 in between. So the idea is not to try to make the interval but to get as much rest as you need and to be going all out in those 50s. So and that type of training is you get a lot of bang through your pockets. It’s that high intensity training. And that’s something that I’ve really incorporated a lot lately. And then also strength training is strength training is something I’ve always believed in, but it’s changed a little bit over the years.

Like now I’m more, I like using bands and elastic tubing, that kind of thing. The stuff that you can do easily with body weights, you don’t have to go to the gym necessarily to do. That can add, you know, that can get you from like, if you’re kind of a middle of the pack type of swimmer and you’re really working on your technique and you’ve got a lot of, you’ve made a lot of improvements. The next level I think is to do, just to start doing some bands and elastic tubing because that’s not only going to help your strength. It’s also going to help you get the right pull like it. We can do exercises that kind of force you to do that high elbow pull. So there’s a lot of benefits there, there too. Yeah. I mean, that’s pretty much what we follow as well as when we’re looking at helping someone get quicker or have a look at what they’re doing with their stroke. Have a look at what they’re doing in their training

and have a look if they’re doing any strength training because it’s, you know, they’re really the three major things that someone needs to start to get quicker. And I mean, with the training, I like to keep it fairly simple like it sounds like you do too. And with, you know, for a triathlete who would come to me, most of the workouts that I would give them would involve some sort of, you know, a few variable pace type things and that speed work is one of them and allowing yourself to have enough rest to actually go at a really high intensity. It’s that sort of age-old mistake that the people make is that, you know, the fast work isn’t, is done too slow and the slow work is done too fast. So, you know, in a lot of workouts, at least when I was training for Ironman, I sort of broke it down into at least one workout a week would be a long line of about 6K and it would all just be very low heart rate, strength-based work with pull-boy paddles.

And then probably two sessions a week would be the main set would be threshold work or CSS work for those that sort of go by that where you’re almost swimming at race pace but you’re breaking it down into either 100s or 200s so it might be something like 8200s at threshold with 20, 30 seconds rest in between, but just getting comfortable with that race pace and then, you know, another session a week would usually be technique with some just all-out sprinting somewhere in there. So, I’d normally do something like for the speed work, I was doing 1050s, 25 all-out and then 25 swim through easy but just making sure that speed work was as fast as I could go and that alone is really good for that strength development that you want when you’re swimming because if you’re just doing that, the really sort of easy stuff you never really get that all-out effort where your body has to adapt to the intensity there. So, I mean, yeah, just kept it really simple

with those three sorts of workouts. I got really good results from them and when I was coaching my master’s squad we did pretty much the same sort of thing and again just got good results with that and then with strength training, I mean, you can look at someone swimming and you can tell whether or not they’ve got the strength they need to be able to hold a fast pace for a half Ironman or a full Ironman distance swim and if you can’t do a chin-up then that’s kind of a good indicator as to should you be doing some more strength work as part of your training and I know you’ve had Chris Ritter, the strength coach on your podcast and so have I and I got a great feedback from that from a lot of listeners who went and downloaded his e-book and some of the videos that he’s got about getting to that stage where he can do at least one chin-up and progressing from there because, yeah, it doesn’t matter if you’re a triathlete

or a swimmer just having the core strength, the upper body strength to be able to pull yourself through the water for that long it’s just so important and if you’re used to sitting in the car sitting at a desk all day then you’re not really using your upper body as much as what you probably need to so adding that into your program even if it’s 20, 30 minutes, two times a week it can have a huge advantage for your swimming. Yeah, absolutely and one thing you said I wanted to go back to you you were saying that a lot of people train too hard when they’re supposed to be going slower and too slow when they’re going that’s something that I interviewed Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple like a month ago and he’s got a lot on that like he talks about this 180 formula that sort of allows you to train at the rate that you need to be to get fit and everybody wants to be fit you don’t necessarily it’s hard to go fast if you’re not fit

so he has this 180 formula and that seems to work really well for because a lot of triathletes are type A and they want to go fast they just want to go hard all the time and you can’t because especially if you’re training for a half Ironman or an Ironman it’s going to kill your body so that kind of slowing down and then training he talks about the fat burning zone as opposed to the carbohydrate burning zone and all those things together it’s going to lead to having more fun in the sport and doing better and then lasting longer so what else is there really? Yeah and in terms of lasting longer I was watching a good video on do you watch much UFC much MMA? No I’m not a fan so Conor McGregor who’s probably the biggest star there he was doing some work with a guy called Ido Portale and he’s basically just a he’s a movement guy and so I was watching this video with him on YouTube it’s called London something but basically what this guy teaches is

that we just don’t move much these days and we’re so sedentary that our body just isn’t being put through these motions that it needs to be to remain mobile to stay healthy and fit and strong so he just he runs these classes of these clinics and he just takes people through all these different movements and trains the body to be familiar with all of these new movements that you put it through and he’s just got some really basic movement stuff I guess similar to what we would teach in a clinic with these basic fundamental movements he’s kind of got that with what he does and it’s just really good for making sure the body can just do these basic movement patterns that if you can’t do that then it just means your hips, your lower back or that’s just going to be really tight and I see that a lot when we run the clinics because we do some mobility tests to see if some of us can get into the right position in the water and probably 4 out of 5

of the people who come to the clinics can’t get into the right position based on these mobility tests and so it just takes a bit of work to get the body back into those positions and whether it takes 6 weeks, 8 weeks of stretching or putting your body through these different movements it just makes such a difference when you get in the water because I can usually see how mobile someone is with these tests I’ll know what they’ll be looking like when they’re swimming because if you just haven’t got the range of motion especially through the shoulders and the back it’s very hard to achieve the right technique that we teach so sometimes it’s just about getting back to basic movement patterns Yeah that’s awesome, I’d love to check that out if you can post it maybe in the show notes for this podcast Yeah, we’ll do just a really interesting way to think about it and just in terms of longevity especially I’ve done one Iron Man now

and I’ve trained for 9 months whatever it was and my body was pretty shattered from it it was just so low back and all that sort of stuff and I know I probably didn’t do enough stretching and mobility work to deal with all of it but if someone is doing that 10-15 years plus then your body is going to take a beating so just to be able to look after it so that by the time you get to your 50s 60s 70s that you can still move properly and I think it’s just so important for that longevity of it Yeah absolutely and on I guess injuries you’ve had a few shoulder issues for the last two years or so so can you talk a little bit about that and what you’re doing to replace you’ll get your fix for swimming now that you can’t swim at the moment Yeah so I’ve had going on about two years I’ve had some shoulder issues and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what started causing the shoulder injuries because you know since college I’ve kind of

gone off in and out of master swimming and triathlon and you know I’ve done various things but I really you know since then I haven’t really done a ton of heavy-duty training but it was like two like around in the summer a couple years ago I started training with the Boulder Masters and I was up there and it’s Boulder Masters is like most people that are like professional triathletes and so I was doing a lot of distance I was keeping up with these guys like oh man I blanked on his name one of the pros he was swimming there and I was keeping up with these guys and you know old man and I hadn’t been swimming in like a year but I really enjoyed that because it was like a good motivational thing to get to the pool and work out. I had no shoulder pain that summer and then kind of slowly over the next few months I kind of stopped swimming for whatever reason got busy with other things and then my shoulder started kind of tightening up but you know

for a while I didn’t really think much of it I just did a little more stretching and stuff like that and but then it got to the point where it started hurting with various things like you know certain movements like moving my arm backwards start to hurt and so then I started doing like physical therapy for it and you know not a lot of success with physical therapy it was a lot of exercises that seemed like the right thing but they weren’t really helping much so then I kind of bounced around from different you know to try to get these shoulders back to normal I went to chiropractors I went to massage therapists I did some ART work active release therapy and a couple other people and you know some things would work for a while and then it would just sort of go back and I’d just be spending a ton of money on whoever it was and so over that over the course of time of course I eventually stopped swimming all together and

but yeah I mean it really forced me to get out and do other things and you asked me what what I’ve done to replace swimming in the meantime because I definitely want to get back to swimming because it was it’s been my exercise for you know ever since I was like eight years old I’ve been you know that’s been one of my main forms of exercise so I do a few things now I do a lot more walking that I used to which I think is a really good thing because I used to sit at my desk all day and then maybe go for a swim but I wouldn’t really move much at all beyond that so now I’m like I’m constantly going for little walks and moving like moving as much as I can sounds like your dog’s yeah he’s keeping the bad guys at bay protecting you that’s good yeah so so I do a lot more just just walking moving my body because I feel like that is that’s one of the most important things you know keeping keeping the movement going and I do some yoga I just

started doing restorative yoga which is like it’s nothing like the vinyasa yoga that most people know about it’s very much it’s slow and the movements aren’t sometimes you don’t even really feel the movement but for my shape that was what I’m dealing with it’s like it’s perfect so that kind of thing really helps and then I do some a little bit of running but not much and then I do some weights that whatever I can handle in the gym doing that and then as far as like overall health I’m really watching my nutrition like I did some blood tests just to make sure I was on the right track with everything and I went to a natural pathic doctor and got all these results and everything was pretty good but I’m taking a few supplements and you know making sure that that I’m eating the right things and keeping everything good but I also do the one one other thing that I do about once a week I go out to the beach here and run sprints and I really

believe that that is one of the keys to kind of keeping your energy up and then also I noticed that when before I wasn’t doing I wasn’t doing that and then I did the blood tests after I’d done a couple of sprint just like a few sprints on the beach like did my blood test again and my testosterone went up significantly and I really attribute that to these high intensity workouts so that’s just another reason why I’m so into the high intensity training I think it’s it’s key but you can’t you can easily over do it so because they’re it’s really difficult you think like you’re growing out to run a few sprints and if you get if your ego starts to get in the way you’re probably going to hurt yourself because it’s easy to get tired out in like two or three sprints and people don’t really realize that when you’re used to doing like 50-100 mile bike rides and you go out to and you don’t sprint at all and then you got to sprint it’s a whole different

set of muscles you’re using it’s a it’s a it’s completely different and you will the best thing to do is to start out with just one or two at the beginning and then just build from there yeah that’s that’s interesting I’ve pretty much done very similar things to that I mean once or twice a week there’s some hills in my place they’re only short they it takes me about 25-30 seconds to run out them but I’ll do five or six hill sprints and then just a like a 2k run down after that and the whole workout might only be 25 minutes of of actual running but five or six sprints and I’m done and I think just just doing that once or twice a week yeah it’s just good you just feel really good after it and I think I mentioned on the podcast a few months ago there was a program here in the states called it’s escape me now what’s it called it’s not four corners anyway there’s another program I’ll see if the name comes to me but basically they did

I think an hour episode on high intensity interval training and they had a few scientists and doctors on and basically just talking about the benefits of of high intensity training and the presenter of the program I think for eight or 12 weeks she worked out three times a week for 20 minutes and all she did was basically basically hill sprints and it was only a couple of them at a time and she after 12 weeks she ended up losing quite a bit of weight she looked a lot better looked a lot healthier and you know it’s not it’s not a very scientific way to do it but just just looking at that you could see the results compared to I think she was just doing some easy long runs during the week and so she changed the high intensity stuff and so I started to add some of that into into my running program and also into my swimming just with those 25 all out sprints and yeah just feel so much better after it and one thing you mentioned as well is how you

sort of got the injury was when you stopped swimming well for the first time in probably I don’t think I’ve ever taken two weeks off swimming completely but in the last two weeks I did because finished the Iron Man and then we had our masters nationals for swimming here so I just took two weeks off completely and surfed every day and just had a break and I got in the water two days ago for the first time in two weeks and I was so sore with like shoulders back everything it just it did not feel good and it’s just funny how quickly it can change when you stop doing something like two weeks and and I was coming from a pretty reasonable fitness base but two weeks and I just felt like absolute crap in the water yeah yeah that’s that is the thing I think with shoulder injuries is they sometimes it is when you take a break and a lot of times it’s when you take a break and then you come back and you sort of resume what you were doing before

which your body isn’t ready for and then your shoulders are so complex or so many things going on with rotator cuff and all the different tendons there that things can go wrong and I think for me it probably also I do I want to mention that it probably had to do or it has to do with sitting at a desk a lot like I even though I try to really work on my posture when I’m sitting it’s still sitting it’s still not ideal position and right now when we’re doing this interview I’m standing because I stand as much as I can now but I think that the sitting and then I used to sleep on my stomach every night and apparently that’s really bad I didn’t even know it before but it kind of put your shoulders in a position where you’re there kind of forward all night and eventually that puts a lot of pressure on so I think the combination of what I had done with all the swimming I did growing up the over training you know complete over training

there was a time I was talking to some of my college buddies last weekend and we were talking about how we did there was one week where we did a hundred thousand yards in one week and I mean it was just completely way over training there was no reason to do that other than just to say we did it but but stuff like that is what I think accumulates over the years and then if you take a break I think your shoulders start to kind of freeze up almost and things don’t work as well and then you go back to swimming and it’s like it’s way harder and then you have the you know all these little things these little tendonitis and things like that that can kind of build up and add up and then pretty soon your sidelines so yeah that’s right I used to do a hundred hundreds with my master squad once a year as part of our whole week training that we do and then after two or three years I just looked at it and I thought no one’s getting any benefit from

this it’s great to tick it off the list and go I’m tough I can do this but apart from that I mean it’s just it sort of sends you backwards for the next couple of days while you recover from it and it just cannot be good for your shoulders especially you know if you’re 30, 40, 50 years old and you you know use that sort of volume it’s just it’s not a smart thing to do so we stopped doing that and I really sort of made the whole week about higher intensity type of work and we made it a lot more fun than a hundred hundreds so it’s yeah it’s like yeah there’s sometimes I think and on I used to do this is sometimes it’s it’s about doing workouts where you know if you’re mentally tougher for it that can be good but only to a certain point you don’t want to be stupid with it especially as an you know as an adult or a master swimmer or an age group triathlete you’ve got to be smart about those things and you know sometimes it can be

alright to do that things with the younger kids because they can bounce back from it after two days but yeah no not with the not with most adults I don’t think it I think as soon as I’ve sort of turned 18 my recovery time from a hard workout or a big night out you know it doubled and I think it’s sort of doubled every year since then it’s just so hard to come back from it

yeah definitely the same way especially those hard night those big nights out those don’t happen anymore no it’s just you just look at or you just imagine how you’re going to feel the next day and go not not worth it I prefer to have a good day tomorrow than be feeling sorry for myself for the next 24 36 hours because yeah yeah back in university it was fine but not any not anymore and then maybe once a year I’ll go out and stay out late and have a big night but I always regret it the next day so this is this is the day that I’m not that I’m going to stop drinking forever but yeah at least limited because it’s just not good for you and I had a sleep specialist on on the podcast a few episodes ago and he said that one of the one of the main things to stop someone from having a deep night sleep is alcohol even one drink if you have it you know around dinner time more than likely you’re going to be getting up at three o’clock four o’clock in the morning

and needing to go to the toilet because that’s what time your liver processes the alcohol and last week I had I had one one or two drinks at night and then I just I didn’t sleep well at all just couldn’t get into that that deep sleep and so now I just try and avoid it at all costs at night because you know you just it’s going to impact your day and if you’re feeling 70% of what you should be and you’re needing to do a lot of work or if I’m running clinics it’s just it’s just not worth it to have that drink at night to sacrifice a good night sleep you just drink in the morning now right yeah that’s right as we’re sitting here it’s 8 46 in the morning and I’ve got my I’ve got my chocolate milkshake with some Bailey’s in it and it’s going to be a good day ahead

and you also said that you pay a lot more attention to your diet now that you you can’t sort of do as much training as you would normally do and you can’t swim I think that’s if you can keep your weight down or keep your weight at a normal level without doing these huge workouts you know you got to be eating well because I think for a lot of years I’ve probably made up for the bad eating I was doing by the amount of work the amount of training I was doing and and even still to a certain extent but yeah if you can if you can stay at a healthy weight range while just doing a small amount of exercise or a basic amount of exercise it’s you’ve got to be doing well that way because as as a triathlete or a swimmer you just do so many so many k’s on the bike I mean also mean that it’s yeah you just sort of can mask the bad eating that you do and when you do stop that’s when you gain a couple of kilos and you realize that what you’re eating

is not good for you yeah oh yeah definitely like that’s one thing I’ve really focused on you know with both with coaching and with myself is the nutrition and and it’s you know it’s one of the things where it is more important actually to eat well than to exercise well because you can and that’s one thing it’s a it’s a myth in endurance sports and you know especially in triathlon that you just work you work really hard and then you can just eat whatever you want and it’s just it never it does not work out like that so many examples of not working out and it’s not just gaining weight I mean that’s definitely a part of it because it’s going to be hard to lose weight even if you’re doing like if you’re training for Ironman the guy that there was a guy a few that won the biggest loser the TV show where they have these people all in the same house and they’re all trying to lose weight they’re all you know obese and they’re

trying to lose as much weight as they can and then the one that loses the most gets the you know they win well this guy won and he then this is like maybe a year or two later he decided to enter in Ironman and he was a big guy even you know after the show he said he gained a lot of weight back because they do a lot of tricks to lose weight that don’t really last but anyway he was training for this Ironman and he said that absolutely training for an Ironman is not a good way to lose weight if that’s your goal is because he said his weight was the same like he would go out on 100 mile bike rides and come you know come back and just he just couldn’t eat enough calories to keep his energy up so I just you know I just want to emphasize that that the nutrition is so important and there’s a guy who’s a trisome coach ambassador and he’s actually down in Melbourne and you know Vince yeah that’s right and so he did this sugar-free training

and he just decided to cut out all sugar and you know his times were so much faster and he said he just felt way better and you know it really it really shows that paying attention to the nutrition is it’s going to pay off in huge ways and not just being in shape looking better but also you know stuff like that like not getting sick not getting injured as much and then there was one other thing I was going to mention I read this book recently called grain brain so all these grains that we’re eating there’s a lot of evidence that’s showing that you know it’s not just that they’re making us fatter they’re also you know doing stuff for our brains that are not so good for future for things like Alzheimer’s I mean I don’t know if there’s a direct correlation but the book lays out a pretty good case to you know pretty much stay away from grains you know at all costs and so I think the more that we can do that the better we’re going to be in every way

yeah and I think if you can do two things and that’s get more sleep and or you know get at least seven and a half hours a night and just eat well you you’re just going to feel so much better because I mean well I made that change probably two months ago I now I pretty much every night I’m getting at least seven and a half hours sleep compared to five to six and and my just I guess you call it level I guess my level of happiness is a lot higher and not like I was sad before anything but just just waking up and not feeling like I need to go straight back to bed and not going to the fridge to sort of feed my tiredness has made such a huge difference and I found that because of that extra sleep I’m now eating a lot better and now that I’m eating a lot better I’m feeling a lot better throughout the day as well and I’m not not craving the sugary stuff and and I’ve sort of cut out most sort of breads and grains as well and more for the reason that I find that I

I probably keep a few extra an extra kilo or two on when I do eat yeah eat bread so it’s more just for that reason but I think just making the change with those two things they’re so fundamental to someone’s health and well being that it’s just such a huge impact and that’s what I felt for the last couple of months when I’ve made this change and and again the sleep the sleep coach who I had on was was just really good for making me aware of it because he one of the things he’s got is these it’s kind of like a fit bit but you know you wear it it’s just a watch and it’s it’s like a medical grade sort of sleep tracker and then you can plug it in after two weeks and you can download all the data from it and it it kind of reads your effectiveness throughout the day so I guess just your mental awareness throughout the day and it’s all just sort of calculated from this this program that they’ve got but you know if you look at the data you can

pretty much correlates with how you feel throughout the day and on the nights where I was getting five to six hours sleep my effectiveness throughout the day was was definitely much lower than when I got two good nights sleep in a row and and just really sort of open my eyes as to how yeah just how much lack of sleep was affecting my day so since then I’ve really tried to to turn it around and I’ll even sort of not skip a workout in the morning but if I’ve got a training session organized at maybe six o’clock sometimes I’ll just take that extra hour’s sleep and then do the workout that little bit later just so that I get that that full sleep because I know throughout the day it’s going to come to come back to bite me if I don’t so I’ve been I’ve sort of changed to it’s okay to actually get a bit of a sleep and get that right and then the rest of the day is going to be a whole lot better for it yeah I mean a hundred percent agree it’s

you can’t cheat sleep there’s no way to do it it’s like even even those people that I know I’ve read about some people say I can I can get by in six hours I’m totally fine but what’s going on inside is probably not totally fine so I I totally agree like if you know at this point I need to get that seven and a half or you know I just don’t feel right and then things don’t go as well during the day and then workouts or skip eating is not as healthy and yeah everything kind of depends on that sleep so I think that’s a good starting point for all this really yeah and I think Arianna Huffington she wrote a book about this I can’t remember the name of it but I was listening to a podcast or an interview with her and she said she said something like five percent of people can get away with very little sleep I mean five hours six hours sleep a night but for 95% of the population they really need to be getting more more sleep so it’s

yeah I’ve sort of probably harped on on this thing for a while for the last couple of podcasts but I just think it’s so so important and I know just what what a benefit it’s had for so I’ve felt for the last couple of months any last words for triathletes listening to this so what would you recommend to someone what tips would you give them if they’re a bit frustrated with their swimming and they’re not making the improvements that they feel like they’re putting in the work for yeah I mean other than the stuff that we just talked about like sleep and nutrition I mean those are kind of the fundamentals but getting to the swimming it’s really going to be if you’re frustrated with where you are now it’s really going to be going back and I know people don’t want to hear this but it’s going back to the basics and you know going through the basic drills I mean there’s you know the balance drills and being balanced in the water

making sure that you’re doing the hip rotation and then of course the high elbow we talked about like all those things are what’s going to set you up to be able to go faster because probably if you’re frustrated where you are now you probably hit your ceiling or your limits in terms of how fast you’re going to go based on the stroke that you have so training more or training harder even if you’re doing the high intensity workouts and all that you may not go any faster just because your stroke is sort of stopping you from getting to that next level so I would just go back and start kind of start over with your stroke and I used to compare it to bowling because I used to bowl back a long time ago you know I used to have this straight like I just throw the ball down the lane and it would just go straight and I got pretty good at that like I got to a point where I was like I think my average is like 180 which is you know not not bad

but to get over that 200 I would have to develop a curve in my stroke so it’s kind of like that’s how swimming is you can get you can only go so far with you know doing what you’re doing so it’s just a matter of stepping back and going okay what you know let’s go back to the basics and see what can be improved and then also like you know I think you also you know I offer the stroke critiques if you send in your video to us we will critique your stroke and tell you kind of give you some tips and stuff like that I think Brent you have the same kind of program on your site so you know just finding a coach and if it’s not in your local area you can send it to someone you know one of us and we’ll give you we’ll give you some tips and point you in the right direction awesome and where can people get in touch with you yeah the website is tricemcoach.com and we have five free lessons so if you want to sign up for that there’s five free travel and swimming lessons

that we give you kind of a step-by-step process to kind of get your stroke off in the right direction there awesome Kevin great to have you on the podcast again and really enjoyed chatting and it was good to meet in San Diego a few months ago because yeah yeah it’s just it’s you know sort of knowing you through through what you do and then on the podcast exchange a few emails and stuff but then to uh yeah it’s a meeting person it is always nice and yeah I’m hoping to get back over there next year and and catch up again soon yeah man it’s great being on this podcast I love chatting with you and you know it’s great meeting here and maybe we can put together like a humongous swim clinic someday that’d be good in San Diego at Alba Norte pool there that pool is so nice I could swim there every day yeah it sounds a little bit sort of north of where you are isn’t it it’s probably about the probably 40 minutes drive for you but um yeah it’s

a beautiful spot there in in uh San Diego a lot warmer than Melbourne I mean we’ve got some great pools here but not we haven’t got the weather that you guys too there that’s right I love it in San Diego yeah yeah we have a pretty we have a pretty good here we’re getting it’s mays we get may gray so it’s usually like it’s overcast like most of the day a lot of times but you know it’ll in about a month it’ll be back to sunny every day so not too bad yeah that’s a good spot okay thanks again and we’ll talk soon cool thanks Brent talk to you soon thanks for joining us on the effortless swimming podcast to get transcriptions bonus videos and to be the first to hear about new episodes go to swimmingpodcast.com