Welcome to episode number 210 of the effortless swimming podcast my guest today is triathlon coach David Tilbury Davis Now you might know him you may not he’s former coach of Lionel Sanders He coaches a number of professional triathletes and he’s one of the most highly successful and highly experienced Triathlon coaches out there at the moment now. He’s been coaching for the last 26 years He’s worked with Olympic athletes Commonwealth games athletes And as I mentioned earlier a lot of professional and age group athletes alike now I had a great chat with David. I learned a lot from the podcast He’s got it a wealth of knowledge and he shares a number of things that That I took away a really good way to help you get comfortable holding a faster stroke rate He also shares a set that a six by 100 set that can test your Contest your resiliency in the water to see where you’re at and how you might go across a nine man distance swim

we also talk about External versus internal cues so external being Rather than thinking I need to get my elbow high He gives you a way that you can approach that and have better success by using an external cue So this was a great podcast. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. So let’s get stuck into it Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water become a better swimmer and Live a better life. Here’s your host Brenton Ford Okay, David, welcome to the podcast Pleasure to be here So you’ve just got back from a little bit of a holiday. Do you take a break from? Coaching or you’re still coaching when you go away or is it more of just a bit of a reset for you as a as a coach And just taking a break from the the daily activities No, I definitely try, you know to take a break and You know make sure all my athletes are all squared away and happy and

Have enough common sense to you know, be autonomous with their decision-making whilst I’m away and Yeah, try to unplug in this day and age So what it wasn’t too bad. I had two athletes racing whilst I was away one in South Africa and one in Cozumel. So there was the odd phone call And the odd checking of the Ironman update page but otherwise it was phone got left in the apartment and

With that I guess having athletes Being able to take responsibility for their own training and not relying on you too much What’s the balance for you? Do you have athletes who are quite dependent on you and they want to chat regularly and Some that are happy to leave it for a week. Where’s that sort of balance for you and how much Instruction and education do you like to provide on on what they should be able to do on their own? I

Try to I try to make sure Sort of the level of Autonomy and an understanding of what they need to do, you know matches Their expectations, you know, I’ve got athletes that are quite early on in their sort of professional career And so maybe Also generationally, you know, I’m closer to 50 some of these athletes might be like mid-20s As another example, maybe female a different culture. They’re American. So as a coach I have to I have to be empathetic to those different cultural and generational

Dynamics and so with this particular athlete, you know, I make sure they understand You know, which direction are sensible to go with their decision-making

So they don’t feel that they’re just sort of left out, you know left out On their own whilst I’m away and then I’ve got other athletes that have been at this game, you know a long time and You know, I they just they they’re not even fussed about speaking to me for a week They’re happy to just crack on and they know, you know, when to call an audible, you know, maybe when

Got one athlete quite talented age group who’s got two young kids And one of them has decided that because they’re Beginning to learn about their vocal cords that having a little sing song of three to five a.m. In the morning is super cool Not so cool for mum and dad, but you know little lad, you know, it’s super fun Just to test his vocal cords out for two hours at three a.m So when that sort of thing happens, you know, he knows, you know, just You know, take a rain check on any intensity and just be smart about it

Yeah, just gonna dig yourself into a hole otherwise answer if you push through a couple of sleepless nights

It’s I found a similar thing working with the athlete star coach in there in their swim stroke is early on typically the more Higher intensity of more regular contact They’re asking a lot more questions and then I think over time they start to take on some of that knowledge that you’ve hopefully being able to win part and then it’s that it’s a you know less often that they they need you and when I’ve got a business coach and he’s helped me for the last 10 years and I I almost know the answer that he’s gonna give me any time I ask him a question It’s good to have him there. It’s about ideas off of but I’ve been with him long enough to You know, know what he’s going to say. Have you found something similar with the the long-term athletes you’ve had? I Wouldn’t say explicitly

You know, I think I’m always tried to in trying to evolve my knowledge bank So, you know one of my professional athletes a couple of years ago was talking to you about how he’d spoken to another pro He was you know saying should you know maybe work with me and one of the things he said was you know one of the things of working with David is even though, you know Certain developmental aspects may have worked for the last 12 months. Don’t assume that you’re just gonna like repeat the same recipe the next 12 months and so

It’s not quite as as simple as that but I do always feel that you know My job is to to certainly empower my athletes, you know with more knowledge more intuition more awareness and Hopefully at some point, you know, I I make myself redundant now, you know That’s in a notional sense because ultimately there’s many professional athletes that are like so experienced that They don’t need a coach to write training sessions per se But they just need a coach to write training sessions because they don’t want to write training sessions They want to just do the training sessions and focus on recovery. So, you know, that’s where you know with the very pointy end athletes I use the example that, you know, it’s not like working with amateur athletes where in terms of performance gains, you know You’re you’re looking at you’re looking for for 20 needles in one haystack, you know with an elite athlete You’re looking for one needle in 20 haystacks. So it becomes more a case of saying to them, you know, okay

What is it that you feel? or you perceive is just missing From your sort of arsenal of performance, you know, what aspect of racing? Do you feel is just not quite where it should be? and then my job is then to go away and Problem solve that find a solution to it contextualize it in the sense of psychology, physiology, neurology And then come back to them and say right, okay This is maybe a subtle shift in how we should do things that’s going to address that Developmental need it’s not a case of coming in with a sort of an approach of okay I you know, I coach people with a polarized approach. So, you know, there’s the worksheet get on with it and

Maybe you’ll be successful. It’s not quite as cut, you know, it’s definitely not that case

Any examples come to mind of athletes where you’ve gone away and thought about it and Looked into what is it that they’re missing and then you’ve been able to find that that needle in a haystack

Yeah, I mean definitely As many as multiple instances over the years You know things like Working more on actually holding an aerodynamic position Working on balance

And bike handling skills by riding on rollers

Working on different ranges of cadence and force production to sort of create the ability to cope with Significant changes in sort of force production, you know over the course of a race Looking at ways of assessing neurological fatigue in in athletes who are hyper sensitive to Neurological fatigue and and trying to monitor that You know, some some athletes, you know, I’ve had two athletes

Similar performance capabilities male pros similar talent sort of similar build

One individual hyper sensitive to neurological fatigue And the other individual just a blunt hammer just needs to do You know a massive amount of of of work to stimulate their parasympathetic system leading into a race whereas the other individual needs to do very little work and lots of super easy volume to stimulate their parasympathetic system And ensure that their taper goes well, and that’s where it gets really interesting because I think in this day and age

With so many coaches and businesses are wrapped up in, you know, metrics and monitoring load. And and unfortunately, you know, a human being is a is a dynamic complex system. And so you have to understand it from a In this day and age from a from a bio psychosocial perspective, you know, somebody may have maybe under a lot of emotional stress because they bought a house and they have a mortgage and there’s just an underlying like

Just really anxious, you know, and they might not so verbalize that. And sometimes you need to work on your people skills and communication skills to get your head around that. And there are others that are just

Just compartmentalize that in the light of now just going to just crack on

And so, you know, there’s there’s a complexity that that can’t really be simplified. And I still can’t don’t think it can be simplified fully by You know, using, you know, AI or relying on certain metrics things like Things like this day and age are things like HRV things like neuromuscular fatigue and counter movement jumps things like training stress scores. You know, to me, they’re all They’re all like a compass, you know, they point north or they point south. They’re not GPS coordinates. So this is exactly where you’re at. And so as a coach, I think there’s still a huge reliance on being able to To sort of, you know, excuse my language, be a bullshit filter for a lot of these metrics. But there’s also a need to be able to look at some of them and say, okay, you know, these things are indicative of x or they’re indicative of y But first and foremost, it comes down to that communication and that buying with the athlete. No, are they talking openly and honestly to you about how they’re feeling what’s going on

And are they well calibrated with that? Some people aren’t And that’s another hurdle. So the nice thing with the swim, you know, your, your Field being the swim is that I think for triathletes the swim is like the canary in the coal mine

And by that, yeah, definitely by that, it’s an old English saying of, you know, they down the coal mines they used to take a canary in a cage and And then if the noxious gases that would suffocate the miners Started to that you can’t smell that, you know, would start to sort of permeate the air the canary would die and then the miners will go, God, we’ve got to get out of the mine. So, you know, that’s the canary in the coal mine but my point there is that the swim is It’s like the early warning system of, of sort of neurological fatigue and general stress. So when you start to see a decay in quality of swimming or capacity to change pace. That’s very quickly an easy way of gauging the sort of holistic stress or the sort of the allostatic load that the athletes under Interesting. So is that, you know, race or in training or both where you’d That’s like almost, that’s like almost every session. Something, you know, something, you know, I’ve been around a lot of swim coaches over the years and

I wouldn’t say I’m set on one approach. I’ve always tried to to pick out what I think are, you know, useful aspects of many different techniques, because I don’t think there is a panacea but one interesting thing

That one coach

I work with taught me was was using like a descending set within a warm up or within a prep set

And just saying to an athlete, okay, I want you to do four by 100 or four by 50 and I want you to sort of go 60, 70, 80, 90% effort And, you know, those times should be a nice decent and there should be, you know, a nice sort of time gap between each of those those times, you know, if you start to see a lack of descending or a flattening of that descent That’s, you know, that’s a prompt for more questions. And that’s, you know, that’s, you know, a test within a workout or a workout that’s a test But that that’s something that I’ve always tried to now incorporate when I’m writing to him sessions for athletes is say okay, pretty much most days that you swim, you know, you’re going to do your warm up And then you’ll do a prep set and within that prep set you’ll do this four by 100 And we’ll just, you know, see what the times are doing and then we just keep an eye on that week, you know, week on week month on month

That’s good. I saw one of the sets that there was something similar that you’d given Simon her and who’s been on this podcast that pro triathlete that you’re coaching And I saw a couple of those descending time or, you know, building effort sets and I think they’re I’m a big fan of them. It’s something that I’ll do if I’m writing workouts like there’s a squad down here in Melbourne that I sort of write programs for three times a week and I swim with them And a lot of times we’re doing some of these descending efforts and it’s it’s such a good indicator of someone’s It’s interesting you say it’s an indicator of like where they’re at essentially in terms of maybe training stress and other things going on And I’ve never thought of it much that way, but I quite quite like that take on it. And I also I just I really like to do those sets just to give people the skills to be able to change gears and have more than just one speed because I’m working with mostly age groupers

People who probably haven’t swam for more than two, three years primarily and it’s it’s a skill that they just don’t have going into the sport and And with the guys that you’re working with it’s they’re really at the pointy end of the field and I mean most of them they’re going to be able to do that stuff but How what are you looking at that four by 100 set across several months and you’re seeing ideally seeing an increase in just in the speeds that they’re going across that several month period and using that as an indicator as as to where they’re at with their swimming Yes Yeah, and it’s and it but there’s a there’s a but

It’s a bit like in cycling the people go on about You know doing a 20 minute test and then taking a very simplistic approaches, you know take 95% of that and that’s your threshold You don’t need to get into semantic debate about definitions of threshold but that’s a really sort of simple cyclists approach to do a 20 minute test now as a as a coach yeah of course I just I could write a training program that makes somebody truly awesome at 20 minute tests but if they’re racing an Ironman they’re going to suck in that race if they never ride longer than two hours So so my point there is that this this four by 100 it’s it’s very useful it’s very indicative you can you can track it as a trend to look at increasing performance but you still need to have a Another way of understanding okay their their actual sort of fitness swim fitness is improving but really what you care about in long distance racing is resilience or like in a muscular endurance and so you need to get a look at that another way is there another approach that you do with a work out or do you just do a race and go

Okay great well my program or my swim my approach to swim coaching is X and Y and Z in this instance with this athlete and they do this race and their swim got better than it was six months ago and when I say better I mean as a percentage of the fastest swimmers at that race because that’s the only way you can account conditions so the way that I would track performance with professional athletes is I’d look at their swim as a percentage of the fastest swimmer in their in their gender because generally speaking somebody like that you’ve had in the pool somebody like Josh hamburger Josh’s swim performance doesn’t really change much you know he’s right at the point he and then he’s pretty consistent so the variance is pretty tight so you just know that if an athlete’s racing Josh and you know six months ago they were 107% of Josh’s time and now they’re 104% then my swim programs working. Yeah that’s and is that how you’d normally approach it to see their overall improvement or is there a swim set or test that you’ll have them do on a somewhat regular basis.

I mean that that’s one way the other way is again coming back to that four by 100. There’s a couple of swim approaches I take a nice one that that I learned from can Cameron die who was a top professional triathlete some years ago. He and a really really good swimmer he particularly likes using a test where you do six by 100 as fast as you can physically go for the six by 100 with a five second recovery. And he said that in his experience that if somebody is sort of neurologically resilient that they can hold their stroke together on the high load, then you should literally see the splits for those hundreds be plus or minus one second. If you see them, sort of like that fifth or sixth one like drop from like a 112 to like a 115, then they are lacking, you know, resilience endurance, you know the capacity to hold their stroke together. And that’s a nice little test, particularly long, you know and then you know you’ve got other swim sessions you can do or again you could look at a classic.

A classic Paul Newsom, you know swim smooth is a is a red mist. You know it’s basically 10 by 400 so you go five five four three two one on the four hundreds and. And again you’re looking for that to improve over a period of time. You’re looking for a good decent, you know from easy aerobic down to, you know threshold, and you’re looking for just consistent descends and pacing. Other approaches you can take are being a little bit more. What’s the word. You know, you’re looking at the athlete a bit more sort of introspection and saying right what I want you to do is I want you to do what I call broke, like a broken 4k or a broken 3k. You say right I want you to swim this broken 3k. You perceive to be your race effort for your given race, and you can break that 3k up as much as you like into hundreds 50s 200s 300s 400s 1k whatever it doesn’t make you can mix and match I don’t care. And I don’t care about the recovery, either you can take short amount or large amount or whatever works for you, as long as you hit that pace.

So, for some athletes that that perceived race effort is always going to be, it always should be quicker when they’re doing a swim session than the actual race effort, because in the race you know you try athletes they’ve still got a bike they’ve still got to run you know it’s competition anxiety. So it might be in this instance that somebody does a broken 3k and they’re trying to hold 112 and they go sort of, you know, couple of 400s couple of 300s couple of 200s some 50s. And they’re always hitting that 112 pace. You know and you can you can play around with the intensity on that you can say okay actually I want you to do that work out, but I want you to do that work out and actually swim it as fast as you would swim a 3k time trial. And again you know you’re then going to start to get an indication of, you know resilience and muscular endurance. So in that instance because again they might pick a time. So let’s say this athlete that was swimming 112 for a for an Ironman, you know they might pick 110.

And then suddenly it actually, you know they do a couple of 400s couple of 300s and then it starts to kind of go to 111s on the 200s and then they drop to 50s and then, you know they’re just able to hold those 35s. And that, you know tells you, yeah probably you just haven’t quite got enough resilience in this room. I like how you use the word resilience because it describes what you can need towards the end of a longer swim because you do see people stroke break down they can’t keep the intensity. And that’s when they can drop off several seconds towards the per 100 towards the end of a of a race, particularly over that Ironman distance. How do you typically go about teaching someone that or training someone who doesn’t come from a swimming background, and they come to you as an athlete is it with sets like that, or just with the training sets that you’re giving them and you’re trying to educate them on what you’re looking to develop

within their swimming because I know, I mean I found it I’ve done a season of triathlon I did one Olympic one half one full, and I never, I was never able to sustain intensity on the bike like I just I didn’t have spent enough time on it. And I was, I was just sort of flatline the whole time running I can push it I’ve done that for a while swimming was fine, but the bike I just I haven’t spent the hours on it and I couldn’t do it so what’s your experience in teaching people that in the swim league. Um, I know I limited to the to the swim for sure and it’s partly through the you know the sessions like the ones I described it might also be with introducing some swim toys for certain stimulus responses that are trying to mimic the kind of situations you find in open water. But it centers around swim sessions like that, because I think that’s the only way you can get them to really reflect on how I feel.

And the reason I think it’s important to take this kind of approach is because you know you you talk to any good swim coach and they say okay, give me an athlete you want to make them a fast swimmer I’m going to make them swim. 50 to 60k a week. Let’s let’s put aside whether they are experienced as a swimmer but you know it’s like the reality is if, if you want to train as a swimmer and develop yourself aerobically. So develop your physiology as a swimmer, you need to be swimming north of 50k doesn’t matter what distance you’re right, you’re going to be swimming north of 50k a week. Now clearly age group triathletes even professional triathletes, they just can’t swim that amount is it’s impossible for them to swim that amount and be able to do their other training or have a normal life so. So then you have to step back and say okay, the restriction in this athletes ability to perform is not cardiovascular.

You sense doing training, which is centered around cardiovascular development. You have to accept that there is a cardiovascular stimulus that comes from doing the swim training, but it is not the primary driver primary driver is feel for the water and capacity to maintain technique under load. This episode of the podcast is sponsored by form swim goggles. With these goggles you don’t have to look at the pace clock anymore or be one of those swimmers in the pool always grabbing for their watch. With form smart swim goggles you can see all of your key metrics while you’re swimming, distance, pace, stroke rate, they’ve got it all. And the swim data is displayed on the goggle lens and you can customize the display to see the metrics that you want to. And I was worried that it was going to be distracting but you can literally see through the display the metrics are always there but you have to choose to focus on them.

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And while the goggles connect to the form swim app on your smartphone too they all sync with the form app and then you can review all of the details of your swim and you can see what other swimmers are up to in the form swim community as well. I’m a big fan of these goggles. I was really impressed when I used them and I use them for the vast majority of the sessions that I’m currently doing. To find out more about the form swim goggles go to formswim.com and you can use our coupon code effortless at checkout and save $15 off your order. Back to the podcast. And then that is a subtly different approach. Yeah that’s so true. And in terms of developing technique and some of that filth the water is and you mentioned earlier that there’s no panacea of swim strike and obviously of the same opinion that there’s different strikes of different folks. Are there a couple of things that you will have your athletes focus on with the swim or how do you sort of work that individually with each of the athletes you’ve got.

So I’m going to I’m going to take a step back and go to some basic physiology. When we when we look at how muscles work you muscles produce force and at different contraction rates and the amount of force they can produce is proportional to the velocity of contraction. That’s sort of AV Hills original force velocity curve. Now, every human being depending on their muscle morphology and biology so they’re fiber typing mitochondrial density muscle mass, you know, sheer size of them in terms of how much drag gets created. They, they have a natural tendency or a natural curve that’s a reflection of that on of their underlying musculature. So you might have somebody that swims with a very high stroke rate. And that stroke rate will be consistently high or higher as they get faster in the water, or as they’re changing speed and getting quicker in the water and likewise you might have somebody that swims at a very low cadence.

And, you know, slowly increases their cadence as they’re swimming at faster speeds. With those two individuals you have to take very different approaches because really all that you’re trying to do is take that sort of exponential curve that’s that that’s the force velocity curve, and you’re literally trying to move it sort of a little bit to the right and a little bit up. And so with that individual that swims at a really slow cadence. What you wouldn’t do is say, Okay, well, when we look at the majority of open water swimmers, they all swim at 90 strokes per minute. So I’m going to make you practice something at 90 strokes per minute when that person is natural physiology is that they only swim at like 72. That’s like going to the gym and saying, I can bench press 100 kilos for five reps, and I want to improve that. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to try and bench press two reps at 200 kilos.

Stupid, can’t do that. I mean, you could try. So, so in, so in this instance, you know, it’s, it’s stimulus, I would take an approach of stimulation response. So with somebody that swims at low accadences, I would, I’ve used the example and again, this is a great approach that I learned from Justin Slater aqua bears in Tucson, who’s very much about, you know, improving feel for the water and he said, you need to like, completely over stimulate them. So, so what we might do is a bunch of fifties and I would say, Okay, Brinton, you swim, typically at 72 strokes a minute. So you’re going to get a tempo trainer. You’re going to set it to 100 strokes a minute, and you’re going to do for fifties at 100 strokes a minute, and I do not care how crap your stroke is, how much you have to shorten it. How much you rush the recovery. How much you look like garbage in the water. I do not care what you do as long as you spin your arms at 100 strokes a minute.

And you do a couple of fifties like that. And it’s infuriating and maddening. And then you set the tempo trainer to 75. And you go, Right, now you’re going to do four by 100 at 75 and moderately hard. And, you know, and then you’ll cycle through that set, like several times, you know, 100 back to 75, 100 back to 75, when your natural tendency would be to swim at 72. So then 75 suddenly starts to feel like, Oh, this is really quiet relaxed. And that’s like a stimulus approach and response approach. You know, much the same way that, you know, correcting some stroke techniques require you to sort of over stimulate somebody in order to get them to kind of process in their head what’s going on like somebody that, that, you know, over extends at the front of the stroke you say, Okay, you know, this is a Paul Newsom one is, you know, put some swim paddles on and swim down the pool. And when you get hoppy down the pool, I want you literally to point your fingers at sky.

And they will literally come to a standstill. And then say, right, carry on swimming now. So now you know what you’re doing when you’re overextending. That’s the sensation. That’s what you’re physically doing. So you’re using sort of neurology to kind of train their brain. And you’re doing it in a way that is centered around external cues, not internal cues. This is really important because there’s been a whole bunch of work done on internal versus external queuing. And psychologically, if you say to somebody, you know, say, you know, Brenton, you know, you’re dropping your elbow when you extend at the front. So I want you to just keep your elbow a little bit higher. All that your brain will do is think about your elbow, nothing else. But from a motor control perspective, what we really want to have happen is we want you to actually get into a position where your elbow is high. So if what I said to you was Brenton, I want you to go down the pool.

And I want you to swim and every time you take a stroke I want you to think about basically reaching over a keg of beer. So your brain will then think about all the movement patterns that go into you visualizing or perceiving that you’re reaching over a keg. And that’s very, and so, you know, you want to always be trying to use these external cues or external sort of stimuli that can help the athlete develop their stroke. And yeah, that’s kind of the way that I’d come at it. And that’s that’s terrific. I really love the to start saying with the stroke rate. So that’s a great approach. And it’s like you’re talking about overstimulation like in our clinics, we do a couple of contrast drills to get people to exaggerate the things that we’re trying to avoid so that when they get them right, they really notice the difference in in drag or propulsion. And then they can self coach and they know whether or not they’re doing those things because they’ve got that awareness about it.

So that that stroke rate one’s really good. And it’s funny you say that because I remember a couple years back when I finally got myself some tempo trainers. I went down to MSAC here in Melbourne and I did a I think I did four fifties at might have been 90 strokes a minute and it was incredibly hard. I was gassed afterwards. But then it’s exactly that like you then a stroke rate of 75 feels like it’s not that much. And so it’s a great approach because I know it’s an issue for for a lot of swimmers and I actually had a guy recently who came to a clinic and his coach has been getting him to try and like rate up to around 90 strokes a minute. But he’s he’s he can’t do that. He can’t he can’t swim at that at that cadence. Well, and I think at best he might be a high 70s sort of swimmer. So he’s just like I’m getting so tired doing doing this. So it’s yeah, it’s it’s also it’s also it’s also length of levers, it’s basic physics.

You know, if you’ve got somebody that’s quite tall with long arms, you know, long levers, then you know when they’re grabbing the water. Let’s say, you know, let’s say 80 centimeters below their shoulder at mid stroke. Don’t get hard on me about stroke technique about I’m just using that as a as a landmark. You know, if there’s if they’re creating a lot of force at that point 80 centimeters deep in the water, you know, the load at the shoulder joint is far more than somebody that is anatomically shorter with shorter limbs where they’re only like 55 centimeters deep. Now the stroke technique may look identical, but the basic physics of force production are wildly different. And so, you know, that’s where coming back to that example of contrast and stroke technique if you’ve got somebody that swims at a really high stroke rate. You know, maybe they’re not actually grabbing enough water. So that’s where I’d resort to like drag tools like, you know, parachutes and foam donuts and things like that.

To actually really force them to think about holding the water. I wouldn’t use paddles. And now, you know, it’s a contentious one, but I’m pretty anti paddles, because I think the biggest problem that most athletes have is a lack of awareness of catch and feel for the water. So why would you put something on your hand, which completely destroys any perception of tactility that you have on your stroke. Doesn’t make any sense to me, especially because when you swim in an open water race, whether it’s a triathlon open water race, and you’re swimming on somebody’s feet. That water that you’re grabbing is heavily aerated. So it’s not as dense as pool water. So if you’re constantly doing lots of swimming with paddles in a pool, and then you go and swim open water and you always wonder, why don’t I massively underperforming? It’s because you have no feel for the water and you’re doing lots of swimming with paddles, and then you’re going in a race and swimming in water, which requires a lot of awareness of your catch.

Yeah. Then with when people swim in a squad, I see a lot of them push off two or three seconds on someone’s feet. What’s your, have you got a preference for that? Like, do you find that beneficial just getting used to swimming in someone’s drag and having that water aerated a bit? Do you want them to swim on their own with clean water or a mix of both? Yeah, it’s context. If you’ve got somebody that has poor open water swim skills relative to their pool swimming, and there’s a disconnect, and you say, right, I want you to swim on the person in front’s feet. And you tell them to, if they’re in a squad, you say, please do make sure you explain to that person that you’re going to do that and why you’re doing it. But likewise, if you’ve got somebody that just handles like rough water really easily, that’s something I’ve always found personally is, you know, I’m not a great swimmer, but just open water, my capacity to change my stroke technique is fairly good.

So I never really saw any decay in my ability, open water versus the pool. In fact, I was actually a better open water swimmer. I was a pool swimmer. But a lot of athletes are the other way around. So, you know, with somebody that’s actually quite good at open water swimming and coping with current and chop and athletes around them, then, you know, I’d always want them going five seconds behind the person in front. Yeah, gotcha. And in terms of developing those open water skills, are you giving many athletes open water swims in the lead up to some races, or is it a lot of the athletes that you coach, you know, they’ve got that experience and it’s like, yeah, you obviously want to go open water and practice that. But is it something that you will schedule into your programming? I mean, there’s a logistical aspect to it. Of course, I’ve got one athlete I coach who raced in South Africa this weekend, but he’s Swedish and he lives in Stockholm. You can’t really open water swim leading into a race at the moment in Stockholm.

I mean, you can, you know, to be fair, you know, there’s lots of people that like cold water swimming in Finland. I’ve tried it. Two degrees centigrade water is not fun. Even for a couple of minutes, even when you’ve got God knows how much wetsuit gear on and neoprene and cold weather gear. Yeah, I mean all seriousness. For somebody that, you know, athletes that I coach in Australia, if they are close to the beach, I definitely see value in maintaining an open water swim each week as a triathlete to develop, you know, skills and awareness. And I would just get them playing around with working on their beach starts working on their exits working on, you know, swimming across the current or through the shop. Rather than go, you know, you’re going to do intervals of this, this distance and this intensity. Now I would just probably focus more on skills or if you’re swimming with a friend from a safety perspective, you know,

bump each other around swim on each other’s feet, you know, roll over their legs, practice stuff like that. So you just become more adept at coping with those scenarios. I was watching the Ironman South Africa swim that earlier today, because I saw a little bit of footage from it and I thought that, yeah, it looked like a reasonably rust swim, particularly the the entry and the exit. Have you seen any footage of that or you’ve been offline for the last few weeks? I saw a few clips. I know it’s been a discussion point, you know, my, the athlete that I coached, he got third overall, he was first off the bike and he said, you know, there was definitely a very significant amount of swell and in the shop. And could the professional athletes have managed to swim 3,800? Maybe they could. And maybe they should be able to. Especially if you Google Perron Porth surf triathlon in Wales, then you’ll see what real chop looks like.

The safety is the race organizer and the race director has to make a safety decision. And, and if, and if they’re not comfortable that they can logistically manage the safety of athletes, then they, you know, they have to shorten the swim. And, and, and that’s, you know, they do is what it is. It’s clear water one year in Florida and the swim was originally meant to go on the outside of the peninsula there and the day before the race I was swimming with one of the pros that I was working with at the time. And I literally remember we, we got into the water and we started swimming and we were basically swimming uphill and I watched I should go over the top of the wave and disappear down the other side and, and, and, you know, I kind of carried on swimming and we got out after a while and we were like, yeah, that was, that was a little crazy. And then the next day, you know, they moved the swim to the other side of the peninsula where it was a lot more sheltered than they changed the starting approach of the race.

Race organizers have to do this, you know, they’ve still got to manage the safety of people it’s not. It’s not a case of, well, it’s not an iron man if you didn’t swim the full distance it’s just, you know, that’s racing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I’ve experienced that when we’re even with our camps overseas in Thailand, for example, you know, we’ve had to change beaches and all of that because it’s, and, and, and a lot of the students, particularly the good students they’re like, can you just let us go out and, you know, all of that but as the, as the person running the camp and as the race directors have to you’ve, you’ve got to keep that in the back of you’ve got to keep the safety in mind because it’s, it’s not a good thing if, if anything goes wrong. So yeah, I completely get it. And they also think as well when, when somebody’s not experienced a situation where they are no longer in control of their own safety in the water, unless you’ve experienced a situation like that.

It’s very easy to be flipping like, ah, you know, they should all just man up and get on with it. You know, like, no, I mean, I, I, I coached him. I was coaching in Brazil for a couple of months some years ago. And we were swimming from this particular beach and there was a group of us triathletes and there was, you know, some swimmers that were also getting in the water and there was a, I would say, middle aged couple that were getting in the water and they had fins and big ass paddles on. And I kind of noticed and was like, oh, interesting. And so we all start swimming and, you know, one of the guys says, you know, we’re going to swim around the edge of that peninsula there and into the next bay and then we’ll swim back. But you know, remember there’s a bit of a current. And so we’re swimming and I’m leading the group of us. And as we get close and close to this peninsula, I can feel there’s like a current that’s just like compressing and getting faster and faster and just pushing us like into

towards the rocks on the very pointy end of that peninsula. And it got to a point where I was literally full out sprinting and going nowhere. And I was like, yeah, this is daft. Now I know why they were wearing flippers and paddles. And then we just, you know, we all just sort of, you know, sat out, stopped swimming and literally within two seconds, you’re 50 meters back towards the beach that we swam from. And, you know, unless you’ve been in a situation like that, it’s very easy to look at, you know, relatively calm water that might actually have, you know, as you Australians know, you know, you get a get water that looks doesn’t look that bad, but there might be a really strong rip. You did not want to be in that. Yeah, it’s so deceptive, isn’t it? Yeah, totally. I remember going to, I was in Raglan in New Zealand and on a surf trip there. And I got out of the water after a surf. It wasn’t even very big. And this guy was, he was sort of five meters wide of where everyone else was paddling back out.

And he got caught in this rip and he paddled for half an hour, didn’t go anywhere, and trying to get across and trying to get back in and then eventually got tired, stopped paddling, and pretty quickly got taken out to sea. And within 15 minutes, couldn’t see him anymore. And so someone up in the car park had called the like emergency services and then half an hour later a guy comes on a jet ski and comes into shore and says, where’s the guy? He’s been gone for about half an hour or 45 minutes. So just like going out until you find him eventually came back with him. But yeah, you’ve got, yeah, you’ve got no, no chance of getting back in when it’s those conditions and it didn’t look that it wasn’t didn’t look dangerous at all. No, I mean, I think, I think, you know, sitting down with, you know, sitting down with a textbook, you know, and maybe it’s something that happens with, you know, the younger generation in Australia but, you know, even for professional

athletes, you know, just taking a moment to sit down with a book and learn about how to read a rip and, you know, understanding some of that stuff can actually be hugely beneficial from a racing perspective, you know, just to be aware of how to read current and chop. And it’s, ironically, it’s something that Richard Varga and one of the top, the top ITU swimmer has talked about is, you know, he is so in tune with his swim stroke that he’ll go to a race venue and he’ll look at the conditions that, you know, in the days leading up to the race, and he’ll pay attention to anything and everything and then he’ll adapt his stroke in the race, depending on what’s going on, you know, he’ll change his cadence, he’ll strain changes recovery, you know, his timing, you know, all those sorts of things, you know, and that’s what they do at the very point he end, whereas most of us is just survive. Yeah, yeah, I’ve had a surf Ironman athlete.

So, like the, it’s like a swim board and and paddle over here in Australia. It’s a big thing and I had a guy Matt Bevilacca on the podcast and he’s he said the biggest surf he’s been out in competition wise was 10 foot surf. And like these guys are just the very best at those sort of conditions and, you know, to keep cool out there. You don’t just jump straight into it’s about just progressively building your confidence, building your experience and then going about it that way and for me when I started to swim open water came from a pool swimming background. It took me about three years to get any good at it because I had a pool based stroke. I didn’t know how to site didn’t know how to draft and it took me a while to learn it and that came from swimming since I was four years old. So it’s something that you just need to get in there and have that get that experience because I kind of equate it to like, you know, mountain bike riding compared to riding on the road like you.

It’s a different sort of handling skill that that it’s required that it’s is required and yeah you just got to you can’t learn that that part of it from a book can you. No you can and you know I would say you know a better analogy is almost like looking at like rock climbing. And you know you talk to top rock climbers and you see some of things that they do and you know that that’s insane you know how could anybody do that but actually like the most. skilled rock climbers are you know have developed like natural sort of risk assessment instincts. Like over many, many years, you know there’s the most famous is Alex Honold and you know his free his climb free solo of El Capitan and everybody says that’s as a as a feat of human endurance that’s the greatest thing that anybody’s probably ever done. And you know there’s some psychological aspect to why he’s able to do it because his amygdala just doesn’t is doesn’t get particularly stimulated.

They don’t know why he was born that way or but but but he’s but he still talks about, you know he’s never doing anything in that endeavor where he felt he was, you know, out of control or you know, because ultimately, you know, the net result would be death. And that’s the thing is exactly exactly what Matt is saying you have to very slowly build up sort of you know stimulus and response to these types of environments and conditions, rather than and and it can make a huge difference I know from personal experience you know you can make a massive difference, developing your open water skill set such that you can swim on faster feet versus relying on just swim fitness. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I said at the start, we’ll go for about half an hour, we’ve gone for almost on an hour here so I don’t take up your time any further. Really enjoyed chatting with you and you know for me these podcasts I think it’s somewhat selfish because I get to learn a lot from people like yourself who have got a wealth of knowledge and experience in triathlon and swimming so I’ve taken it taken away a lot from this podcast so I appreciate you taking the time to be here.

And I know you’re not a man of sort of social media and all that sort of stuff but your coaching services is Tilbury Davis so if people do want to find out more about you or perhaps get in contact what’s the best way to go about it. Yeah, I mean I’m on, I’m on Instagram as coach Tilbury’s and Tilbury Davis Twitter coach Tilbury’s and my website is Tilbury Davis.com. So, and there’s plenty of information there and you know this I’ve been on a few podcasts and shared a lot of thoughts around, around coaching over the years as things have evolved in my mind. And within the sport as a whole or endurance sports as a whole. Yeah, there’s plenty there. It seems like it’s like it seems like the more the secret weapon of a lot of the, a lot of top triathletes and is it mostly word of mouth how like I guess it spreads and through podcasts and that kind of thing. I mean certainly I’ve I’ve always, I’ve always worked with a small number of athletes globally and I’ve always tended to have athletes approach me through reputation or referral.

And I think that’s generally how it works and you know certainly there’s you know athletes that work through a couple of coaches over a period of years and that’s, you know, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just trying to learn and improve, you know, I’ve coached individuals like Lionel Sanders twice in the last five years. And, you know, at some point you have to accept that maybe, you know, you’re not adding value knowledge wise, or maybe, you know, from a communication perspective, you know you’re not. You’re not adding things of, you know, adapted and changed or moved in such a way that you’re not, you know, ticking all the boxes in creating sufficient buying. And that’s why as a coach I think in any sport, I think the most important thing you can work on is communication. And then after that worry about all the technical knowledge stuff. When you get an athlete to be fully bought in to a process, you know, you’re always going to be having a little bit of an uphill battle, you know, and just hoping that they buy the knowledge when in reality, you know, in any sale industry they say, you know, people buy people they don’t buy knowledge.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And I think that’s the good thing about podcasts like this, you get to, you get to, you get to see what someone’s really like when you have this long form conversation. So it’s, and I think for me personally with my business, I think a lot of the people have come to camps and clinics, they’ve listened to the podcast and they can decide whether or not the right person to work with. And that’s what I really like about these these podcasts because we can. Yeah, and I don’t think you really have these types of conversations that often just in person like you don’t how often you sit down with your friend chat on one topic. So, yeah, no this is this offer a matter in this, you know, den age of a lot of remote work or with peers, you know, I think, you know, once you get to a certain point and you have a certain amount of knowledge. You shouldn’t be afraid to share that. You shouldn’t be afraid to sit down with a peer and say, hey, you know, what do you think about this? Because wisdom is, you know, accepting that sometimes you’re wrong and changing your perspective and evolving.

You know, that’s, that’s what’s, that’s what’s key. Yeah, and God knows I’ve done that a lot of times over the last 15 years that I’ve coached. But I think it’s all for the better. So yeah, David, I appreciate the time and it’s been great. 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.