Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Imagine driving along a cliff top road, amazing scenery, and you’re watching the ocean pass by, and you’re thinking this is amazing, and you’re in the moment, and you’re really just truly appreciating the view that you’ve got. And then from the back seat, your five year old asks you, are we there yet? And it takes you out of the moment. That’s kind of like what a watch will do to your swimming. A watch will take you out of the moment and not allow you to be as present as you could when you’re swimming. And the problem with that is swimming is so much about the feel for the water and the ability to be present and hear the water moving over you, feel it rushing over your hands and your body and you just having that internal gauge of the intensity and the effort that you’re putting on and how you’re moving through the water that if you get taken out of that, because you’re looking at your watch and you’re trying

to hit a certain time, that is one of the things that is going to stop you from improving as quick as you could. And some people like to track their swims with their watch so that they can post it on Strava. But I would argue that you will actually get way more improvement and become a better swimmer by not worrying about what Strava says and not worrying about what your watch says and just allowing yourself to be more in the moment when you go to the pool. And I’ve seen this with many swimmers that will come into the wall, they’ll hit stop on their watch, they’ll check their time and then they’ll go again. Whereas you’ll have some swimmers who aren’t using a watch and they’re using the 60 second clock at the pool to see what times they’re doing and see what times they need to leave on. And they are the ones that are typically much more in that flow state because you can get taken out of it by using your watch. And personally, I found that

when I used the watch for a couple of weeks, just to kind of test it out, I was always worried about what my time would say at the end on the watch. I’d always want to be trying to hit a certain pace and I’d be doing an aerobic set, trying to hit a faster time than I actually needed to, because I just wanted to beat what my watch was going to tell me. And that’s just something that stopped me from actually putting in the right amount of effort. And it took me out of that flow state with my swimming. And I see it with so many swimmers these days. So if you’re currently on your watch all the time, what you could try instead is track your swims manually, whether that’s like a 3K swim or three and a half K swim, just put it in manually to your Strava or your Garmin app and just tell your coach, look, I want to get better at swimming. And I feel like the watch is a distraction right now. I’m doing the swims, but I’m just going to track it manually and

see how you feel after a month of not using your watch. And I would argue that most people would find that they actually become better swimmers by getting rid of the watch when it comes to swimming in the pool. So let me know in the comments, do you use a watch? Do you not use one? And is this something that you would try for a month just as a trial to see if it’s something that will help you actually get better at swimming? Let me know. 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.