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. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My name’s Brenton Ford. This is a short episode where I want to do two things. Number one, just let you know that Hell Week will be opening for bookings on the 14th of December, which is this Thursday if you listen to the podcast. It’s open at nine o’clock Melbourne time, which is Australian eastern standard time. The reason I want to let you know is because it will likely book up very quickly. There’s only 21 spots available. And with the amount of interest I’ve had from people wanting to return and people wanting to join us for next year’s Hell Week camp, I’d recommend booking as soon as possible because I think it will book up very quickly. So if you’d like to book in for our Hell Week camp in Thailand next year, go to

effortlesswimming.com forward slash hell week and make sure you go there at nine o’clock Melbourne time because that’s when bookings will open. And once they’re full, then it’s unlikely you’ll be able to to get in unless someone cancels their spot, which they’ll be awaiting this. So that’s the first thing. Second thing is I want to talk about taking one step backwards to take two steps forward. One thing that I’ve come to learn a lot in the last couple of years is whenever it comes to particularly changing a stroke, I mean, one of the main things that that we do as a swimming coaching company is help people improve their technique to help them swim faster. One of the main things that I find is that whenever you’re looking to adjust or change a habit and particularly change a motor pattern, you’re going to have to take one step backwards in terms of your speed, how you feel and also just kind of where you’re at with your swimming in order to take

two steps forward. An example of this is when I did filming two or three months ago. And this is for me. And then I picked out two key things that I was working on. Number one was I had to go a bit deeper with my catch and my pull through. I wasn’t quite going deep enough. So I wasn’t able to pull as strong as I could. So I was able to engage my lats as much as I could. And I just had to go five to 10 centimetres deeper with both arms. The second thing, my right wrist was breaking. So my hand was my fingertips were tipping down too much. So I was losing some surface area on my right hand. So so I needed to work on keeping that as one paddle while I was pulling through. And for the well, the first time that I tried it, I went four to five seconds slower for a time hundred than I would normally be. And the reason for that was I’m trying to maintain these these changes that I’m looking to make. And I just couldn’t do it at at speed.

It actually made me slower. And this is so common when it comes to to changing your technique. You’re not going to either have the strength or have the the ability to hold it under pressure and that speed first off. So it will take you a while. And it wasn’t until three weeks later that I actually got back down to the the speed that I would normally be at for a time hundred. I’m going to push off the wall. And then about a week later, I finally started going quicker. I went about a second quicker than normal. And then the week after that, I went about two seconds quicker than the normal. So really, it was about five weeks four or five weeks to actually start going faster than where I was at originally. So if you if you come to a clinic, if you go to a camp or if you’re looking to make changes to your own stroke, don’t be afraid to go that little bit slower and to not be as fast in the beginning, because it does take time to to adapt to it.

And one of the the main things that you need to adapt to or that you kind of need to get used to is finding the the rhythm and the fluency in your your stroke with the changes in your technique. Because like Gary Haring talks about, it’s the pit of discomfort. It’s the awkwardness, the uncomfortableness that you’re going to have to go through whenever you’re doing something new. It’s like if a dancer or a ballet dancer, if they’re learning a new routine or a new dance, they’re not going to be very fluent. They’re not going to be able to put their all the different moves together in the first week. It’s going to take them a long time to be able to do it and have it flawless and have it have themselves feel comfortable and to have that

that fluency to their to their movements. So it’s exactly the same. It’s going to take you some time. So just that’s one thing you’ve got to accept. You’ve got to have that long term view. And that’s why with our membership where I coach people online, that’s why it’s the minimum term is 12 months. So if I’m going to work with someone, yeah, I could maybe help them in in a week and they they can improve. But if I really want to help them get faster, it’s got to be a long term because when it, you know, if you’re looking to just do something for a week and then go and just try it, well, you’ve really got to try long try for a longer period of time. And one of our most recent podcasts, I think it was episode 92, was called 66 days and 18 months. And there we talked about how it takes around 66 days to actually replace a habit. And if you’re looking to try something, give it 18 months for you to get the full experience

and know whether that’s something you want to do. So you’ve really got to be looking long term when it comes to becoming a better swimmer. And so you’re going to hit some highs, you’re going to have some lows. But the main thing is that you keep on track and keep moving towards that goal. And don’t get, don’t stop doing something if you if you have a little bit of a setback like going slower initially when you make changes to your stroke. So that’s what I wanted to talk about today is the long term approach and it’s OK to take one step back to take two steps forward. This has been another episode of the Effortless Swimming podcast. I’ll be back very soon with another episode. Thank you very much for listening. See you next time. 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.