I think people, when they’re trying to search for a range of motion, benefits trying to force it too much rather than letting it relax into the position. And once we have relaxed and we’ve got a bit more range of motion opened up, we’ll then apply some strength training to reinforce it. So the body then goes, sweet, we have this range of motion. Now we’ve done some strength training through this range of motion to make it feel safe, secure, and it learns that that is okay. So we don’t keep regressing backwards and we can kind of make better gains as we move forwards. I think a lot of the time, you know, people put these massive programs out there because they want to show their value. But showing your value is actually doing what’s best for each individual athlete and their circumstance and making sure that you can adjust their program and be flexible with your plan. 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.

Ryan Evendon is the founder behind formidable strength and conditioning, a coaching service that’s reshaping how swimmers integrate strength training into their routines, helping them power through the water with more speed and resilience while safeguarding against injuries. Today, Ryan will share his insights on essential strength exercises for swimmers, how to prevent common swimming injuries and some truly inspiring success stories from the athletes he’s worked with. Whether you’re a competitive swimmer looking to enhance your performance or a recreational swimmer aiming to swim smarter and stronger, Ryan’s expertise is sure to provide valuable guidance. Let’s get into the episode.

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Ryan Evendon. And Ryan, I first heard about you from Andy Donaldson when I had him on the podcast talking about his marathon swimming and he talked about how important strength training was and he talked about how important you were as a part of his strength training in the build up to those big swims and making sure he doesn’t get injured.

He can withstand those tough conditions over many, many hours. And then I’ve seen you quite regularly on Instagram and popping up in my feed and on a few other podcasts as well. So I wanted to get you on the podcast to talk about strength training for swimmers because it’s a component that is super important for anyone, but I think particularly as we get older, it only gets more important. So firstly, welcome. And how did you veer into swimming strength training for swimmers? Well, mate, originally I was a swimmer myself. So I was a 200 breaststroke swimmer. I got to about 6th in the country for the 200 breasts.

And I was often really injured. Like I got injured all the time and it was probably a lot of, a lot to do with over training, but my body wasn’t able to handle the loads that we were doing.

So I always thought I’d actually become a swim coach, like on pool deck coach. But when I was doing all my rehab and stuff like that, I kind of fell into the gym side of things a little bit more and thought I can probably make more of an impact here, trying to keep people in the water as long as possible and having them have a longer time period in the water. So that’s kind of why I fell into the gym side of things. From there, like for the last eight years, I’ve worked with swimmers in the gym. So a long time now compared to how long, you know, S&C for swimmers has kind of become popular in the last couple of years.

But it’s been a wild ride, man. We’ve done everything from, you know, in terms of formidable strength and conditioning, we’ve had guys go to the Olympics, but the guys that I think we’re truly passionate about nowadays is that older generational group that are trying to do more open water swims, the channel swims, and it breeds more into our philosophy of trying to create swimmers for life. And that’s through strength training for injury prevention to make sure they can handle more load in the water. And just enjoy it. Like I think a lot of the time, everyone gets so caught up in the performance aspect of things that they forget that, you know, this was something that everyone got into because they enjoyed it and they want to keep enjoying it for as long as possible. And you’re not enjoying it if you’re busted with a shoulder all the time. So, you know, as much as we don’t, well, we do do rehab now. We’ve just brought on a physiotherapist,

but as much as we’ve always been focused, we want to prevent as many injuries as possible through strength training because we believe that if you’re in the water, you’re going to actually get better at swimming. So our job is to keep you in there and build some capacity and the performance aspect of, you know, strength training for swimmers will then come from there. And how’s your philosophy evolved over the years that you’ve been a strength coach? Because I’m sure you’ve worked with a lot more athletes over that time. You’ve come across different demographics and people training with different goals. So I imagine your philosophy has probably shifted or taken a bit of a turn at some point. I think it’s probably more of a circular. I think we’ve started off just really focusing on nailing the basics.

Then, you know, you get caught down a little bit of a rabbit hole of, you know, all the stuff that matters, like, you know, the velocity you’re using in your strength training and all those kind of things. But then I think over the last two years, we’ve just come right back around to the basics. What’s, you know, ensure that range of motion is there. That’s the first one. And range of motion isn’t just stretching. There’s a huge component of, you know, being able to be strong enough to hold the range of motion that you need to worry about. Then from that point of, from range of motion, we want to look at stabilizing the joints so you can actually apply force. Because a lot of people, even, especially in the older populations, to go back to point one, they don’t get into the right position so they can never actually get the technical aspects that the coaches are trying to get them to have because they just physically can’t get in

without compensating somewhere else. But once we can get into those positions, we need to really make sure that they’re strong enough to be able to hold and maintain those positions as they’re pulling through their strokes and going through their races or their swims. So that would be the two main points. And then we can get whatever performance adaptations that we like through strength training and, you know, working on those other factors. Like, you know, there’s more specific aspects for me. Hmm. So is there a way that you assess someone’s mobility or their range of motion? Yep. So the first way that we probably look into that would be, you know, range of motion for the shoulder is quite important. Overhead range of motion is our number one

that we normally consider top of the… That’s the first one we’re looking at because if you can’t get your head up, if you can’t get your arms above your head in swimming, you’re in a bit of a pickle.

It’s pretty hard to catch them freestyle or swim any of the strokes if your arms don’t go above your head. So that’s number one. How do you assess that? Yep. So there’s a few ways we can do it. We use a bit of the vault technology for our in-house assessments, but for the online guys, we get them just to lie on their back, arms straight up above their head. So if you lie on your back, arms straight up and then you just fold those arms back. And if you can get your arms on the floor without your lower back popping up or seeing anything else change, we’re in a pretty good position there to move forward. So we can make a pretty clear assumption that that’s going to be…

You’ve got enough overhead range of motion there. And with that, I mean, I see it all the time with a lot of their triathletes that will come in from being on the bike and running. They’re very stiff through the shoulders and don’t have that overhead range of motion.

How do you… What are some ways to get started on improving that? Because I imagine it’s not about building the strength to start with. It’s about just expanding that range of motion and it’s probably starting very light. Like what is it for you that you would start to move on to from there? So we always start from the most proximal aspect and then we work our way out. So what I mean by that, especially if we take the shoulder, we work from the trunk, so your body, and then move out towards your limbs. So number one thing that we always assess if someone’s coming in with a very tight upper thoracic area, chest and back, is their breathing.

We probably solved more shoulder issues for just breathing mechanics, especially in older populations where they’re more likely to have more stress in their lives, where they start breathing for those upper traps a little bit more than actually having a full diaphragmatic breath. But that’s step one, because we’ve got to sort that out. If we don’t focus on that, everything else we try and do is probably just going to regress back at some point. So we start there. Then what we do, we work towards the thoracic spine. So that’s the top region of your spine just before you get to your neck. And we make sure you’ve got at least 10 degrees of range of motion there. If you don’t have that, your scap function, your scaps won’t function correctly. What is this next point that we look at? We look at scap functions. So we go, breathing is good, T spine is good, scap function is good. Then we’ll move actually into the shoulder joint itself

and we’ll look, okay, can you now get 90 degrees of glenal-humual joint range of motion there? And if you’re ticking all those boxes, it adds up to 180 degrees. And then we can go from there. In terms of how we manage that, we obviously do the breathing first.

What we generally see is if you work from proximal to distal, you solve a lot of issues going forward. So if we solve the breathing issue and that becomes a regular and normal thing that they’re doing, it will then relieve some of the tension going out. But especially with your triathletes and your cyclists, they’re generally very weak upper back because they spent a lot of time in that their shoulders are forwards because they want to get over the bike and hold that position. So just strengthening up that upper back is a huge component of the stuff what we would focus on. Things like band pull-aparts, your rowing mechanics, making sure that you’re actually getting your shoulder to move forwards and backwards while you’re rowing and you’re not just using your arm to do it. Making sure the scapula is gliding across that ribcage nicely and functioning well would be really good and building strength through that area. Once we’ve done that,

we see this kind of cascade effect of the range of motion starting to open up with, of course, some mobility aids and stuff like that. So if anyone is in my program, they know that we love a little peanut. So it’s the two tennis balls that are kind of put together, goes up your spine. Combine that, find the really tight spot, go for your breathing mechanics. That’s why breathing is also really important because it allows us to open up these ranges a little bit better.

And then we take it from there with some just breathing in that position, releasing it, try not to force things. I think people, when they’re trying to search for a range of motion, benefits try to force it too much rather than letting it relax into the position. And once we have relaxed and we’ve got a bit more range of motion to open up, we’ll then apply some strength training to reinforce it. So the body then goes, sweet. We have this range of motion. Now we’ve done some strength training through this range of motion to make it feel safe, secure. And it learns that that is okay. So we don’t keep regressing backwards and we can kind of make better gains as we move forwards.

It’s really great to hear you talk about your approach there because it’s so similar in the technique approach that we like to take. It’s start from the inside, move out from there. And it makes sense. There’s no point in thinking about what your hands or your wrists are doing because it’s connected to your elbows and your shoulder. And it doesn’t work that way. So you’ve got to start inside out. And just that range of motion, I think even if people didn’t build or increase their strength that much, but just worked on that range of motion, for many people, that’s going to help them swim a lot faster and more efficiently because being able to get into the positions is, I’d say for probably 40 to 50% of the people that I coach who come to clinics, they just can’t physically, or can’t simply get into those positions that we want them to. So really some basic stuff can go a long, long way. Yeah. We really see two types of people here

with this. So we have one side of the group that’s that. They can’t get into the position. And then we have the other side of the group where they can’t stabilize in that position. And they’re both problems. Everyone thinks about, I think a lot of the time, everyone goes, oh, you’ve got heaps of range of motion that should be great. But this is where we’ve got to find a balance. It’s all about balance with your body and performance and swimming. You can’t be one side or the other too much. You’ve got to meet somewhere in the middle to get that balance so you can get into position like you’re talking about. What’s a huge issue that we see in adult populations.

But you’ve also got to be able to stabilize and actually control yourself in those end ranges of motions and not go too far. You can’t overextend on a catch position and lose everything the same way that you would not be able to get into the position. And I think the way that you’re talking about swim technique, it’s kind of the same as what I came from. So before I got into S&C coaching, I was a swim coach. I was a swim coach while I was competitive swimming as well. And that was always the approach that I would take when I was taught to take is you’ve got to work its head position, hip position, feet position, rotation, and then work your way out. So body position is key. If you can float well, you’re solving most of your problems. So for us in the S&C side of things, it’s the same or it should be the same. If you can’t get them into the right position, they’re never going to be able to actually apply

any of the technical teaching or it’s going to be very difficult without compensation for them to apply the technical teaching that the swim coach is trying to get them to do. So I think that’s where we really worked. And it’s another reason why I’ve really loved working with older populations now because I feel like the impact we can make on those guys who are really tight and are really struggling to get in position and just feel like their technique is not going to get better. Like we have so many people come to us and say, I just, I will never, I’m probably never going to get a high elbow catch. And I’m like, really? It’s like, well, I’ve been trying for years and we’ve done all the drills. I’m like, mate, let’s assess, let’s see where your shoulders at and let’s go from there. And needless to say, they couldn’t get their arm above their head. And we go, okay, this is going to take some time because it takes longer to fix you.

Once you get a bit older, your body’s learned this position is comfortable here. It will take some time and your swimming might feel a bit icky, but stick with it because this is, we’ll get you, if you, if you can get it, if you can get your arm above your head, we can get this catch position. So we’ve just got to get your arm above your head now. Yeah, I love it. And in terms of the swimmers that are doing the longer distance events, even if it’s an Iron Man, maybe a Rotnest Channel swim, which is 20 kilometers. What approach are you taking there? Because it’s obviously not about that explosive power that we’re looking for. It’s about being able to be strong throughout the race and maintain it. Someone like Andy Donelson, for example. What’s your philosophy behind building the strength required for the longer distance stuff?

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Okay, so with this, this is a very interesting point because would you agree that if you could get faster in the water, your ability to swim longer distances will probably get better because you’ve got a stronger threshold? Yeah. That makes sense? Yeah. You know what I’m saying? So for example, if you’re holding a 130 pace, but you make yourself fast enough to swim a 120 pace, 130 becomes easy.

Does that make sense? Yeah. Or will it come in as long as you’re doing the training required for it? So that’s the easiest concept to go with. This is where I go with strength training. If you could, and we don’t really work in the world of what you can lift and stuff like that, it’s very much just watch the trend. But if you are lifting at this level, be like at a certain level before say, you could let’s put a number on it, even though we don’t really care about the numbers, you could only RDL 40 kilos before and now you can RDL 60 kilos.

40 is going to be real easy for you.

And you’ll be able to do a lot more reps at 40 than you would would have before when 40 was really hard. So the essence is really still, like we don’t necessarily go into so much of like the explosive jumping, throwing work that we do with the sprint guys and the pool swimmers and stuff like that. But we don’t cut it out completely either because it’s still important. Like we still need to make people,

speed is still what gets people across the line and a lot of these ultra marathon swims.

And something that has become very apparent to us, especially working with Andy and working with the other guys like Josie, Max, Robbie Bonsall and all those boys. You know, the ones that can get faster, give themselves less risks for weather and other things to come into play and ruin that swim for you. So speed is still even an endurance, something that I think very strongly

is very critical still. I think if you just try and become, I think if you just try to become this endurance animal, but you’ve got no speed improvement, I think you just leave yourself in a big risk window of like, okay, well, I could swim 40 kilometers, but if the weather turns bad, especially in rotto and port to pub, for example, especially port to pub because it’s a little bit later in the year, we see this all the time, the fastest, the cutoff time might come in and they might have to move that forwards because of weather conditions and stuff like that. So you can’t just sit back and go, okay, well, we just need to make them endurance animals. I think that’s an aspect of speed is involved. A lot of that is determined by the swim coaching side of things as well, but we need to help facilitate that by giving them the opportunity to have that extra strength and power at the disposal. And if we can make them a little bit stronger,

they then become a little bit more efficient at their previous bests, that’s going to help them a long way. But the main thing for these endurance guys is just making sure that they can get in the water as much as possible for me. And if we get them stronger, the stronger they are and the more balanced their body is, the less likely they are to break. As long as we’re managing recovery in terms of sleep, hydration and nutrition, well, that’s something that we’ve got to really focus on. And then the strength work that comes from that and that opportunity for them to become faster in the water because they get stronger, they have more disposable force that they can use in the water. They’ll feel better in the water, what will be a massive confidence boost. Their stroke efficiency will increase because they can pull more efficiently each time because they’ve had technical improvement because we can get them in range of motion.

But they’re also just stronger each stroke so they can then get on top of it. So I think I’ve seen this before, especially in the endurance sport arena where everyone’s just like, you just need to do high reps, high volumes, all these things. But I also think, well, that’s what they’re doing in the water anyway. So why don’t we take a little bit of a different approach and make them and work on some of the stuff that they’re not going to get in the water, strength, power, speed, and just give their body that opportunity when they do go in the water and that transfer when they do go in the water to be able to go a little bit faster in their training sessions and build a higher threshold. I think that’s kind of where we’ve gone in terms of essence for these endurance guides. And I think that’s why we have such a great success record. We’ve not just the elite guys because people are going to say that Andy is an animal

because he’s super fast anyway. But even the guys who aren’t as fast as Andy, they’ve had these improvements in speed in the water that have helped them because they can sit at that threshold that was a little bit faster, would have been too hard for them before for longer and get themselves across the line quicker.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And would you, in terms of fitting it in each week, where would you suggest people try and fit their strength workouts in relation to their swim sessions? Because I know personally, if I do a hard gym session Tuesday night, swimming Wednesday morning, I’m usually going to feel it. So I try to do it at least 24 hours before a swim session. Otherwise, I just come in feeling pretty heavy. And obviously it depends how much you’re training. But do you have a preference there and what have you seen work well for people? This is the hardest thing, I think, for a lot of swimmers, is how do I fit it in,

especially the older guys who also got huge work commitments and all those other things, right?

Because it becomes tough. You’re trying to balance your pool sessions that you have to do. You’re not going to get better at swimming without swimming.

The gym’s great, but if you’re not in the water, you’re not going to go faster in the water. So that’s your specific time where you get faster in the water. So where do you fit it in? How do you fit it in? And it really is a question of what works best for you. There is obviously my opinion in terms of what is optimal. I wouldn’t have you come in if it was completely up to me and you’re a professional athlete, yada, yada, yada. Well, we don’t work with professional athletes. I don’t think there’s many in swimming, but we’re not an institute or sport or anything like that. We work with the real people in the real world. And it’s just very tough. So what we try to do is we look at their schedule and say if they’ve got a double on a Monday, a single on a Tuesday, a double on a Wednesday, a single on a Tuesday, on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they might do one swim on Saturday and a Sunday. For example, we might get them in

on a Tuesday, Thursday morning or the Tuesday, Thursday night just to balance it out so they are getting enough time. However, when we run into issues with that, especially with the guys who work, is like, you know, or they have families Tuesday and Thursday night, but they don’t only time to hang out with the family. So what do we do then? Well, we normally would pick the most, the lightest intensity swimming sessions that we can and try and pair it up with that. And it’s up to us as this S&C provider to manage their load so they’re not going into the next session sore. Because at the end of the day, you’re only going to get better from what you recover from. This is, you know, I’m an S&C provider who works with swimmers. My job is to make sure they can swim in the water to the best of their ability every time they get in the water. My job is not to kick people in the butt and make them sore for weeks in my own way of trying to fulfill my own needs

as an S&C coach and make myself feel relevant. My job is to make sure that these guys get in the water, do and can continue to perform in the water. Yes, sometimes they’re going to get sore. And that does happen. But that’s not the goal. I don’t want anyone to be sore. We have a rule with my gym program. If they do a session and they’re sore, they’ve got to tell us because we don’t want it to happen twice. We want to just make sure that they’re doing what they can and they’re maximizing every swim session they can do. And there’s a lot of ways that you can do that. One might be, okay, the volume isn’t very high. The intensity wasn’t very high. So what did you do in terms of recovery? How’s your nutrition? What’s your sleep like? Did you hydrate effectively? Do we need to bring in some recovery aids just to help speed up that process for you? Or is this going to just be something that we’re going to have to take? Okay, this happened this week.

We’ll make a quick adjustment for your second session in the week. And then we’ll come back to that session at same light and see what happens because it might have just been it’s a lot of new stuff in the program. The adaptation process was your body just freaked out a bit. But you’ve got to also go, okay, well, we don’t want that to happen too often because then they’ve had two crap sessions that week or in two weeks and I don’t really want that. I want people to feel fresh because at the end of the day, they need to swim fast in the water to get faster in the water. They don’t need to lift heavy in the gym to get faster in the water necessarily. It does help though.

Gotcha. So the reason you don’t want them coming or leaving a session, a gym session saw is because it’s obviously going to impact their performance in the pool. And if you’re doing that too much, you’re just not going to get the gains from the swim. What’s the risk reward ratio on that if that makes sense? Like if I’m belting someone in the gym

twice a week and they’re turning up

after every session they have with me to their next session in the water and they’re sore, they’re going to have a crap session at least twice a week if they get 48 hours of doms, they’re going to have maybe three crap sessions, what ends up six crap sessions a week, but maybe they only had one good session that week. They’re probably not getting what they need out of those swim sessions. So like pull it back in like, you know, let’s give you what you can handle at this stage and where you’re at with your life and what’s going on in the world and what can you, what can your body manage because there’s no point in wasting your time because you don’t have a lot because we’re on this schedule. There’s no point in me wasting your time,

giving you these massive gym sessions where I could probably get more improvement out of you in 20 minutes than an hour because that’s all your body is willing to give me at this point in time. But the best thing about the body is it adapts over time if you give it the opportunity to. So may start at 20 and we may build that up over time and we may need to drop back every now and again if you’re training spikes, that’s fine. But we can consistently just increase incrementally over a course of, you know, a longer period of time and we will get you to an hour and it will be fine and your body will be adapted to it and then you’re getting more out of it but your body’s actually improved and we’ve decreased your risk of injury what would obviously be very bad if you got injured because then you know in the water and then we’re modifying your gym anyway. So we’ve kicked ourselves in the face there.

So it’s just, you know, what is the reward from that risk? You know, if I’m not able to take myself out of it and say, what is the best for the swimmer? The best thing for the swimmer is for the swimmer to swim and be able to swim well. Also, their coaches stop sending like, don’t want you going to, don’t want their swimmer is going to an S&C provider when their kids always, or their adult swimmers always turn up sore the next day and they’re getting frustrated on pool deck going, why am I, why can’t you do a bloody aerobic A1 cycle?

I lift my arms above my head. Well, that’s bloody useful, isn’t it? Like, so, you know, it’s just, I think a lot of the time, you know, people put these massive programs out there because they want to show their value, but showing your value is actually doing what’s best for each individual athlete and their circumstance and making sure that you can adjust their program and be flexible with your plan. Again, I’m an S&C provider. I’m a supplementary service to these guys like a dietitian or a physio is. I’m not the primary thing that’s going to make them better. The primary thing that’s going to make them better is them in the water.

So my job is to make sure they can get in the water and swim really well.

And in terms of people who start with you, they’re quite new. What are some of the common misconceptions that they come in with?

Which one? It’s changed a lot. This is probably the thing that’s changed the most because when we first started, my primary goal when talking to coaches was this is going to be a benefit to your athletes, not something that’s going to make them slower because a lot of people used to think that. I think now that it’s evolved a bit more and people have caught up. So I don’t have to deal with that much at the moment. But one of the main…

Just trying to think of the most common one at the moment. We… I think we do such a good job in our positioning now on our website how we enter conversations with people that we don’t get a lot of that many objections once people have signed up. But I think one of the main ones is people don’t value the rest periods enough.

That’s probably resting…

Resting and recovery is probably the thing that we have to work on the most with people at this stage. And that would be in terms of people thinking they can just blast through their program because in the water a lot of the time it is just get your main set, talk to her. Here’s your cycles, away you go. You’re getting like 10 to 15 seconds, 20 seconds rest. Especially when you’re doing more endurance work or a minute maybe. We’re in the gym, it’s like, okay, well, we’re probably going to have a minimum rest of a minute plus because it’s a different style of working out and we need to deal with different things and stuff like that. So really getting people to understand and buy into rest periods is probably the number one thing I have to deal with.

We still get the question about

injury risk in the gym. And I just kind of say all sport has risk of injury. My job is to mitigate your risk of injury as much as possible by making you stronger.

But at the end of the day, you’re probably more likely to get injured at swimming than you are in the gym based on the stats that we’ve got and the people that have been injured with us. And the other one would probably what we talked about earlier in terms of like the endurance swimming thing, in terms of not putting enough emphasis on getting these guys stronger and pushing that threshold up a little bit higher so they can have a better performance in the water. I think that’s probably the main one. People still think that just being a robically,

being a robic animal is the way to go where I think having a bit more speed is a key aspect of that now. It’s interesting here you talk about the rest intervals or recovery intervals. I find it’s the same thing in the pool with endurance athletes. Whenever we do sprint sets, having them be okay with being on the wall for a minute while they rest up before they go a fast 50, right? Like it’s just like, no, we got to go. We got to go. It’s like, no, just let’s take this minute rest. Then we can actually go, you know, much, much faster and much harder in this 50 and actually hit a much higher speed and use a different energy system.

People just, they want to go to the pool, want to get their workout done, but if they can be okay with being on the wall for more rest, long-term it’s going to help them a lot. And obviously same thing for strength training. Yeah, I think it’s something that’s coming.

It’s coming around, I think. I think the only way this is kind of going to trickle down is the more coaches that talk about it and actually implement it.

I think as I’ve mentioned a few times, I think for these endurance athletes, speed is key.

Being fit enough is important, but I think you can get so fit and then you probably didn’t need to get any fitter. But if you got faster, you’d make your life for the hell of a lot easier getting across. And you need rest period for that to happen because otherwise you’re training the wrong adaptation.

And that’s, I think it’s great to hear because that’s the process that we take with our swim program because we also own a swim program as well is we’re going to train the specific adaptation and we’re going to do that. And speed is a big part of that. Endurance is a big part of that. Everything in between is a big part of that that you need. And there’s different levels to what athletes are. If you’re a master’s 50 sprinter, there’s something you’re doing different training than a Andy Donaldson training for Manhattan Island. But there still has to be elements of everything for everyone to get. It’s just the ratio of what you give them changes. And getting people to actually sit and rest is a huge one that I especially find with the trifle crew, the open water crew especially, because they’re so used to being in the water and just churning out kilometers that they don’t really take that step back. Good story for you.

I think you’ve had Josie on the pod before, yeah?

No, I haven’t had Josie on. Just Andy. Anyway, Josie is a great story. Josie also did Manhattan with Andy. So she was the fifth fastest overall now and missed out on the female record. But when she first came to us like five years ago, she was famous for getting her sets done in like 20 minutes. These are our long view sessions. And she would be done. It would be finishing the warm-up and Josie would be walking out the door. And it was two years ago, I think. Roughly two years ago where we kind of made that switch for her and kind of sat her down and went, look, you’re the fittest person in the program by far. You’re so fit. You’re always so fit. And I know that your thing that you hold on to is you’re like, I’m the fittest here. That will get me across the line. But you need to get faster now. So we need to change how you’re training. And she moved programs and the coach that she was with was obviously much into that as well

and saw that opportunity. And it’s great with the collaboration between S&C and the swim coach. And now she’s off crushing it. And she’s the first one to tell you, you know, speed is something that I want to prioritize. It’s something that you need to prioritize. Getting faster is important. It just makes your life easier.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And in this time, so you work with a wide range of people, how many times a week are the competitive guys, like the younger sort of age group swimmers, getting going to the gym compared to the older crew and do you have a suggestion or recommendation for most people? What would be a minimum for you for the age group triathlete? The minimum or maximum? Pretty much the same at the moment for us. And it comes, it’s realistically a matter of time. And the time dictates it too. It’s probably where we’re at for most of these guys. Majority of the athletes that we see with us, they’re on too.

You know, the way that I set up is works is, you know, we give you as many sessions is going to be best for you. So they could have four if we thought it was going to be the best for them. But most of the time, there’s no way they’re going to recover enough or have enough time to do that. So two is where we’ve sat with a lot of people. And a lot of the time, I don’t think you have enough time or the athlete is trained enough to go to free and get much of a benefit out of it.

Over like peak season with the like the open water season over here where people are doing open water events like every weekend, we go to free sessions. But the third sessions is a primer slash recovery session to get them ready for the weekend. There’s no real emphasis on trying to get them stronger or anything like that. It’s come in warm up, sit in boots, sit in your arm sleeves, do your recovery, make sure your range of motion is ready to go. And then a bit of priming work. So some med bull slams and stuff like that. And yeah, we do priming work for the open water guys as well, because it’s still important. Like you still want to have that go when you get there, right? So that’s when that competitive start of the year turns up, we go to free. But the third session is really like 30 minutes, just come in and do some stuff and they can do it at home as well. It’s a session that’s kind of designed that they can do wherever they most comfortable.

They can come in and do it if they want, they can do it at home if they want. But most of the time we sit around too

just because of the time constraints that we have because they need to be in the water more.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

Thanks so much for being on the podcast. I know you’ve got, we got based in Perth in Western Australia. But I think you’ve also got online resources as well. So what’s the best place for people to get in contact with you or your team and find out more about what you do? So you’ve got a few options here. You can just contact us directly through our social media. Instagram is probably the most accessible. I’m down as swimming under school strong. And then there’s obviously formidable strength and coaching. But the swimming strong is the one I’m going to be on most of the time. So that’s probably the easiest way to get in contact with us that way. Or head to the website. What’s www.formidablestrength.com.au and just put an enquiry there and the sales team will get to you. Good stuff. Well, thanks, Ryan. I’d love to see what you’re doing with. I think like having that niche of working with swimmers, purely swimmers is great because while general strength training

for people is important, I think there are some specific things that swimmers really need like the overhead range of motion, the thoracic rotation, like some really specific things that can go a long, long way. And I love your approach as well. So thanks for sharing some of that with me on the podcast. And anyone who’s listening to this, get in touch with Ryan and his team and we’ll put those links in the show notes. Awesome, mate. Thank you very much. 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.