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.

Thanks for joining me on the Effortless Swimming podcast. My name is Brenton Ford. Today’s guest is Jeff Grace. He’s a yoga teacher in Vancouver, Canada. And when I just spoke with Jeff, I was thinking, okay, what do we chat about here? Yoga is great for flexibility and mobility, but I actually learned a lot from speaking with Jeff and he really big into the swimming specific yoga. And he’s developed a program to help swimmers to improve their swimming through yoga. And it comes down to a lot more than just your mobility and flexibility. Some of the things that we spoke about was the increase of the improvement of awareness of your body through yoga. And I think this is a really big thing for people who aren’t doing any dry land training or exercises, there’s only sort of so much you can develop from being in the water. If you’re not doing anything on the land, you’re missing out on some of that body awareness that you can have through

doing something separate to swimming. So we look into that. We also look at how some specific movements in yoga can help you with the biomechanics of swimming, how you can reduce or prevent injuries through it and how you can adapt to the physiological demands that swimming requires through yoga. And Jeff’s worked with a number of Olympians as well. And he’s got a really good insight into improving your swimming with the assistance of yoga. So Jeff’s also got some great videos online that you can check out at swimmingspecificyoga.com and we’ll link to that on our website at effortlesswimming.com. So swimmingspecificyoga.com. If you’d like to get some very simple routines that you can go through either before your training afterwards or just completely separately, check out his website. That’s a very easy way to start to incorporate yoga into your normal training routine. Here we go. To go for. Where’d you come across?

How’d you find me? I just found it on I’m just trying to think about what my Android actual app for podcasts is. I want to say it’s pod attic and just look for some swimming websites was or not swim websites, but swimming podcasts and just I’m a little bit of a podcast attic. So it was obviously swimming’s a big part of of my life and that’s how I came across and saw, you know, one of the first things that drew me to it was I’m very good friends with Garrett and we did some work together when he was with Flow Swimming and we’ve been friends ever since. So listen to his stuff with Chris Ritter there that you had on just talking about kind of the higher intensity lower volume training. And so that’s kind of how I got first introduced to you. Yeah, cool. Talking about yoga and swimming. Why do you feel like swimmers should be doing yoga? What sort of benefits do you see in the guys and the girls that you work with?

I think there’s incredible benefit in many areas. I mean, I would say first off when you look at it, the body awareness component is huge. Looking at just the development of spatial awareness and just learning the spatial awareness to be able to manipulate the body. And then I believe almost everything you do on the mat as long as it’s, you know, focused on being able to have that transferability in the water absolutely is. And I think that a lot of the coaches have seen that that body awareness has really enhanced the ability of swimmers to do technical changes. And so I think the body awareness is a huge aspect. And then, of course, when you go to strength and strength and mobility, I think that one of the things that when I’m working specifically with swimmers that we’re really focused on, especially is shoulder stability really developing some scapular awareness and control and then being able to connect that to core

strength as well. And when you look at those aspects, I mean, that is functional strength. And then that also brings right in the injury prevention aspect of it. I know that especially with the age group swimmers, especially when you’re looking at a higher volume of athletes doing the programs that the coaches have found that there’s a huge amount of benefit when it comes to just not seeing the kind of typical injuries or the amount of injuries that they had seen in the past. And so that’s been an improvement. I think when you look at mobility, the other thing that goes right back to that strength and stability aspect, because I think one of the things when you look at, of course, everything we’re doing in swimming, applying force at different ranges and whatnot, when you look at developing mobility, especially with what I’m doing yoga-wise, and you connect that to the core strength and you connect that to the stability,

you’re allowing the athlete to gain a better range, but then be able to apply force and power once they gain that range rather than just improving their range of motion and then maybe not being able to apply power or force once they gain that new range. And then the final aspect and done this with a lot of the age group athletes and that I work with is just really working on the mental side of things. And I guess I shouldn’t just say with the age group athletes I work with, but also with the elite athlete. We really do hit on the mindfulness aspect and not in a spiritual sense by any means, but just really being able to have your focus in the present and being able to just let go of the other things that may be, you know, circling around in our minds and one of the coolest things was one of the age group athletes that I’ve worked with. I think she about 13 years old now and she came to me at the end of one of the yoga classes and just said

Jeff, you know, how I’m really getting nervous about doing a 200 fly. That’s my best event, but I’m continually getting anxiety before my races. How can I use this to help me with that? And we really talked about applying it and I know she really found that to help. So you’ve got that mindfulness aspect. So I guess just, I went through a whole bunch of things. I think that there’s a huge amount that swimmers can get out of it. So many good points there and you’ve, I was already sold on yoga before, you know, before we spoke, you know, a Pilates joke, I think it’s just the correlation between two of those things, that and swimming. It just, it can make such a difference and I’ve experienced that personally, but I love each of those points you brought up and so the first one, body awareness. I work with so many different people in the clinics that we do and the swimmers who make the, well number one, the fastest improvements, but those that I

see probably progressing the fastest are the ones who have got the best awareness of what their body’s doing and one of the most common things that I tend to see is when someone needs to make a fairly radical change to their stroke or just the placement of their hands or their head position, whatever it is, they really need to exaggerate that change to actually make a difference. So if you say okay, I want you to keep your hands a little bit wider when you’re extending out in front and if they try and do just that a little bit, nothing will change. They really need to exaggerate it to actually, you know, move it five, ten centimetres out wider. So that just awareness on the land is one thing, but then once you get in the water it’s even sort of harder to have that awareness because you’ve got so much going on around you. So I think that development of body awareness is so important and they sort of talk about that a lot with some of the

studies these days that kids who specialize too early on, they don’t quite get that well-rounded development and an awareness of their body. So if they’re just doing swimming from six years of age onwards and they’re not doing anything land-based, whether it’s yoga, whether they’re playing soccer or netball or those other sports and getting that kind of development, they often don’t quite excel once they get to 15, 16, 17 and onwards. So I think that’s such a such a good point and we’ve started doing a lot of the sort of mobility and strengthening exercises at our week camp, a training camp that we run in Thailand every year and we started doing that last year and the swimmers who came along there doing that over the course of just a week and those guys who weren’t doing that previously, I saw such a change in the way that they were able to I guess manipulate their body in the water but just have that awareness of

what they should be feeling, where they’re actually placed in the water and they’re able to make those changes a lot easier. So I really love that point. It’s one I never really thought about when it comes to doing yoga but I think super important and then the other one was just was mobility that you mentioned and you know being able to apply pressure with more range, you watch elite swimmers and elite triathletes who often have that sort of range and mobility, they’re just it really stands out and one of the things that we like to do is test people’s mobility in a few different areas and people even kids like we have 10 year old kids who come along and they are really really tight, they’ve got very bad, very poor upper thoracic mobility and these guys you know they should they shouldn’t not at 10 years of age but it’s just from I think sitting down so much and watching videos and everything and so I think just getting people

to move properly it’s such a big one for swimming. So each of those things they think they’re just so important. You had me laughing on this end and there’s a couple points from exactly where you’re talking about when I was laughing was talking about the over exaggeration with the pull I mean you know one of the things that I talk about when introducing the concept of body awareness especially with the age groupers but I do with the masters athletes that I’ve been working with as well is the biggest example I use is that crossover right and when you look at body awareness how many athletes you know I know when I coach I can’t even tell you how many athletes there is this situation when you’re coaching them and they’re doing freestyle and you’re like okay you’re crossing over so what we need to do is have that arm right in line with the shoulder to be able to stop that and they go and they think they’ve corrected it and you’re like

okay no you’re still crossing over and they’re like no no I’m not and then you take the video camera out they’re like oh wow I am right and so that’s one of the examples that you know I use with with the athletes when talking about how we can apply when you get really knowledgeable about how to move your body how that can then take that into the water and one of the things to that you’re talking about with the younger kids you know when I coached and especially coach age group athletes always found the kids that came from a gymnastics background wow that was the learning curve with athletes who did that was phenomenal because of that body awareness aspect and I think one of the things that’s so great about yoga that I really bring in to every single session I do with with athletes is going through body scans is one of the things and then another thing is whenever we’re going from one side to the other or when we come back to

oppose at different points it’s okay let’s bring your focus and explore how the sides feel different in the body and then explore after you’ve done different poses different sequences different exercises whatever you want to call what you’re doing and coming back to a different pose go through that body scan again and notice how your body is responded so you’re just continually learning how to get that feedback from the body which exactly like both of us have been saying you can take that right back into the water absolutely and my niece actually just started doing gymnastics I think it was last week and like she’s only young she’s probably not even two years of age at but just the very basic stuff that it’s mostly games and things like that but I thought is it such a gymnastics should be something that they teach in school because the ability to move your body and have that kind of awareness and strength and flexibility that carries on through

for the rest of your life I think it’s that sort of awareness will help in any sport whether it’s for me and whether it’s football so I really can really just see the importance of it and particularly with swimming like we for the the swimmers who come to us and they’re in that sort of more not elite range but just even top 10 top 20 for their age group in triathlon or swimming it’s often just these quite minor changes they’re looking to make so talking about let’s say move your hand placement one or two centimetres it varies subtle changes and one of the big things that I I often try and get people to do is basically from the point where they their hand enters the water in freestyle to the point where they extend out in front and then they’re about halfway through the pool I like them to try and have an elevated wrist so basically the hand should be angled just slightly down from forearm so that way you can hold you’ve got this big

paddle to work with as soon as you let that hand come back from the the forearm or back from the wrist you lose half your paddle and you lose a lot of feel for the water and I see that takes a lot of time for people to get the feel for because they’re natural whether it’s habits or just training those changing the neural pathways to hold that position they just can take a while to get used to that change so yeah that’s why I see the the body awareness is so important and like I’ve done I think yoga classes and Pilates classes in front of a mirror and even just how you feel something is is often very different than how it actually looks so having that sort of feedback from either a teacher a coach or the mirror is really helpful I mean absolutely it’s like if you’re swimming swimming on your own and you don’t have a coach right and you might be feeling certain things but you you really have no idea one of the things that

I say to you say to people that I work with now in yoga it’s funny how much I coach full-time for basically close to 20 years and how much of my coaching just even the exact things that I used to say to athletes that come into the yoga classes and one of them is when wrong feels right right feels wrong and right feels wrong yes yes spot on I didn’t get my head around that yeah exactly right the first time you hear it it’s like okay yeah but yeah that’s and that’s the biggest thing because it really challenges your brain then right and when you look at it it’s when you can gather in that feedback on your mat and when you were you know and this is one of the things that I really do when crafting yoga for swimmers is you look at those points that they’re going to get themselves into in the water and you have them doing a lot of those same things but just in different angles or in different positioning and obviously you’re having to work against

gravity and not buoyancy right so you are still using a lot of that same engagement a lot of the same neural pathways but it’s challenging it in an unfamiliar environment so you have to learn to read your body with those engagements even more so I think that’s one of the beauties of yoga and how you can relate it right back to the water so let’s talk swimming specific yoga because or sport specific yoga because I know you work with age group athletes you’ve worked with elite swimmers as well with probably more specific yoga than than other sort of other specialties out there what are some of those differences from what you do compared to just whether it’s bicarbonne or I don’t know the other kinds of yoga so I’ll just pretend like I do but how’s how’s sport specific yoga different well you know one of the one of the things that I’ve really done when it comes to my own education in the field of yoga is that I’ve done a

lot of training and studying in various different styles so it’s funny when I did a 200 hour training which did cover different styles of hatha vinyasa yin and restorative and then I did advanced training in becoming a yoga therapist which is looking at how do you craft a yoga practice to help someone that has different challenges in their wellness and in their health and so one of the things that I’ve really learned which was one of the goals of my education was how can I take all these different elements and be able to apply them in different ways so when you look at yoga for swimming specifically I mean at any sport and the analysis and then I’ll bring in swimming specifically but you know you need to look at the specific biomechanics that are used in the sport that you’re targeting you need to look at the physiological aspects you need to look at some of the psychological aspects and then you also which is and and I

think this is the real key is you have to understand the periodization of an athlete’s training program because you can be doing what you think is right for the athlete but if it’s not integrated into what they’re doing what their coach has them doing and it’s not complementing their main training program you know what are you doing right if you’re working against something then then you’re giving no benefit and could be you know taking away from so you’ve got to have that understanding and that piece to it to bring it all together and when you look at you know yoga for swimming specifically one of the ways that I explain it especially to people who may not have a great understanding of sport is I’ll take something where I teach a yoga for runners class as well and when I look at yoga for running verse yoga for swimming when you come to a yoga for runners class arms are not going to be involved very much we do a little bit of

cross body connection work because obviously you do have to move the arms and legs in the specific patterns for for efficiency and have that ability to have the cross body connection but you know there is not a lot that I am going to bring in upper body wise I’m focusing on the lower body and a lot of the lower body mechanics and when we then take that to swimming that’s obviously going to be very different one of the biggest things as I brought up earlier that is so important is that scapular awareness and understanding that control and that stability and being able to gain mobility and also apply force at greater ranges of motion while keeping stability and not having that shoulder joint vulnerable which we obviously know as coaches as swimmers anyone who’s doing that type of training that you know when you do have those vulnerabilities shoulder injuries can be prevalent and so you know that’s one of the big areas swimming wise

another area that you look at is one that I talked about just slightly in that runner’s example but is much much more applicable therefore we use it you know a lot more emphasis is that cross body connection and really focusing on learning how to feel from you know the furthest extension of one arm to the opposite leg and that connection and control right through the core of the body and one one of the great people that I actually learned that from is one of your fellow countrymen is a guy by the name Tom Barton and he works with St. Peter’s Western and works with Michael Bulls guys and down there not last Christmas but the Christmas before and I got to spend some time with him and also did a session along with Mitch Larkin and Mattie Wilson and that was one of the things Tom really stressed with those guys obviously as backstroke specialists they’re going to need that cross body connection and that’s something those athletes really stress to me

when I talk to them specifically about the yoga and then when looking at things once again is is going back to so not only the biomechanics and I guess I spoke to a little bit about this when we talked about you know that scapular control and awareness is the injury prevention and when you look at building a program for specifically swimmers can be rid of let’s go to the comparison again of runners obviously there’s going to be different areas of vulnerability in different areas that could possibly be weak and you need to focus on those specific areas with the different sports to be able to have that injury prevention part of it actually applicable and effective and then the other aspect is well going back not at the other aspect but going back to that periodization aspect and looking at how you do things so and the timing so one of the I’ve been working with the National Training Center athletes here at UBC and one of the sessions we’ll do

is after their Wednesday morning practice and one of the sessions we do is before their Saturday morning practice so the session we do after their Wednesday morning practice is all recovery base so there’s very little time spent on any real strong engagement definitely not much time spent at all on strength development but really looking at how do we enhance that recovery so that you know they’re going to be able to return to practices and be able to basically revive themselves in the middle of their week and benefit from that aspect of it whereas when we look at the Saturday morning we don’t want to be doing stuff where we hold a little longer which we’ll do after the Wednesday to create more release we want to have mobility but we want to be able to really make sure they’re engaging so that when they go in the water they’re able to apply that force and what they’re doing is going directly to benefit what they’re about to do in the water

whereas you know if you don’t have that real sense of timing or one of the things that especially coming from my coaching background and working with different strength and conditioning people I always wanted to make sure the communication was there so you know before almost every session if not before every session I talk to each one of the coaches and just say where’s our emphasis today where do you want me to put it you know and especially age group guys wise sometimes it’ll be like okay I want you to hit them hard I want strength today and I want them working their core and then other days when we come to taper time you know it’s going to be all recovery based stuff and some of the things that we’ve even done with some of the age group guys that’s been meet is we’ve used some of our time at the end during our you know really strong but coming into our relaxation points in our Shavasana at the end of a practice we started to bring in some visualization

and bringing in visualization in the way of as you come up to your race so not necessarily in the race because once again I want to leave that aspect to their coaches and of course I talked to all their coaches about this visualization before but we talked about how you approach and what happens up until that point that you get whistled on the blocks and what are you going to do before your race to allow yourself to become focused to become mindful and really allow that mindfulness aspect to be used to be able to visualize to get them towards their peak performance and how long are these sessions with that you’re doing with the guys is it 30 minutes is it an hour does it change whether you’re doing it before or after it changes with the different groups and it’s kind of all over the place really and once again that’s dependent on where the coaches are at and what they wish for their athletes to do and with the National Training Center guys

we go 50 minutes with one of the age group teams that I work with when we do it beforehand we’re 30 minutes and it’s like it’s a lot more dynamic and active when we do it on a Saturday morning after their practice it’s more 45 minutes where it is more recovery based and then there are some groups I work with that we do do an hour as well and how often do you see people needing ideally doing a yoga workout each week how many times should someone really do it to get the benefit while not impacting their time too much if they’ve got eight, nine swimming workouts throughout the week I mean for me you’ve got to swim three times a week to really see any sort of improvement or difference and sort of four or five is ideal if not a few more but what would you say for a swimmer doing yoga would it be one session, two, three? I would say an ideal would be or maybe a good amount would be doing if you can get in your 45 minutes twice a week

now one of the things that I thought was great once again that Tom Barton really used in both Mitch and Maddie talked to me about is that they do their sessions twice a week but then they have like 10 to 20 minutes of different things that they’ve talked to Tom about to do that they can do each day and they take that upon themselves where they are actually doing yoga each day but it might be just for that 10 minutes and that’s something that I think is a wonderful thing because you know you get into that it’s not just the movements it’s not just the physical kind of I guess overt things that we think about but actually getting into that flow learning how to move with ease and it’s the same thing kind of when you think about it when you’re talking about prep sets for main sets right you want to get athletes getting into a flow getting into a groove getting into a rhythm and once they do that their main sets are going to be a lot more effective

performed a lot better so when you do that yoga has that rhythm and one of the things that I didn’t bring up when you first asked me the question of what can people get out of the yoga is that movement with ease and I really relate it back to that concept of easy speed I love a lot of the Australian swimming personalities so going right back to you know a Bill Sweetenhamism and talking about that 95% after 100% speed and learning how to move in a relaxed way and I think that just getting that 10 minutes in can bring you to learn how to move with that rhythm and once again when you’re moving with rhythm on your mat or just on dry land and then getting in the water you’ve already started to set yourself up both physically and mentally to start to swim with easy speed yeah that’s an interesting point to bring up a friend of mine and another coach who I’ve had on the podcast a few times Annie Jones she calls it like learning to dance

when you’re swimming like it’s to find that that rhythm it’s about finding your groove and and that can take a little while and if yoga is one of those things that can help you do that I think it’s a great tool to use because once a swimmer’s got the right body position and body line they’re balanced in the water and then they’re you know recovering and pulling well kicking well it’s really then it’s just about putting it together and finding that rhythm and that tempo and timing that they can maintain and hold in a race and adjust if they need to so like that’s really the cream on top that’s a lot of people that I tend to work with it’s the last thing that they need to put together but that’s the thing that can sometimes take the most time is really finding that race rhythm and to swim fast you’ve got to stay relaxed as you do it and I like that term 95% effort for 100% speed it’s that dichotomy of staying relaxed

but having that little bit of tension in order to apply pressure and that’s a hard thing to do when I think that involves a bit of mastering it takes a lot of hours in the pool to develop that sort of feel for the water and stay relaxed to get faster because the natural instinct is to want to tense up and fight it and really go for it but you’ve got to bring it back a little bit in order to go fast and be able to maintain that over the course of a longer race absolutely you know the term that I apply when we’re doing yoga sessions is effortless effort and just really learning how to apply that effort with as much grace as possible with as much ease as possible one of the things that I actually love I was a head coach of an age group team for about five years and the easy speed concept was something that I’ve always said as one of the biggest things when I coached and when I came back and worked with this team after I finished coaching there

and I worked with the same team yoga wise I actually have a Buddha with a lotus tattooed on my arm and under it it says effortless effort and one of the kids that I coached from the age of 10 to 15 and I was then teaching yoga at I guess 16 or 17 he looked at my arm and he goes ah that’s easy speed and I was like yeah right just perfect you got it I’m gonna have to uh drop that or steal that one I like that and like okay it’s not copyright yeah like in the past bad people so if it was to mean like you can’t just go easy to and swim fast and that’s not what it means it’s just what you’re talking about it’s about being effortless being relaxed but putting in effort so it’s uh that’s a really good way of putting it I like that so I’m going to just copy you on that one so I appreciate it I don’t know if I’ll get a tattoo but um

how much would it cost me to get you to change it to to swimming instead of effort there

to get the with the logo as well that’d be the first person to get a tattoo with it and you’re not far off so maybe I’ll um I don’t know we’ll work something out there anyway I love it I love it so the the mental side of things you know yoga I think it I sort of see it as it’s like when you go away on holidays it takes you two or three days to sort of settle into that holiday mode and switch your mind off from work and everything back home and yoga and Pilates meditation feel like that’s a way of kind of getting grounded and getting into the the now so to speak just a bit faster and shutting off all of those those thoughts of what’s happening at school or or work so is that like just a bit of a process that you go through to get to that stage or you’ve got a routine for the swimmers that they will typically go through if it’s like a 10 minute workout you know it’s something that bring up in a lot of different ways and I mean first and this is obviously

directly applicable to when we’re talking swimming is that focus on breath and when you draw your attention to your breath and really have that as an anchor that’s what one of the strongest ways that you can bring your mind into present state so that’s one of the first things that we always focus on and a lot of times we’ll we’ll be in stillness for you know whether it be in in a child’s pose or laying on their back or in a mountain pose which is just a strong standing posture at the start of a session and we’ll go through two things and both of these things are strong anchors that can bring your mind into the moment and as I said the first is breath and I like using breath at the start of a session and the end of a session that’s really using the lung capacity right so once again you’re gaining something that’s going to transfer right into the water and that also brings in that aspect of really being able to feel that expansion through the body

and that’s where that next anchor is that can bring the mind into the moment a bit more is that awareness of the body because if you have that focus on breath and you have that true focus on how the body feels those are only things that are happening right now and therefore that has the mind focused in on the moment now one of the things that I find people have whether it be yoga whether it be meditation a lot of people have the thought that it’s about thinking about nothing I mean that’s like going back to that old kind of saying don’t think about a pink elephant right what are you gonna think about you’re thinking about the pink elephant so if you’re trying to think about nothing you’re gonna be thinking and I have spent some time at a Buddhist monastery out of retreat and in around people who have practiced mindfulness very disciplined for many many years and I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to one person who’s been able to say yeah no I can think of nothing

what the aspect is that you’re really looking for is those thoughts that come into the mind that you don’t attach your attention to them so then you know if we’re looking at and this is something that I think can be a great benefit when you look on the mental end of things is when an athlete is dealing with pre-race anxiety and what are those thoughts of those thoughts are of things that usually have not happened or things that have happened in the past that they’re just reliving through and if you can allow yourself to just be present have that focus on your body or your breath and just let those thoughts actually come into your mind but just notice them and don’t attach your attention or your motion to them that takes away all the power of those thoughts that bring on that anxiety now that obviously makes it sound a heck of a lot simpler than it is but that’s the focus that you’re really developing when you’re doing a yoga practice

is that ability to really just allow yourself to not attach to things and one of the other aspects that I love about that mental side of yoga is we all know as athletes as coaches that like you said when you’re looking at excelling at swimming you’re gonna have to be in a pool a lot and what happens when you’re at practices what happens when you come to races to meets to competitions is that and this is needed to be able to become better is you’re constantly being critiqued you’re constantly looked at and looking at yourself in a way where you’re judging good or bad what do I need to improve and critique is needed but I think one of the dangers that can then come and can really be not healthy in a lot of ways is when an athlete can’t get out of that mindset and they’re continuing to critique themselves at almost every point and I really think for athletes to be at their best I think for anyone to be at their best is that they need to give themselves

a break away from that and the yoga practice is really centered on this is not a performance time this is a time where you’re moving through you are getting all of these benefits but we’re not judging you know what that needs to be quicker that needs whatever it is it is looking at being able to do what you’re doing without an expectation and without having a true judgment of course when we’re doing something you know you need to have a greater knee bend to get greater strength or you need to roll a shoulder back coming into a twist to be able to gain mobility those things are there but it’s not looking at that in the same way as we look at when we’re training and when we’re in competition so having that mental break away from that critiquing away from that judgment and being able to look at things in a different way I think is so healthy and so beneficial that’s why I think swimmers or triathletes they get a lot of benefit from actually coaching

other athletes and even just standing on the pool deck and watching a swimming session so like for me I swam from when I was quite young four or five up until I was 18 I was you know training eight or nine times a week and in the think of it when you’re training that much you’ve got these big goals set and don’t really get that time outside of the pool to look at what you’re doing objectively like it’s there’s a big difference from a training session when you’re in there and you’re doing it compared to if you’re the coach and you’re watching the session happen like you know for me I’m coaching probably more than I’m swimming at the moment but the session seems completely different when you’re on either end and so I think to be able to take that step back and see yourself what you’re doing from that I guess that coach’s perspective or an outsider’s perspective that gives you gives you a better idea of where those improvements can come from

you might be being too hard on yourself like that I think it’s just so important because you see it in a very different way when you’re in there absolutely and I think you know you touched on one thing right there on that being too hard on yourself I mean that’s once again being hard on yourself you need to be able to excel in sport and you know by no means of what I’m about to say do I want to take that away from that and that’s why I’m stating it right now but at the same time you got to learn how to be compassionate towards yourself right I mean if you’re constantly I mean I know that’s been one of my biggest challenges in my life and that came from you know my swimming days starting at starting at eight and going through you know my age group career and then going through into triathlon but then continuing to go in through coaching and just really kind of anything in my life which I think is a great thing that we get from athletics is that ability to push

the ability to discipline the ability to be hard on ourselves but we also have to have that ability to be compassionate to ourselves so that it’s not a constant beat down you know we have to be able to learn to step away I have a friend and a guy I used to coach who he was if he had a bad session and he’d normally have won a week where he wasn’t performing at his very best he’d be so hard on himself and swearing when he hit the wall if he didn’t get the time that he wanted and like it’s it’s just it’s not helpful and every session is not going to be the best session of your life you’re going to feel average guaranteed at least once a week you know you’re not going to hit those the times that you want but it’s that as long as you’re on that upward progression you know over a long period of time you’re going to go up you’re going to go down but it’s that long term that you want to look at so I see it among a few people probably let’s say 10%

15% of the the athletes that I’ve worked with and

yeah it’s a tough one because I mean it really those athletes really push themselves and they guaranteed they’re going to put the work in to do what they need to to hit their goals but at the same time they can get down on themselves very easily so it’s it’s a fine line that they’re walking and sometimes it works and sometimes it it doesn’t work quite so well for them but yeah I think if you go I was just going to say on the other aspect in the person you know in the type of person you’re talking about is that’s when that ability to swim relaxed is gone right because you’re trying to force it you’re trying I had one athlete that I coached at a varsity level when I was coaching at the University of Calgary and this this athlete man like I there have not been many that I’ve seen that have been willing to work harder and push themselves they treated every race like it was life and death and when you treated like that like everything’s on the line

I mean sometimes you’re going to perform well but majority of the time if you’re constantly doing that to yourself psychologically it is that beat down and you’re putting so much onto yourself when it doesn’t need to be and you’re not swimming relaxed and when we go back to what we were talking about earlier in the conversation to truly be a peak performance you need to swim relaxed and you know one of the things that I’m sure you do is you show athletes what a Michael Phelps looks like you know what a Kate Campbell looks like she’s a great great example of someone who can swim with great power and looks so exceptionally easy when she does it and that that’s not there when you think everything is on the line every time yeah absolutely and I mean I see that in one of the very first drills we do at the clinics is just a basic kicking drill on your front with your arms out in front and there’s a couple of different things that we work on

with that one drill but with that like if I like to do that drill just to get them to try and hold their line in the water and hold their alignment in their body position and just stay relaxed as they do it most people we’ve got fins on for this drill most people they’re kicking really hard they’re gassed by the end of it they’re tired and it’s just about holding the right position and the line and just kicking very gently and finding that point of balance but it’s that sort of life or death or that I’ve got to go hard to get something out of this that stops them from just relaxing and not overthinking it and stops them from settling into that that very comfortable position and and I get experience that they need to have in the water there so yeah it’s it’s like that the harder you try for something sometimes the less you’ll get it you’ve got to kind of be cool about it you know you’ve got to not force things too much because that’s when

they can get further away well and you and you hit on something there that you know I I didn’t put in in this weight or in the conversation and is the perfect point is that overthinking aspect and when when you look at it and this is something you know when we’re going through yoga sessions that I talked to athletes about is you know there’s that concept of the zone and the zone is about flow and flow is about being mindful and having the mind present and if you’re overthinking you know that’s that’s when it all goes to goes to hell and one of the biggest things I think anyone but especially athletes can get out of yoga and you know a great book I just read that that talks about that is is I think it’s called the mindful athlete and what it who it wrote it was George Mumford who was the meditation teacher that worked with Phil Jackson that worked with the bowls Michael Jordan Scottie Pippin and then worked with Kobe Bryant and Shaquille Neal in the Lakers

and really just talking about being able to shut it off and go with flow what’s the name of that book I believe it’s the mindful athlete mindful athlete interesting yeah that’s a good point and just being able to really find your groove in swimming I’ve spoken about this before and people are probably going to hate me for bringing it back up but just I can’t understand it when people are on their garments again like on their watch every lap start stop checking your time checking your stroke rate all this sort of stuff you’re overthinking things that way and you’re getting the awareness that you need to improve your swimming like it’s cannot stand swimming with a a watch and like it’s I think leave them by the side of the pool it might look good on Strava that’s great but if you really want to get faster take your your swim watch off and and just focus on how things feel because swimming is all about feel I love it I’m laughing the entire time

you talked about that because when I I’d go over

a triathlon group when I was coaching at the University of Calgary and the first thing that I tried to do was guys take off your damn watches yeah you know like let’s let’s let’s just swim yep absolutely like and because it’s with yeah it’s different than it’s different than running like running you might check your pace for you know if you’re doing efforts you might check your pace every K you can have a quick look all right keep going but in the water I think more of a distraction than it is when you’re when you’re running or when you’re cycling so that it’s a very sort of different sport that way so um you know enough about that people will probably they’ll start switching off if I complain about that anymore but so Jeff thanks so much for being on the podcast and where can people find more videos find more information about yoga for swimming or you know triathlon and running as well absolutely they can come to my website which is excelwithgrace.ca

you can also it’s excelwithgrace.com now gets you there as well and

I do have a YouTube channel which is also excel with grace sport specific yoga that’s got shorter sport specific videos on it the majority there is swimming and then there’s going to be I’m going to be launching some online services and there’ll be classes that you can drop into slash you know pay for one at a time there’ll be monthly subscriptions will there be grouping of classes and archive of classes that you’ll get along with some different lessons and then also some team and individual consultation or sessions and then another which they can find on the website as well another project that I’m involved with is with Sean Hutchison Hugh who is a I’m not sure do you know who Sean is no he used to be a coach in the U.S. he coached King Aquatics and I guess he’s coached many great swimmers but when one of the most prominent was Arianna Coochers Hugh who had the world record in the 200 I am for quite a while and he’s got a a new venture called iCOS which is an accelerated

learning system that is based off neuroplasticity and neuro neuro mirroring so information on that is will be on the website as well and I’m not going to talk more about that it’s really interesting I think anyone who’s into learning any type of sport skill will absolutely love it and it’s an app you can get easily but like I said once again that information will be on the website which is excelwithgrace.com sounds good and once that new websites live as well I’ll put the links on on our website at effortlesswimming.com and yeah looking forward to seeing the online programs as well because I mean you’re based in Canada most of the people listening to this Australia US Canada New Zealand and Asia as well so it’s so everyone’s from all over the shop so just to I think get know that for me having two or three or a few more just basic yoga workouts that are specific for swimming would be really useful because a lot of people are fairly pressed for time I know I am myself

so being able to do something like that at home or before training is really useful and being able to do that from wherever they are in the world would be great so I’ll put those links in on our website at effortlesswimming.com and Jeff’s been good talking to you and I think we’re on the same page with all of that particularly at the start talking about the benefit of yoga you hit on a few points there the body awareness that I never really thought about when it comes to yoga I was really thinking mobility flexibility but there’s so much more to it than than just that so appreciate you coming on and sharing all of your knowledge that’s absolutely great to join your brand and this was awesome 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