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 guest today is Jerry Rodriguez, the man behind Tower 26. And Jerry, you were one of the very first guests that I had on the podcast. I think it was about seven years ago. So it’s been a long time between drinks, but we’ve got you back on the podcast to talk about all things swimming. And I love to get your take on a couple of topics that I’ve got written down here. So first of all, welcome back, Jerry. Yeah, well, thank you. I remember that. It’s gonna be eight or seven, eight years ago now, nine years perhaps even in your beginning days. And I was delighted that you contacted me because I’ve been following you from the time you got started. I always love when, you know, younger guys like you get involved and do great work. So it’s a pleasure for me to be on your podcast. But thank you. Round two. Yeah, I appreciate that because I know when I first started coaching and then moved more towards working with triathletes

adults, you were the name that so many people spoke about, even here in Australia, not just the US, but here in Australia, everyone knew of Tower 26 and coaching and the structure and the way that you approached swimming. And I’ve learned a lot from seeing what you do and how you coach over the years. So I appreciate you being on the podcast and you’re someone who I’ve learned a great deal from. And we were talking before we got on the podcast about Kona, which has just happened for those that are listening. This might have been a few weeks ago, but for Kona, so I haven’t had a chance to catch up on any of the footage. I’ve seen the race results, but that’s it. But I’d love to get your observations on what you store at Kona on the weekend.

Yeah, beautiful weather for both races, especially on the swim segment, relatively calm. There are some rollers, but nothing significant. And, you know, what’s changed, I guess, Brenton, over the years, you know, I remember going to Kona in the early 80s, it’s the depth of the field, right? Now you just have most of the field being quite decent swimmers. I can recall back when the med were swimming in the low 50s for, you know, for the leaders at top two or three, and then they’d be a gap to mid 50s before the pack would start coming in and then it would be strung out through, you know, 105 to 108

for the pros. Now, I’m not sure if there’s a pro that went over 55 minutes on the men’s side, and you know, a big pack of men’s side at 48 minutes, I think there were 16 or 17 of them in the load of mid 48s. And then another group not too far behind about a minute back, or maybe seven or eight around 49 and a half to 50. And then we got into the 51s, 52s with another 20 or 30. So you have these sort of three packs on they’re all relatively close together. So very competitive and much higher density of great, great performances on the swim. And the woman the same, close to 51 minutes on the water for Lucy Charles, 50 high. And again, the majority of the athletes in the 54, 55 range 56. So you know, the game has changed, you have to be pretty decent. You don’t have to be a great swimmer. And you know, that’s saying in Kona, you don’t want the reason to swim, but boy, if you’re free down for a bath, it hurts you quite a bit.

Absolutely, especially with the times they did for incredible and the fastest that we’ve seen there. What do you think has changed where all the pros have stepped up to that level? Is it that they’re not qualifying? If they’re not swing those faster times? Or is it something that they’re taking more seriously now? What do you think it has caused it? I think there are a few things that come to my mind since it’s a good question. And I’m not prepared to answer, but I’m sure there’s several reasons, but to quickly come to mind one, listening to podcasts such as yours, and acquiring greater knowledge. And therefore that hits one of our buckets, which is improvement of swim mechanics, right? So that’s indefinitely one. Another one is we now have, you know, it’s been a number of years that we’re starting to see the ITU athletes advance up to 70.3 racing and then to Ironman racing, well, some even jumping straight to Ironman

racing. So you have to be a good swimmer, or have improved your swim quite a bit to race an ITU because you’re not a decent swimmer. Once you get on the bike, you might get lapped and then you never get to put your run shoes on. So we’re just starting with a higher talent base. I believe the shorter races has has increased the level of swimmer that comes in or traffic, swimming, the swimming ability into Ironman at the professional level. Those are two quick ones. And of course, there’s evolution, right? I mean, just got 40 something years of evolving and learning and guys like you that put up great instructional knowledge and good coaching. It’s helpful to everyone. Yeah, is it with the pros that you’ve worked with, if you can think of an example, you don’t give names necessarily, but what have you seen in terms of someone who’s maybe come to their pro, they’re an average swimmer, so to speak, someone who’s made that jump to being a strong swimmer in

that pro field, what are some of those things that you see them doing in training with their technique to be able to make that jump? Because I work with the number of pros who are looking to get up to that front pack there. And for Sunderland, it’s like two or three seconds per hundred that they need to increase in speed to get there. And because otherwise they’re just missing that front pack. And then others that that would be aside might be 10 seconds and might be 15. But I know quite a few pros who are looking to make that leap to the front pack and a lot of them are only just a couple seconds off. So what are some of those things that you tend to consider for them? Yeah, so from my experience, and we’ve probably probably been exposed to a few hundred pros over my career coaching. And we don’t typically see the pros that are two seconds off the front pack. I think our reputation has been more that we get the ones that are two

seconds per hundred. That is, you get the ones that are 10 to 20 seconds for 100 behind. So these are really good bikers or runners that really need, you know, massive swim injection type thing. So for those guys, it’s all it’s four things. And we talk about this frequently with all of our athletes but the pros it’s four key things. One, you got to improve their swimming mechanics. Two, most of them need to increase their training volume. Three, you know, they need to the proper swim prescription or the proper workouts they need to be put together in a careful and methodical way. And then four, those athletes need some amount of accountability, as opposed to swimming on their own, taking their coaches, they need to be swimming with a squad where a coach can give them feedback. So it’s heavy accountability is needed. So those four main things on the level of to which one just depends on where they are in the progression, right? So someone who has

terrible mechanics. Yeah, well, that’s going to be their bullseye for a while. The person who has decent mechanics, but hasn’t been swimming much. Well, they’re going to need to increase volume and then some are out there doing silly training like because they’re doing an iron man, they think they need to swim 4100s with five seconds rest all day long. Oh, that’s just one type of training. You don’t get any faster. You just are able to do 4100s at the same pace. You’re able to do five. So you don’t go faster, you just go longer. Yeah, it’s right, isn’t it? And it’s not surprising if they don’t come from a swimming background there. They think that’s probably what they need, but there’s so much more that you should be doing. And one of the things that is surprising for a lot of people who don’t come from that background, I think is the amount of technical work that you should be including in your sessions

doesn’t need to be a hit, but you need to be doing some specific drills or kicking or whatever might be scaling just some things that are yes, you’re going slow, your heart rate’s not up, but you need to be working those things that will help you develop the feel for the water and the technique because that is such a huge component of swimming that you need to take the time to do it. And sometimes they feel like it’s wasted time because they’re not working hard. I understand that because they I mean, I’m the same sometimes I just want to get in there and just like I want to work hard in some sessions, but where a lot of improvement can come from is by spending the time on those things that will make you mechanically better.

You know, you’re absolutely right. But I’ve seen the evolution from before you were involved in coaching. And I apologize, I don’t mean to sound pedantic. It’s just I went through the time when we had a period where everything was stroke trills. There was a particular methodology or coaching that was being, you know, really bought into by the triathlon community and athletes, pros and non pros in particular would go do these stroke drills for 45 minutes. Well, it’s become a good driller. You don’t become a good swimmer necessarily. So I’ve seen the other side of that. So what you’re basically saying is we need a blend, right? And the blend of it between drills, you know, technical work and hard work, which is what you’re also talking about. That’s where the expertise of coaches like you come in to be able to help advise and structure from, you know, from a methodology for those athletes to follow so they can go from pack three or pack four

up to pack two or three and hope we one day get close to the front.

You think that is you’ve mentioned swimming with a squad swimming with other people’s important. Do you feel like those that weren’t pushing themselves hard enough, or they just haven’t got that accountability to stick with their pace or to finish off this session? Well, what do you think it is that that they were doing prior? Well, you know, there’s a breadth of variances what athletes in my experience have been doing and probably the easiest thing, the easiest way to answer that question would be to identify the punctured problems that have seen athletes, whether they’re professionals or non pros. And obviously the majority of our audience are not special athletes. They swim alone and they do some drills, maybe that you’ve prescribed, a lot of prescribed bill, others have prescribed, but they’re swimming alone, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing the drills correctly because there’s no one supervising the drills, right?

And the problem with that is that it takes close supervision to be able to master a drill. So to your point earlier, join a squad, join, get a coach to be able to review what you’re doing, what a minimum if you don’t have that opportunity, get yourself a video reported, and I believe you offer that service and send it in to you and have you review it and get them feedback immediately. Because doing drills, it could be effective, but not if you’re doing them incorrectly. So you need a feedback mechanism, mechanism, right, which is back to our item on the core of accountability. Yeah, no, I work with a couple of people online with stroke analysis, and I often get them to film themselves doing the drills because I’d say at least half the time they’re not doing them right initially. So it does take that feedback to be able to do it right. Yeah, so they’re not as purposeful. They are, the individual is being purposeful,

but the execution of the drill, the outcome of the drill is not nailing the purpose that you have prescribed. So that’s why it’s necessary to be reviewed. It’s a very difficult sport. I mean, this is not biking or running, where it’s a lot easier to make influence and then the other two sports, which is why it’s easy for an Ironman athlete where 90 plus percent of the race is non-swimming and not want to spend much time in the swim. What’s the return, right? Yeah, that’s right. I’ve got a question for you that’s a little bit different to what we’ve been talking about here, but what is it that you love about the sport of swimming from a coaching perspective and from physically doing it as well? What is it that really attracts you to it? It’s a puzzle. It’s a giant puzzle. I presume I don’t play golf, but I presume it’s similar to golf. You might hit one or two, maybe, if you’re lucky, holds in one in your lifetime,

but you’ll never hit 18 on a course, right? And so you have this puzzle that’s very difficult to solve because you and I could come up with on the metrics that we want to or our ways to teach the ABC one, two, three of how to improve swimming technique. But it’s still it’s so still individual. Johnny or Mary may not be able to do a certain drill that you do it. Well, certain drill that you’re prescribing, or they just don’t have that skill set to really master something. So what do we do to put a patch on that? I’ll put a fix on it, right? So to me, that’s a fun puzzle to try to fix. There’s no perfection in it. That’s a huge part of why I enjoy it and still enjoy swimming is like this. There’s so many things that you can do to get better. And there’s so many different ways to approach it. And I feel like you just you’re never done. You’re never at that point where you try to a perfect game. You’ve hit that hole in one and you’re done.

But there’s always these things, little things that you can do to improve. And here’s from one another. I mean, I learned from you. I learned reading and listening to other coaches and super helpful to me. You know, the day we think we’ve made it. It’s a comment that I’ve made to Coach Mapdix and that over the years, Franklin coach that I used to coach many years ago. You know, the day you think you make it as a coach, it’s your last best day.

Yeah, because you’ve decided that you’ve reached your pinnacle and then you’ve stopped learning. Progression never stops. It continues. And so lately, I look back when I first started coaching and that is when I felt like I knew the most, the first year or two that I was coaching. And that and then I started to realize I know very little as times where I feel like you thought, I don’t know much about this sport. Like, I feel like I’m a beginner. And yeah, it’s just there’s just so there’s just so much going on. And as you mentioned, a lot like I love to learn from other coaches and even you learn from the swimmers that you coach as well, because one thing might not work with them. So you have to come up with a different approach. So it’s always learning, which is a which is why it’s so appealing from the coaching side of it to I’d love to get your your take on training in the pool for the open water because a lot of the at the triathletes

I coach, that is one of the things that this can be holding them back. Initially, it’s like that get the pool times quicker and then initially challenge to carry that into the open water with the wetsuit. So what are some things that you’ve seen work well for people to be able to train for the open water in the pool? Because here in Melbourne, the open water is freezing over winter. It’s nine, ten degrees Celsius and a lot of people are racing over the winter. So they don’t have that ability to get into the open water, at least not very often. So I’d like to chat about some of those things that you can do in the pool.

Yeah, you know, so another way of asking the question is what are we solving for? Right. And when someone is unable to transfer their swim speed in the pool to open water, and by the way, it’s never transferable directly because in the pool, if you’re swimming in a short course pool for every 100 yards in the United States on meters in Australia, although we have to have meter short course meter fluency or two,

you push off the wall four times and that’s the fastest velocity you’ll ever have. So you cannot swim a continuous 100 meters in open water as fast as you would in a pool because you don’t have in open water four walls to push off of. And if it’s a long course pool, 50 meters like you guys have, we have some also, you have two push-offs. So it’s there’s never going to be that direct correlation, but we don’t want to lose as much as what many athletes lose when they go to open water. So, OK, what’s we have to ask what’s causing this? What are we trying to really solve here? So what are the factors that contribute to slowness? Well, one of them we can’t fix, which is the wall push-off. So we remove that one, unfixable. Now let’s look at what we have solved for. So if an athlete swims very fast in the pool, maybe they don’t have very silky silk like siting skills. And every time they go to site, which is a skill that’s used the most in open water,

right, because you’re in a site highly frequently. If you’re sensible, at least if you want to swim straight, that’s the shortest distance, you need to be very fluid at it. So it’s not clunky. So that requires a whole lot of practice. And what a better place to practice than the swimming pool because you can build it into all of your workouts. In fact, for instance, June hour, we have a phase called a race ready phase. Right. And right before that, we have something called open water skill building phase. So it begins in our open water skill building phase and then continues the entire time through out our race ready phase. And our race ready phase basically is equivalent to the racing season. The four months of the year with a bulk of races occur. And I recognize races are now 12 years, 12 months around calendar. But basically four or five months are the bulk of the developer, right? So that race ready phase that we’re in every single pool work

out that we have has siting built into it, because that’s your number one most important skill to build out unlearn and to be able to make it fruitful for you and not have to cause any disruption to your swim stroke or and also not to indeed your performance, your speed. So you build these into your pool training sessions. Another thing that occurs in any open water race, triathlon open water races, that the beginning of races are always very fast, no matter how much we say, we’re going to slow down. We don’t the excitement at the start, the whole buildup of the event. And if you don’t build in race specific training

into your as part of your skills, you’re not going to be able to do it in race day. You’ll try to execute it in race day, but you’ll blow up after some period of time. So then it’ll also be a detriment to performance. Swimming straight is another one being able to swim as straight as you can as possible. One of the ways to solve for that, obviously, is higher frequency of siting. But also some people just more apt at swimming a little straighter than others. So we have to find out, OK, what’s your real deficiency? You pull to the right, people to the left, what’s your thing? And try to fix that. So go through all the variables that account for some inefficiency in open water, because the skills that we need in open water are different than the skills of the pool swimmers use to go to the Olympic games, right? Very different. So those pool swimmers, they don’t need siting. Those pool swimmers, when they swim the 1500 meters in the pool

that Australia always has a terrific athletes in, won multiple gold medals at Olympics. You don’t see them swim the first 100 meters in 50 seconds. But one seconds, no, they’re going out in 55 seconds. And then they’re pacing themselves equally throughout the rest of the race, generally, in open water, triathlon, we see fast starts, race, takeout, speed. So all of these ingredients, we then have to, these are part of the things we’re solving for, we have to build these into our pool training sessions at high frequency and want to say high frequency.

Pool swimmers, for instance, go into the Olympic games, they’re swimming anywhere from 809 to 12 sessions a week.

Most athletes are swimming two or three times a week, some pros maybe five or six times a week, maybe a little bit more for some. But generally, the range is two times a week to six times a week, right? Well, for the person who’s swimming only two times a week or three times a week, you better believe during the race ready phase, you should be building and siting the most important skill that will impede performance into every single session. So solve for those things in your pool workouts, build them in, build the confidence that you have those skills and you export it to open water. And of course, the opportunity, you mentioned that it’s not easy because the water is a little bit cold. So when there is opportunity when the water warms up, get to open water and start practicing those skills in open water. And we also mentioned wetsuits. Wetsuits can be uncomfortable for some, if you’re not familiar using them.

So you have to put those on in your pool sessions, use them for 20 or 30 minutes in a pool workout. And not just one time, two and a half or dozen times, many times. So none of these things are when you hear them, you go, oh, there’s no silver bullet or magic bullet there. These are just normal little things that we have to solve for. They add up.

The other thing I want to talk about here is a question I get quite often is someone will come to me, they might be around, say they’re 145 to two minute pace. And they say, I’m so much faster with a pool buoy on. And when I take the pool buoy off, I’m so much slower. Like, what, why is that? And obviously it’s because of the extra buoyancy, the reduction in drag with body position. So you’re kept together there. What do you normally say to people when they come to you and they’re inquiring about why they can’t swim as fast without a pool buoy? This podcast is brought to you by Form Goggles. Form empowers swimmers at every level to reach their goals. Whether they want to get stronger, faster, swim further, or be more efficient. Get lap by lap motivation with real-time metrics and workout instructions right in your goggles. And Forms recently released Form Plans, which included progressive series of workouts

to help you achieve your fitness, skills, or triathlon goals. You can follow along with the plan and your weekly swims will be automatically synced to your goggles. So you’ll swim through your workouts with real-time metrics and workout instructions all in your goggles. So it’s like having a coach right there with you. And I’ve had a look through these training plans and I think they are excellent for people who want to train for certain triathlons or reach certain fitness goals. It will build on each week and a really good way to progressively build up your fitness. So if you’d like to follow along with some plans to help you reach your specific swimming goals, then check out Form Goggles at formswim.com forward slash effortless. And this will give you $15 off your purchase of Form Goggles. So formswim.com forward slash effortless to get your pair of Form Goggles. So that’s probably one of the most common things, right?

Especially males and get this denser muscle mass in your hips and leg muscles. So they’re going to sink in. What happens is that athletes… So I’m giving you a little bit of a why before answering the question. Why are their legs sinking? Well, why are they not in this proper position or posture in the water? And the reason is simply lack of familiarity. You spend all your life in land. All of a sudden you’re in this form median and you don’t actually know and you’re suspended to some extent. I mean, you’re at 92% ish of subsidized body weight. So the hundred and… Well, I don’t know what you’re measuring in kilograms, right? Whatever that… Whatever someone’s weight is on land, most of it is gone and subsidized in the water. So they’re in this weightless state almost and you don’t have some great awareness of… It must feel like engagement. So proprioception. So we have to teach that. We have to let them know this is normal.

You’re no different than anybody else. Now, how do we fix it? What are we solving for? Well, so we’re solving for body awareness. We’re solving for people to talk to your muscles and get them to do something in the water. You might be able to talk to those muscles and get them to do it on land, but in the water it’s a whole different game. So we do those simple drills, by the way, or exercises where we would have somebody simply hold on to the lane line or hold on to the wall, both hands, right? Put your snorkel on. Get your face down in the water. And so your head is… The water level sits in the sort of the center top of your head, not the crown, not your forehead, but between your hairline and the peak of the top of your head. So somewhere midway, the normal head position for swimming, right? You want the water line to sit there and then have them close their eyes and see what happens to their feet. Their feet are extended fully out behind them.

So they’re fully elongated off the wall, right? Arms are stretched out, feet are stretched out. And for most, their legs are going to sink. And then we ask them to engage and we tell them which muscles to engage those muscles and hold your heels up to the surface, hold them up and hold them up there. And then they have to think about those muscles and they start talking to them and then they engage them and then they’re able to do it. Everyone’s able to do it. Then let’s go swim like that. And so what we’re really doing is creating the awareness, right? And then asking them to execute it. But it’s difficult. Next time. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because as a swimmer from a young age, you never think about it when you’re a kid, but you just develop that awareness and you know how and what muscles to hold there. But for somebody who’s new to it, they’ve got to be taught those things. They’ve got to have them explain to them

and what they should be feeling through there. But once they can hold their body in that position, then you can really move on to the next things. But if they’re not, well, it’s going to be hard work because I’ve seen swimmers who will try and get their hips there. They’re thinking about trying to get their legs up and their hips up. So they try and stick their bum up in the air. So they’ve been through their waist and that’s honestly the wrong thing you want to do. So it is just a very… They kick a lot, right? They just try to kick it more. And most of us, you know, they’re not very good kickers because it’s difficult to be a good kicker, especially triathletes who have inflexible ankles and understandably so for running and riding. It’s also really difficult for pool coaches and even elite pool coaches to effectively coach even triathletes at times because there’s a nuance to what these adults need that some pool coaches haven’t…

It’s not part of their repertoire. They just deal with super elite athletes. However, the triathlete is attracted to the super elite swimming coach as if they’re going to solve their problem. But the super elite needs swimming coach. It’s coaching people. The majority of Olympic distance swimming races are two minutes and shorter. 85% of races are two minutes and shorter. So their skill set as coaches are to coach an athlete, swimming athlete at the Olympic level, the elite level for two minute races. That’s a whole different set of demands than what the triathlete needs. So there’s a craft that needs to be holed in for those that are coaching traffic. So exactly, you asked this question earlier and I meant to respond to it when you asked about the Kona race. One of the things I heard on the commentary when we touched on this a little bit, if it’s okay, I grow into it, about the commentary during the swim, I’ve heard two of the commentators talking about,

well, we’re now getting to the end of the swim and this is the time that you want to throw your legs in and start kicking more. Well, these two commentators, and let’s leave them nameless for the moment, are very elite swimmers. They swim at the elite level in college, one at Stanford and one at the University of Michigan and these are top 10 if not top three in the areas that they were there and C2A teams and both of these are super elite swimmers. And when they swim, engaging their legs will generate propulsion. It will also, and one of the reasons they were talking about doing this is so you can start increasing blood flow. Well, that may be fine for the less than 1% of athletes that are good swimmers, but for 99% or more that aren’t great swimmers, as you know, your coach, asking a traffic to start kicking more is probably one of the worst things you can do because they don’t generate much propulsion from it.

It starts to destabilize their stroke and their mechanics more and really at Kona in particular, you’ve got two minutes, a minimum of two to three minutes, two minutes of the elite in transition running to your bike. You have plenty of time to start engaging blood flow into your lower extremities. And we also have a system that’s pumping blood throughout your body. So I’m not a big fan of those comments and I recognize why those elite commented or elite swimming triathletes make those commentary mistakes or make those commentary comments because they’re swimmers but it doesn’t apply across the board. So you have to sort of also be able to know as a listener, as the audience, maybe as a triathlete, how to filter information that we receive also super important. I think that’s why I thought I knew the most about swimming when I first started coaching and then when I did start to coach triathletes, started to realize this stuff doesn’t work

and what I thought they would be able to pick things up straightaway. As soon as I say, maybe I’ll go this way or maybe have that way and I thought they could pick it up immediately, but that’s not how technique changes work. It takes time. It takes nuance. It takes sometimes drills as well and often a different approach for the triathletes. And boy, that took me quite a few years to really figure that out. And what you learned as a swimmer and you are a very good swimmer, what I learned, you know, having to swim for a number of years and those two commentators may not apply to who we’re teaching because who we’re teaching are, we collectively are at that high-end aptitude level because we have thousands of hours of practice on their amounts. They don’t. So we’re, we have to consider, are we asking, are we putting a demand on a participant that’s beyond their ability to execute it at this time? So you have to be super careful when we’re teaching it.

It’s not an easy task. Now, you talked about not bringing your legs into it at the end of the race for most people, but in terms of kick, it’s something that you want people to be able to do well, but not necessarily to do hard or put a lot of effort into during the race. So what do you see people doing with their kick that’s slowing them down? First of all, and then I know you work a lot of kicking drills and exercises into your program so that their kick is at least effective and it’s helping them with their balance and timing. So what are the main mistakes you see there for those that don’t have an effective kick? So we have to ask, I always come back to what are we solving for and what are we trying to peak the athlete to be able to

assist them the best that we can, given that the level that they’re at. And for the most part, kicking is not going to deliver much propulsion for most triathletes because they simply don’t spend enough time. They just don’t have the number of hours in a week given, let’s go back to those averages again, two times a week, right? Maybe some will swim three times a week, remove the pros for more two to three times a week. How much kicking can we really do and how much should we really allocate given that even if they became okay at kicking how much will it contribute to a bonus or propulsion? The answer is not very much. And so let’s at a minimum, minimize as coaches, minimize the damage that the legs create. And as for many triathletes and they will tell you they laugh about it. You put me on a kickboard and you ask me to kick without fins. I go backwards, right? So how do we at least not go backwards? Let’s try to neutralize that to zero if we can, right?

So we may not go forward, but let’s not go backwards. And even putting joking aside, let’s be able to get some propulsion and not be completely just wiped because these are large muscle groups that we’re putting a heavy demand on. So heart rate just blows up, goes super high and it’s not delivering much propulsion and you just get cooked. So okay, how much time do we really spend on this? So you mentioned we do kicking. Well, we use kicking mainly as a way to teach body caughtness on body awareness. We do a lot of vertical kicking during our recovery phase and our technical phase. Those two phases get grouped together at the end of the season, one goes through certain mechanics. And you mentioned this earlier about to see folks bending up their waist and in the pool and the legs are sinking and so on. So how do we teach them not to do that? So I give one example and you go to the wall while the other example is also vertical kicking

when you place your body perpendicular to the surface of the water and you have your arms out of the water hands in line with your shoulders and you kick with a very narrow amplitude and point your toes at a very small knee bend. And you’re trying to, as you mentioned earlier, not bend at the waist at all. And the first thing we see is people bending up their waist sort of leaning forward or call it sitting on a bar stool. Well, the pub’s for a point, not for it doesn’t belong in a swimming pool. So let’s work on this. So that’s where we do a fair amount of kicking and it’s all about teaching proper body posture because ultimately what are we solving for again? We’re solving for performance in the water and the biggest obstacle we have is great resistance, the density of the water. So if we can make the body as hydrodynamic as possible as slender as possible, as sleek as possible, well, we’ve solved a big problem like there to start with.

So it’s not about the kicking. We’re doing a kicking drill, vertical kicking, but it’s solving our body posture problem. And now you also like to do some normal kicking on different sides as well. Left side, right side, front, back to work to kick in those different directions as well. We do those, okay. So that comes on there. We have some technical categories that have all my years of kicking. Try to, what I’ve done is bulk the errors that I’ve seen by triathletes. Now remember, this is triathletes particular. So by swimming coach listings, this does not apply to you. For triathletes, we have three buckets that I put mistakes under. Taughtness, alignment and propulsion. In those three categories, there are a bunch of some, you know, sub areas. And under the area of alignment, a whole lot of things cause misalignment. And one of them, it would be over rotation. And that’s a massive one because that was one of the major pillars back in the 90s

and into the 2000s, 2000, 2010, that all these coaches were following from a particular coach that started that philosophy. You needed to rotate a whole lot swimming. So we do have people kick on their sides and we need to teach them how much on your sides you need to kick because what we see is too much rotation, generally greater than 45 degrees, is what we see where the mistakes are occurring. And we want that body to be turned, as you know, 30 to 45 degrees and real more than that. So we have them do a little bit of kicking on their sides and we have them encouraging to keep the kick very narrow and we use fins on these to start up. So the purpose is not necessarily about kicking. It’s one of the, we’re solving for a problem that’s occurring somewhere else because many times when we see a problem and you know this and you do this yourself because I’ve heard your podcast talking about it, you treat the problem.

You don’t treat the symptom. No, infrequently the symptom is the problem, but most times it’s not. The symptom is an effect that’s occurring from something else. We got to fix what the real problem was. We got to get to the core of the problem to fix it. So when we see these legs being this, you know, super huge spread of the feet as an example. Well, what’s causing that? When somebody wrapped like they’re kicking very wide, wider than their shoulders, right? Well, a lot of times that’s from over rotation. So we can tell them don’t kick as wide, but if they’re over rotating, we’re not solving the problem for them. So we got to fix the rotation problem to get to the legs playing out too much. So this is one of the reasons we use kicking on your side slightly to solve for these other problems. I really like the way you put that with the cause and symptom because many times when I’ve done analysis with someone, when I get them to analyze their stroke first,

I will watch through the video and I’ll ask them to pick out anything that they could recognize. And sometimes they’ll get those things on the head. But the reason that they’re not able to fix it, even if they knew already that they were doing it, is because they don’t know what the cause of it is. They know, yes, my legs are going apart, but they didn’t know it was from over rotation or looking too high to breathe. And it’s these other things that when you go to the very core of it, if you correct those things first, then the other parts of the stroke will improve. And so often people want to maybe start with the catch. So like, I’m not holding any water with my catch. And that can be really hard to have a good catch if you are over rotating because if you had a good catch, it’s going to put you in a very strained position with your shoulder if you’re rotating to 90 degrees. And so just by coming back to the fundamentals of the stroke

and getting those right and then building it up from there is such a better approach. And a couple of years ago, I came up with now, sort of like your three things with taughtness, alignment, propulsion. We’ve got our five core principles, which roughly sort of follow that. And if you go in that order of things and we usually just start with breathing, then we’ve worked on balance and then alignment and we go down from there. If you follow that order, then you can really start to diagnose what’s the true cause of some of these areas that are happening in the stroke. And that’s a beautiful word. That’s the correct word, diagnose because the only way to have a proper diagnostic is to be able to understand what causes the problems, right? And I’m just no different than you were in the beginning years. Oh, come on. Get your legs closer together in this example. It wasn’t fixing the problem of going, come on, guys, what’s wrong with you?

Well, what’s wrong with them is what’s wrong with me. I wasn’t delivering the proper message. I wasn’t being a very good coach. So, you know, I had to step back and go, wait a minute, how do we really fix these problems and remove all the books that I read and everything I learned about swimming in my years growing up as an athlete and look at it through a completely different lens, which is the lens of the triathlete that they didn’t swim as kids most of them, their land sports and ankles are inflexible and so on. So a lot of different pieces come into play here. So that’s all for all those things carefully. I want to talk about the concept of feel for the water. I’ve heard a top level triathlon coach say he’s only seen two or three triathletes in his entire career who have actually had a feel for the water, but I think it depends on how you define it. What are your thoughts around feel for the water? Is it something that a triathlete can develop

and do you ever talk about that when you are coaching them in the sport? So let’s define what is feel for the water and it’s this swimming terminology just like the word catch in swimming, which is a word I tend to not use in teaching that many coaches use and I don’t use it to capture the stroke because I don’t think it’s an effective way of communicating just this coach’s view. Because catch means something. Catch to me means catching a ball. What does that mean? Absolutely nothing unless you’re playing water polo which we don’t do in a triathlon then what does this word mean? So I think there’s our full communication issue as is feel for the water. What does that mean? Well, to me, I put my hands and I could put my hands around the water and I could feel the water. Yeah, I could feel it. What does it really mean? And it’s this indigenous swimming term over the years that really means what I think coaches and athletes are saying,

boy, today I feel really light in the water and every stroke that I took gave me lots of forward movement and propulsion. I just felt effortless. That’s what you do well, right? I’m part of your brand, right? Yeah. So that’s what feel for the water is. Well, that’s my understanding as to how coaches and athletes because an athlete that even an elite one can’t even really define it clearly. So this is my take on a feel, a feel for the water. So now, and if we could just make the presumption that I’m correct then how do we solve for it again? How do we get there? Well, some athletes and that elite coach that you talked about they just be highly gifted. And if they started that these triathletes started swimming at young ages, they might have been very elite swimmers. So he is correct that they may have this innate feel for the water. No different than we’ve had some Aussie swimmers start swimming at 13 and 14 and then make the Olympic team and become these sensational athletes.

That’s highly unusual. So they have this natural gift. It’s natural feel, natural athletic ability for the sport swimming, which is not the case in most triathletes. So how do we get there? Well, like anything else, it’s frequency, right? That’s a whole lot of touches in the water, more time spent and teaching the proper mechanics, your the ingredients. You have five. We put it on the three categories, whatever those are. And eventually over time that feel that sensation is really what it is. We’ll come, but it can only come from a high amount of frequency. Why? Because we don’t spend our time in the water. We’re religious to the land, not the water. So the more time we spend away from it, the less feel we have. So please, I’d be interested to get your take on it because I do think it’s somewhat complex and somewhat almost overused at times because I think it’s difficult to accomplish. I love the way that you put it dead.

I see it the same way is that when a swimmer feels like they’ve got the forward propulsion from what their arms are doing through the stroke and they’re coordinating that well with their rotation. And it feels effortless moving forwards where it’s not hard work, but they’re still getting good times and good speed as a result of it. That’s my take on tilt for water because when you have someone who isn’t moving through the catch and the pull very well and they’re not getting that forward propulsion and they do some things to tweak it and they start to get that the idea of it and they and they steal that happening. That to me is developing feel for the water knowing what it is that’s moving that can move them forward. So I tend to agree. I’d like to get your take on what some of the terminology what language you like to use around the catch. And I do talk about the exit is the release as well. There’s I’m sure if I’ve heard you mention that but yeah,

but we’ve used that word that the word that we typically I tend to try to use and teach our coaches is to remove the catch that word because I don’t think our job as teachers, which is what we really are, right? It’s how do we communicate effectively to our audience? So Jerry might use a few words and you know, I get 20 blank stairs and then Brentage uses a different word same concept and it is explaining it exactly the same way, but uses a different word and all of a sudden those 20 blank stairs and Jerry looked at you and look at Brenton and smiles. Oh, we got this guy is a real deal. A jury guy doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about. Well, we both said the same thing. You just use different word checks. Oh, I mean it. And I think this is our job as coaches to try to find words to communicate effectively. I’ve never found the word catch effectively communicate what we’re trying to do in swimming. It’s just again, it’s another indigenous swimming term.

So I use the word set up and what is set up me? You know, in normal language, we’re setting something up. We’re getting ready to do something. We’re setting up the right pieces in place to be able to do something. We set up for an event, you know, if you go to a concert, we should we arrive to listen to the concert, but there’s a whole set up that occurs that when we sit down on the lights get turned on magic happens, right? Well, the setup in swimming. There’s no propulsion occurring in it, but we’re doing some key things more different than the sound system is being checked and the lights are being checked and, you know, all the drinks and the t-shirts and everything are being put out before the customers arrive for the concert. So when they arrive and the lights go on, everything’s ready to go. The setup in swimming is the same thing. There’s all this stuff that’s being done for a proper setup or during the setup to allow you to have effective

propulsion, right? So I prefer to use the word setup. What do we need to do in a setup as opposed to catch that I just think it’s too much of a swimming term, but that’s this guy, you know, you would find a way with that beautiful Aussie accent to use the word catch and everybody would laugh.

No, I think that’s great. I’m laughing because we so like I as you know, I use the term catch that position, but I also when I’m explaining stuff in clinics and in person talk about the catch phase and I refer to the catch is that when you’re out in front to linear and down in what I call the catch phase, we’ll call that the setup phase. So it’s I think I’m on the same page, but I drive that tenancy and use use catch and I’ll just explain one thing. You know, I hear it is up to guests of your podcast, but I apologize. I’m saying something that you know, that I’m not used, but again, our jobs to communicate with teachers. How do we communicate effectively for our audience to understand and come up with the words that you and for your athletes that you coach. Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s great. And it’s so important. Then one of the things that I came up with the word for a couple of years ago after hearing

different coaches talk about this position that we are talking about the power diamond when the hands are directly under the shoulders, just to describe the shape that you want to be armed to be in, which is you’ve got one arm. It’s like a half diamond if you’re looking at it as it’s passing under the shoulder and call it power diamond because it’s got both arms there. It’s like diamond and power because that’s typically when you’re going to have the most strength through the stroke, not that you want to muscle that that part of it, but that is when you’ll be strongest, especially compared to the movement of the catch or the setup phase there. So I think that the terminology that you use is so important. And I think it’s also good to have a few different words in your back pocket to be able to describe the same thing so that someone can get it to click for them. And I know that’s something that you obviously

use as well. Well, I’m one of these coaches I believe similar to you and as you know, I have tremendous respect and admiration for your coaching and I enjoy when athletes that we coach go see other coaches because those other coaches, let’s say they come to see you as an example. They’re in Australia visiting and they go check out brettan or take one of your video sessions. You they use different words, annunciate particular words differently than maybe I do and the athlete gets it. So that’s important, right? What’s the ultimate outcome we’re looking for? We’re solving for make the athlete better. You found a way to use certain words and it worked. I think it’s good exposure for athletes and I encourage it and job as the coaches are to make sure that we are not too caught up in ourselves and feel that our athletes shouldn’t talk to other coaches, which is kind of interesting and I’ll support you while we’re that’s the case at times.

I’ve always found it funny when coaches protective of their athletes, like I don’t want you talking to any other coaches. I don’t want you getting any other ideas. I mean, I do. I understand it through the coach. You’ve got this plan to your athlete and you want it done this way. And maybe someone’s got a tendency to chase shiny objects and maybe I can see it that way. But but yeah, it’s you know, and especially I think with what what we do, what I do here. It’s like, well, I primarily run clinics here in Australia and I’ve got athletes from all the different triathlon clubs from different swim clubs as well. So I’m not there to take their athletes and to take them on board here. I just want people to get good results. I just want them to improve and then same thing. That’s what you’re doing. I know you just want them to get better and you don’t care which way they take to do it. You just want them to get the results.

So tell the coaches who you’re talking to who have got that mindset and they’re the ones who are great fun to work with. Well, of course. And like anything else, when you have coaches that are very dogmatic about their approach. And so that’s very narrow minded. It means your approach. I have my three pillars. You have five. I’m interested in listening to yours and learning from it, which is stuck in my three again. I talked about this earlier. And I’ve had my last best day, right?

Yeah, that’s exactly it. Well, Jerry, I appreciate you being on the podcast and so much that I’ve gotten from this episode. And I know particularly the triathletes are going to listen to this. So I really don’t get a lot out of it. So thanks so much for being a guest seven years later on the podcast. And I really appreciate everything that you do with Tower 26 and the work that you’ve put in there because it’s been such a huge resource for triathletes looking to improve their swim. And I’ve had so many athletes who have come to my clinics who have followed the Tower 26 plans and then have worked with you. And that’s here in Australia. So you’ve got a huge reach, not only just in the U.S., but everywhere else. So thanks so much for being on the podcast. It’s been great. And I’ll get you on much sooner than seven years down the track.

Well, I’m appreciative of you just having me on anyway. So thanks so much. You know, and I said this before we started up. You are so very good at what you do and very open-minded and humble, which is a quality that I’m attracted to. So keep up your great work. I, you know, love seeing what you do and follow you closely. So thanks for having me. Thanks very much. Thanks, Terry. 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.