you might look at your data from from the EO swim better and it might tell you you’ve got three things. You’re generating too much downward force. You’ve got too much lateral force and maybe you’ve also got hand drag or upward force at the back end. You can only change one thing at a time and you’ve got it and the whole point about the system is being able to not just make the change but measure the outcome of that change. 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. How does an Olympic medalist take 19 seconds off her 800 meter time and nearly beat Kader Ledecky? In this episode I’m joined by Jamie Fuller from EO Labs, the creators of these swim better handsets, a company I’ve worked closely with since their early days to share how this breakthrough tech is transforming performance.

From helping Paige Madden make that jaw-dropping improvement to giving triathletes a way to measure swim power in watts, sync with training peaks and use AI to pinpoint exactly where they’re losing speed. EO is changing the way we understand the swim leg. From Olympic podiums to your local pool this could change the way you approach every stroke. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. We’ve got a return guest back on. We’ve got Jamie Fuller from EO. Welcome back, Jamie. Thank you, Brenton. Lovely to see you. It’s great to hear about some of the updates going on at the elite level of swimming and how that trickles down to amateur athletes, weekend warriors, I guess people like myself and to hear how some of the bestomers in the world are using some of the tech that you guys have got available. There’s new updates that you’ve got through EO which I’d love to chat about today because it’s really cool to see this

stuff evolving and where the sport’s going to go in the future. I’d love to chat about that stuff today. Where do you think would be a good place to take it off? Yes, mate. So we’re at a really interesting point because we’ve spent the last, primarily we’ve spent the last two to three years focused on pure swimming. And by pure swimming, I mean the swimmers at the elite end specifically in swimming as opposed to triathlon. So when we launched and for the last couple of years, it’s all been about working with Olympians, working with Olympic teams and federations, working with NCAA colleges and similar organizations here in Australia and Europe and Asia too, about exploring the technology, understanding what it means, because this is new. This is not stuff that’s been around for years. This is stuff that we’ve frankly created slash invented and innovated. And so it’s been a massive learning journey, not just for our customers, but for us as well. Because if I look at,

if I look where we are today, I had no idea when we started this journey that we’d be where we are. So we’re now at this really interesting point where we’re ready and where we’re now not transitioning, but we’re stepping and increasing our focus now, particularly into triathletes. And so whilst there was so much work done around the Paris Olympics and continued to do work, even with the world championships that have just finished in Singapore and at that very elite level, where this system fundamentally makes a huge amount of sense is in triathlon. And that’s for a couple of reasons, apart from the demographics and the economic aspects of it, because let’s face it, this isn’t like a $50 gimmick set of product you buy. This is a serious piece of care. When you’re dealing with triathletes, you’re dealing with a cohort of people who spend a lot of money. They’ll spend 10, 15, 20 grand on a bike. They’ll go and spend 40, 50 grand going to Germany to do an Ironman or

Kona. So in the first instance, there’s a preparedness to invest in equipment for what they do. Secondly, they’re already very, very, very comfortable dealing with data and dealing with digital devices, electronics to collect that data, especially around power. Because when you look at cycling, so much about cycling performance is driven by the amount of power that you’re driving through your legs into the crank and measuring that power and understanding the application of that power and how it relates to performance. Now, until literally last week, our system has been presenting force or pressure in kilopascals. Now we’ve transitioned from there into presenting power in watts. So what’s really great from a triathlete perspective is they’re able to look at their cycle data, their run data, and discuss it in terms of output in watts. And now they can do exactly the same thing with their swim. So the ability to not only measure

how much power you’re pushing and then to apply the technique lens that we bring, which is what direction is that power going? Because over time, you hope to get stronger and to be able to push more power, but then critically, you want to make sure that that power is being pushed in the right direction. Because unlike cycling, where on cycling, you’ve got a two-dimensional plane where literally your feet are just going around like this, not only are we dealing in water, but we’re also dealing in three dimensions. So it’s pointless of you getting stronger and increasing that power, but then pushing it in all the wrong directions and not pushing it in the propulsive direction. So there’s this really interesting point now where, and I know that triathletes, I hear this all the time from triathletes and platforms. We’ve got all this data in run and cycle and we’ve got nothing for swim. When can we have something for swim? Well, guess what?

As of right now, it’s available. And so that data will tie in with, say, someone who’s using training peaks. They can basically just upload it and it syncs with their training peaks with their training stress score, their watts. What are some of those numbers that are coming through to them? Yeah, exactly. Right now, with our product, you can go into your account on the platform and you can click a little link that says connect to training peaks. And that’ll pop up a training peak screen and you enter your training peaks login details, username, password. And from that moment on, every bit of data that you collect on here will automatically populate into your training peaks account. And precisely, as you said, you can look at your run data, your cycle data, and your swim data. And so not only can you see your intensity factor, training stress score, because the idea is you wear these for the whole swim session. Literally, you start recording at

the beginning of the session, you wear them for the whole session, you stop recording. And when you download the data, assuming you’ve already logged connected to your training peaks account, which is like a 10 second step, it’s nothing. Once you’ve done that, then automatically your data will populate into the training peaks. And so, like I said, not just your intensity factor training stress score, it’s also got your total power that you’ve or your maximum power, your average power, it breaks it up into the different phases across the session. You’ve also got your normal information that we collect with respect to, you know, the time taken, the distance one, your distance per stroke, or, you know, what I call the boring stuff. But also, we also calculate, we’re able to tell you accurately exactly what your work is in kilojoules. So you can measure exactly how much work you’ve done in that session.

And where this now becomes really specific for a workout for a triathlete is up until now, when you’ve been doing sets, you’ve had to stop and start recording for each set. And so you might do a workout which has got six sets in it, and you then download six files at the end of it. Well, not anymore. Now what you can do, you can start recording at the beginning of the session, you stop recording at the end of the session, you’ve got one file, and that file will upload. And what it’ll do is it converts your whole recording. So your session might go for 40 minutes. But within that 40 minutes, you might have 32 minutes, 30 seconds of swimming. So what our processing does now, our algorithms, is it kicks out all the non-swim time. So where you’re taking a recovery break at the end of the lap, and where you might be doing some weird things with your hands, and by weird things, I mean, sculling, you know, your hands

might be going in and out of the water whilst you’re not swimming. It might be technically collecting data. Well, now the system has been upgraded and improved so that we can sense those times when you’re doing that weird stuff, and we can exclude it and take it purely down to your pure raw swim component and present it as such. So the ability to track all that, the ability to look at it, as I said, in exactly the same language as your bike and your run, which is language that triathletes are very comfortable with. And you know, they’re always going to be, you know, we see this in cycling, you know, the whole my dick’s bigger than your dick routine, because I’m pushing, you know, 320 watts and you’re only pushing 285 watts. Well, you can play the same games now with your swim. So what my, my objective here, particularly in triathlon, because we know that the vast majority of triathletes come from cycling and running.

We know that a lot of triathletes do the swim because they absolutely have to, and they hate it, right? You know, it’s not something they want to do voluntarily. And for a lot of them, it’s not fun. This thing can change all that. This thing can literally gamify it because the data that you’re getting becomes so interesting and so fascinating, where you’re able to not just interrogate it and see what’s going on, but track it and look at how you’re evolving over time, implementing the changes that are being highlighted. And I’ll get to how those changes are highlighted in a minute. But now it’s, I think it’s going to drastically change the approach. And in very blunt terms, I think because of all the data I see and lots of triathletes that I’ve worked closely with, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to improvement. Because, you know, traditionally swimming, and it’s filtered through into triathlon

as well. It’s had this mantra of if you want to be faster, you’ve got to swim more. Well, there’s no more about that because the improvements that can be generated through technique change are huge. With a little bit of focus and some energy. And what I think you’ll find is that triathletes are going to be looking at this stuff and wanting to get back into the pool more, there’ll be more motivated, more incentivized because they’ll see some big improvements. Even just the not having to start, stop it after every 100 or 200, whatever you’re doing, that in itself, I think is a really big one. Because if you’ve ever done testing with athletes with the swim better devices, we want, you know, we’ll work on some different things. We’ll try breathing to the opposite side. We’ll try changing the stroke. So without needing to start and stop it, you can just, you can make those changes, see what the difference is in

their power, their direction. That I think itself is a really important one. I actually had a swimmer who did a follow up filming session in Sydney two weeks back and he wore his swim better devices and recorded that while we did this filming session. So it was really interesting just going through his footage, looking at his data, seeing why he wasn’t as propulsive on his left side, which is all the stuff that his devices have measured for maybe two years now. But it’s just, it’s just so good to see the numbers behind what I see in the, in the video. So in terms of how this data is presented and how you continue to improve that aspect of things and simplify all this data that the devices collect, do you want to pull up a, maybe a share screen and just show some of these latest latest stuff? Sure. And just before I do, I’ll flag one more thing. Because you know, Brenton, with, with this things, you need to, you need two things.

You need the handsets themselves. And you also need a membership. And the membership is really important. You’ve got to have the membership to be able to analyze your data properly. Without a membership, you can still see some data, but it’s very high level. You need a membership to be able to interrogate it. And what I’m going to show you is captured in all the membership stuff. Now, I know that there’s an element of sensitivity for some people who say, well, Christ, I’ve got to pay a thousand bucks for these. And I’ve got to pay you something every year. We get that. We, we understand the sensitivity that comes with that. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s an expectation as to why should I pay more after I, after I pay a grand for these, why should I continue to pay? Very, very fair comment. The reality is this is a cloud based processor. So the data is not stored on your computer. It’s not stored in the app.

It’s stored only whilst you’re collecting it on the handset. And then it’s all sent to the cloud. And so there’s all sorts of costs associated with hosting it. There’s also video integration. So you can upload video through our platform, sync it to the data. And you can see beautifully exactly what’s going on with the hand on the video. And you can see what’s what the implications are for the fours.

There’s constant innovation that’s being performed, constantly bringing out more functionality, more information, better targeted. Because as you can appreciate, this thing collects a lot of data. And part of the secret here is number one, how do we make it simple to understand? And number two, how do we distill it? Because just presenting a whole heap of data is not the answer. It’s a question of how do we go through it and bring out the stuff that is most meaningful. There’s what we call the so what factor. Because I see this with a lot of a lot of device companies that just produce a lot of and you get it and you go, well, so what? I don’t understand what it means to me. And so we are paranoid about that so what factor. And what we estimate at the moment that what’s collected on here, we’re using about 40% of it. So there’s a lot more to come through and a lot more work that we are doing and will need to do to be able to continually

refine it and improve it and offer bigger and better representation. The goal being that we want the user to get as much insight in as short a time as possible. It’s pointless if the user’s got to spend an hour and a half every time digging through and trying to understand all these different components. So I guess where I’m getting to now is the big change that’s happened with the implementation of power and with the connectivity with training peaks is you can get all your training peaks data, what I call the effort related data, not the tech. There’s two, there’s two pieces. There’s effort and technique. And on our platform, we’ve got all the techniques on training peaks, you’ll get all the effort stuff. I mean, the effort stuff is on our platform too, but you’ll be able to go into the training peaks platform and look at all your effort data, your power, your work, your IF and TSS and all that stuff. And you don’t need a membership. So if you choose, I don’t want the

membership, I’m just going to buy the handsets. That’s it. No problems. You’ll get all that effort related data on the training peaks platform. You’ll be able to have it there with your cycle in your run. Happy days. What we would encourage people do is also to subscribe to the EO platform to get their technique data, because that’s when it’s not just a question of how much power am I pushing, but where am I pushing it? And where am I losing it? You know, you can see in data quite clearly, you can easily see where you’re losing your propulsion at what part of the stroke exactly where it is in the stroke. And you can see exactly why you’re losing your propulsion. And invariably, it’s one of two things. It’s because that hand is rotating. And the moment you rotate that hand, not only does the power not go back towards your feet, but it goes laterally either inwards or outwards. But critically, the moment you rotate that hand,

you lose the hold on the water. And I think even like high level NCAA swimmers

at times don’t even fully grasp that basic swim physics 101 concept. It’s all about putting the hand in the water, grabbing the water and advancing the body. It’s ideally we don’t want that hand physically moving back. We want that hand staying there and holding there as the body advances. And the reality is to do that, that hand needs to be positioned like this and not like that. Because the moment you position like that, you’re knifing through. So it’s all these things bringing it together and making it available in the ultimate view, which is the effort based stuff on training peaks and then the technique stuff. And so what I’m going to share now, I’ll share my screen and we’ll have a bit of a look at, let me go to here. So hopefully, Brenton, you can see this. This is, please ignore the quality of the data. This is my swim on Sunday. I haven’t been in the water for 18 months, I had shoulder surgery. And this is the first time I got back in the water.

And you’ll see here it was like, it was a total of eight minutes. But this was an 18 minute recording. So it kicked out all the non swim time when I was doing all sorts of other stuff. And what you’re looking at here are the eight laps and the orange and the blue shows you the power that I’m driving through the orange is my left hand and the blue is my right hand. And you can see that I’ve got it automatically, I’ve got an imbalance between my right and my left. I’m pushing considerably more through my right than I am through my left. And you can see here the darker colors, they represent the propulsive.

So we’re not only, we’re not just showing you total power. We’re also giving you a visual reference of your propulsive power on each of those laps to start with. And if you want, you can click into here and you can see this data for every stroke in that lap. And same story, you know, total power and propulsive power on the first stroke of the right hand and so on as you go through. And then along the top here is the stroke rate. So the stroke rate, as you can see, you know, varied a little bit across the eight. Pretty basic, pretty straightforward. Where we go into the first key metric, which is where are these powers, this power being directed? Now you can see here that we’ve got the six directions. And not only do we show the six directions, we can also tell you what your goals should be. And I can tell you from a distance women’s perspective, we want this propulsive number to be sitting more 70 to 75%. And before I had my

shoulder surgery, I was, I was sitting at about 68, 67, 68%. Now that I’ve had my shoulder surgery and I’ve lost my form completely from not getting in the water, you can see it’s declined.

So this is important is understanding the allocation of where those forces are going. And again, I can turn each hand off and we can say, we’ll show me the right hand. You know, the right hand is 60% propulsive and 25 down. Whereas the left hand is 50% propulsive and 38% down. So automatically I can see that I’ve got what’s going on with each hand independently of one another. When we look at hand path, we can have a quick look at the consistency and we can see here the path that my left and my right hand goes through. And there are two things that I’m looking at here. And this is every stroke in that lap, as you can see, selected. This is just lap one, every stroke. And the two things we’re looking for is how tightly bunched those lines are. And secondly, we’re looking for symmetry or balance between the two. And I’m pretty straight on my right hand. My left hand’s got a little bit tiny, a little bit of an S. I’ve got a bit more depth on my right. So you can start to

have a look at what’s going on. Then when we go for what we call our power versus time, this is where we’re able to look at every stroke and what’s being generated in the amount of propulsive power on each of those strokes as we go through. And the beauty about this is I can also add my vertical force, my vertical power, sorry. And so you can see this is a right hand stroke and a left and a right and a left. And you can see where I’m generating the downward power in conjunction with my propulsive power. And one of the objectives of every distance swimmer is to get through that downward phase nice and early so that then they can be as propulsively as they can be for as long as they can be. So we look at this point right here where my downward is in conjunction with where I am in my propulsive phase, which is very early, which is exactly what I want to see likewise on this stroke here. What you don’t want to see is you don’t want to see this point of maximum downward

corresponding with that point of maximum propulsion. You want to see it happen nice and early in the phasing. And then finally, this is where we bring it all together. And where I’m able to say, for example, pop my lateral on here and I can pick a stroke. Let’s pick a right hand stroke and we’ll look at the overhead view because I’ve got my lateral on here. And the one thing that you’ll notice here, Brenton, that you might have seen before is this green line. And that green line is where we map the hand speed. So you can see now we can look at how fast the hand is traveling in conjunction with what propulsion is being generated and what there’s only a little bit of lateral there. So what I can do is I can move that red line anywhere so I can put that red line right here because that’s my catch. That point there where I’m starting to generate propulsion, that’s exactly my catch. And you can see my hand has traveled from the end of the glide down to

there. It’s traveled all that distance or side on. It’s gone from this point all the way back to there for no benefit whatsoever. That’s a problem or it’s an opportunity because ideally we want the catch to happen as early as possible at the end of the glide. So the quicker we get that accelerating back from here, the sooner we get into the catch. And you can see that I’m not catching to here. So if I could have got my catch here, I would have had all that time you know from 0.34 down to 1.34. That’s a whole second that that hand is set off the day.

And that’s reflected in the hand speed. And you can see here now the hand speed is kicking up and as it kicks up we now get that propulsion generated. And you can also see that little bit of inward force that’s being generated. That’s happening as that hand is physically tracking inwards. You see it physically tracks inwards in that point in the middle. And as it tracks inwards, it’s generating a little bit of inward power pushing inwards. So the ability to bring all that together and see what’s going on and summarize it in here and understand okay, what my numbers should be because we can show you and we can tell you what the numbers your goals are. And that’s the last piece of this puzzle too by the way is we’ve now got artificial intelligence data analytics. So if I think I’ve got to stop sharing and reshare, let me go back to here and I’m in a reshare by screen mate because I’ve got a different

screen for this and here we share. And so now I’ll show you I’ll show you in a bit you can click on a button that says EOI or EO intelligence and in less than 60 seconds you’re presented with a report like this which gives you the charts and then we start at the top and we give us that you just got a little thing at the top because this is in beta testing. So this is coming out around the 20th to the 25th of August. So we’re only a couple of weeks away from this being live for everybody. And you see we get a report of when it is, what was swum, the basic data that’s coming through. And then we get some commentary. And as you can see it says here that you’ve got a significant bilateral asymmetry with your right arm generating 30 to 40% more power than your left. And if I go down to the screen you can see exactly in here that right arm is generating a lot more power than the left. Consistent power declines across the laps suggesting impact from

fatigue. There’s a double peak pattern appearing in your strokes and the power versus time which indicates interrupted force application reducing efficiency. Plus you’ve got high downward force combined with excessive lateral movement compromising your forward propulsion. So it’s a great snapshot to tell you what’s happening and then it breaks it down including where you’ve got excessive downward force with hand drag indicates an elbow drop during the strike which is probably happening during the glide phase. High lateral forces driving energy away from your propulsion. And then a list of things to work on including links to products can potentially help you as well. And then furthermore our ability to include some video drills so that we can diagnose the problem tell you where it’s occurring and how it’s occurring what you need to change and some things to work on and potentially some videos as well for some drills as to how

to change it. That’s cool. Wow. This is really I think this is that’s a really powerful component for people to be able to literally do their do their do their swim just to show you on here.

This is this is what you’d see in the as you get your data here and then there’s this little button up here the little blue button the EOI. So you’re able to click that button

like I said it takes probably about 45 seconds and not only will you get the report on the screen but it automatically saves a copy in word to your downloads folder. And so what you’re able to do then is you’re able to go into your downloads folder. In fact I’ve probably got mine up here I can go into my downloads folder I can see it’ll be one of these in here these downloads try this one not that one evidently might be one of these yeah there you go download so I can I can open it up oh you probably can’t see that yeah it’s not showing on the share screen sorry yeah but I can I can go I can go into it I can then edit it and I can then save it and if if I’m an athlete I can save it for myself or if I’m a coach I can forward it to my athlete with potentially some comments from me as well. Wow that’s cool I remember sitting down a couple years ago and that getting to that point or this point is where I thought this is this is where it will be really useful for

for somebody who’s just using the devices on their own so that’s that’s cool cool to say like it’s a great way just to summarize all that data in a practical and applicable way for people to know what to work on and let me tell you mate we’re we’re only in the first step I mean we’ve been working on the AI for a long time because it takes it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to train the system because you’ve got to I mean AI doesn’t automatically know everything you’ve got to teach it so we’re just at that very first gate where it starts with the basics information once we get further down the track. Hey real quick in case you didn’t know we run swimming camps around the world from the Maldives Thailand Japan with Sundays Galapagos Islands plus a bunch of new locations for next year so if you’d like to join us at a future camp and improve your swimming and explore and experience some of the best locations to

swim in the world then go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash camps we’ve got all the dates and locations listed there. A question I get all the time is I’m not that quick will this camp be suitable for me? We have a wide range of speeds and abilities come to the camps so as long as you can swim a kilometer there’s a very good chance that these camps will be suitable for you and if you’re not sure just get in touch with us and we’ll make sure that we do find you a suitable camp. Thanks for listening let’s get back into the podcast. The ability of this thing to look at patterns with respect to your breathing pattern you know what the consequences of the impact is of your breathing to both the shape of the hand as well as the power that’s being generated and the direction that power is going the ability for us to then take something like your power versus time curve and apply them one on top of the other and turn that into a consistency

metric because we know what we’re trying to do here is as athletes I shouldn’t say we because I’m not an athlete but what athletes are trying to do is not only get more efficient and more effective but you want it to be repeatable you’re looking for to create the best technique you can and to do it over and over and over so the our ability to take that data and convert it into a score and to and this is where I’ll use the word I don’t particularly like the word but this is where a sense of gamification comes in and I say I don’t like it because it’s got the connotations of game and but really it’s about me being drawn into it and becoming more focused better understanding and more incentivized to improve that number and it’s just it’s just psychology I mean that’s the way it is the more you can measure it and the better you can get the more you’re likely to get involved and this is when I come back to

some of my original comments about the way that triathletes treat the swim leg you know it’s I do it because I have to I don’t do it because I love it I occasionally see somebody a triathlete that comes from the world of swimming it’s very rare the vast majorities come from from cycling and running and the swim is really it’s not done because they want to it’s done because I absolutely bloody have to do it but I dare this system has got the capacity to change that whole dynamic for them which again can unlock some huge benefits I was with a guy last week an elite triathlete here in Australia and this guy’s come from swimming so he always gets out of the water first that’s his always out of the water first and somebody asked him the question what does he think this can do for triathletes he said I’ll tell you exactly you’ll you’ll go from being a one minute 50 down to a one minute 30 you’ll say you’ll you will find with without a huge

amount of effort involved you’ll be able to improve by 20 seconds per 100 meters because the standard of swimming amongst triathletes is generally pretty poor I’m looking forward to seeing what this goes Brenton it’s it’s all about how do we take all that data and over time get smarter and better at training it and understanding it and the system being able to see things that even I’m the super user I’m the guy that does the the data analytics with the Olympic gold medalists and the best coaches in the world right I teach them how to interpret that data but this system will absolutely smash me eventually it’ll know way more than me and it’ll see things because it’ll be able to look at all the underlying data very quickly and see patterns and then when we do get to feed more controlled data sessions and by controlled we’ve got a program pretty much devised to work with elite athletes to collect their data anonymized so it’s not a question of taking

kyle charmers and saying here have a look at kyle charmers data everybody but it’s a question of being able to take that anonymized but that data secured under controlled circumstances so that you know we’ve got the same pool dense distance it’s at race pace west west where everyone is starting with a dive not with a push off so that the time is super accurate to a hundredth of a second and comparable from athlete to athlete and then being able to look across all of the different metrics and work out exactly which metric is contributing to which part of of improvement and then the and this is the beauty about ai to be able to interrogate that and spot those patterns and spot those correlations and those relationships and then being able to feed it back in and then turn that into advice for swimmers like me not just you know gold medalist and an Olympic medalist but turn it into advice for people that are rubbish swimmers who want to swim better

that’s not you want to go into no question and the thing that i’m one of the things that i’m like probably most excited about and i only saw this a little while ago we’ve been talking about bringing other sensors in and synchronizing to the hands so for example we measure at the moment hand velocity the speed that the hands moving through the water we’re not measuring the body velocity so the hand velocity is really important for measuring power so the power that we present today starts with a basis of pressure and if the pressure is you know how much pressure is my hand pushing through that water through that pressure sensor in the oh that’s the the base level then you go up a step and you include the surface area of your paddle and this is my paddle my hand is my paddle so when i take my pressure and add into the surface area of my hand i can now calculate the amount of force in newtons that i that i’m that i’m pushing

so now i’ve got forcing newtons then the last step is i include the speed of my hand and it doesn’t matter what direction it’s about the speed that my hand is moving and that then takes me from pressure to force and then to power and now with surface area and hand speed and pressure i can present power but it’s only the speed of the hand what i really want to know is the speed of my body because everybody when they swim they accelerate and decelerate through the swim itself and the very best swimmers have got a lower level of acceleration and a lower level of deceleration an olympic swimmer their velocity would do that if you look at mine it does this right and then jit swimmers have got high acceleration high deceleration so what is really critical is that we can map and synchronize the speed of the body but not only that so we want a device that can sit at the base of your spine that will measure

your body velocity as you go but not only that it can also measure the rolling of the hips and the timing of the hip roll in conjunction with the hand and not only that it can also measure the pitch of the chest and if your hips are doing not just this but this that too can be measured then you put a device on each foot and then you’re talking about one timing of the kick and two effectiveness of the kick and the kick effectiveness is really important too as you know I mean a lot of it comes down to the flexibility of the foot and the ability of the foot to be able to generate propulsion with your feet so if you bring all those together you’re now able to suddenly map the whole ecosystem and then you’re able to show how the hand relates to the hip roll relates to what’s essentially the drag an increase in the drag component of the body and in relation to the kick as well and then you can present that so you can take two athletes

side by side and you can present them and overlay them and you can play one off against the other and see exactly where one is improving over the other and vice versa and then they can learn from each other so one of the one of the key one of the key principles mate that we should be take very seriously is let’s learn and understand what’s happening in other sports and this is probably the biggest issue with swimming and swimming is is very behind everything else the application and the acceptance and the embracing of data and technology in all other sports is way more advanced part of it’s because swimming has not been able to come up with products like this that do the stuff that we’re talking about that holds it back so one of the key probably the most advanced sport in the world is formula one and there’s a reason it’s because of money right and the amount of money involved in formula one is the same

thing with football you know some of the things that are coming out of soccer football are huge but if I go back to formula one you’re able to look at two drivers in the same car I’d say an F1 team with their two drivers and you can map exactly what’s going on not just with acceleration and brake but gear changes steering wheel adjustments all through the context of time and speed and you’re able then to look at and this is what these drivers do in the in the one team is they look at their data together they look at each of their data and what that does is it lifts each one it gives that more information to each side of the garage that helps both of them improve and that’s why teams have got two drivers because they need to be able to do those comparisons for improvements to be able to apply it in the race against all the other teams that they’re racing against and it’s there’s no question why it can’t be the same

thing when we’re talking about Olympic level federations and Olympic level teams to be able to say you know this is the stuff that you need to be able then you can do this with a back striker or two backstrokers or two butterflies or whatever where you can analyse this data very very minutely and see exactly what’s what’s making one swim faster than the yeah sure so I think it most people know we’ve got a partnership with Kyle Charmers and Kyle’s been on board since very very early on I went and met with him in his coach and this was not about a commercial type transaction this was about us helping him getting onto the podium and you know he got a gold in Rio a silver in Tokyo and then you got a silver in Paris and so Kyle we’ve worked very closely with Kyle and again in Kyle’s context or certainly after Tokyo you know his his goal was to try and find seven or eight hundreds of a second like less than a tenth of a second

now that’s because that’s what he lost the gold to Caleb Dressel buy in uh in Tokyo now we know in Paris it was a different story it was like over a second to uh to the chinese guy Panjama and after after the Paris Olympics after the race in Paris it was literally the day after the 100 meters and I was you know obviously rooting for Kyle and don’t get me wrong super pleased that he meddled in three consecutive Olympics I mean that in itself is mind blowing but you know tiny little thing in the back of my mind you know pity he didn’t get the gold and it was the next day that I got an email from the chinese national team saying we want to thank you for the technology that you’ve produced because it was instrumental in Panjama doing what he did in the 100 meters which was not only winning by over a second which hadn’t happened for a hundred years but also smashing the world record and he literally smashed the world record

though because I’d sold the system to the chinese like a year earlier but I had no visibility into who was using it and they even sent me some some of his data too which was remarkable so we’ve got Pan we’ve got Kyle in the 100 then you’ve got in the 50 you’ve got Cam McAvoy I’ve worked with Cam McAvoy and Ben Proud you know Ben got the silver medal and I worked very closely not just with Ben but with Ben’s performance coach based in London and Ben was training in Turkey and he was getting his data was being looked at in London by his performance guy and me here in Sydney and we were sort of collaborating a little bit on that so from an Olympics perspective that was remarkable there and then added to that is a young lady in the United States called Paige Madden now Paige was an Olympic medalist from Tokyo so we’re talking about a really a high level high quality swimmer and then sort of I think something like

10 months before she started using it and she wasn’t using it specifically herself it was being used by a mathematician out of the University of Virginia a guy called Ken Ono and Ken started using the handsets and looking at the data because he was bringing mathematics and science to the UVA team and this is a team by the way that’s just won the women’s NCAA title for the fifth consecutive year in a row working under under coach Todd Dissobo and Ken put Paige through a number of different training drills and one of them what he did was is he put two male NCAA swimmers either side of her so put her in a lane put put a bloke on the left and a bloke on the right and gave them clear instructions of when to kick and she had to follow and when she did wearing our handsets immediately they could see what was going on as she accelerated she lost her form when I say lost her form she went from having a propulsive number of something like I think

from memory it was like 62% or 60% dropped down to 43% or 42% because instead of her maintaining her form her hand path suddenly stopped going straight and went laterally and so the power that she was generating was not being pushed backwards it was pushed to the side and she also started leaning more and pushing more down so her propulsion plummeted as a percentage and all they did was they sat her down afterwards and they showed her the data explained what was happening brought her back the next day undertook the same same protocols did it exactly the same way but this time she knew what she was doing before and the beauty about page and you see this with some athletes is they’ve got this remarkable connection between the brain and the limb I don’t have that right I can I have it to a degree and I can concentrate and I can change some things but sometimes this is where drills come in and this is where accessories and paddles

and other things come in to try and help you implement those drills but page has got this ability to be able to say okay I’ve got to make sure that I maintain my technique and she did and in doing so she was able to keep her propulsion up there in the the low 60% and not dropping it down to 42 the upshot was and this is remember this is this is an existing Olympic medalist she took 19 seconds of her 800 meter swim time and she won the bronze medal in the 800 in Paris and she was that far away from Arnie Titmus in silver and I think about a second away from Katie Ledecky in the gold and she she told me afterwards she said even Katie Ledecky had said to her my god what on earth have you done how can you possibly find 18 seconds now don’t get me wrong she did other work she was working with great US coach Bob Bowman and she did other like you know her training regime it’s not everything down to EO swim better but it’s the

understanding that she was able to get what was happening and and what forces she was and power she was generating and where she was able to change her change and improve her technique and and lop off the 19 seconds and there’s a couple of things as you know Brent and you can only change one thing at a time you might look at your data from from the EO swim better and it might tell you you’ve got three things you’re generating too much downward force you’ve got too much lateral force and maybe you’ve also got hand drag or upward force at the back end you can only change one thing at a time and you’ve got it and the whole point about the system is being able to not just make the change but measure the outcome of that change because it’s the outcome that’s that’s critical because you don’t want to be making change and and not knowing whether it’s working and once yeah you measure it and it’s where you want to be

you’ve then got to rinse and repeat until it becomes muscle memory once you’ve got that point then you can move on to the next thing and I’ll just show you one more thing because I think this is this is also something that is really become critical I mentioned that we’ve learned a lot over the time we’ve been doing this and this is this is a perfect example of what good looks like so here are our six directional numbers you can see this going to Brenton on the screen yeah right here are our six vector direction numbers so this is the distribution of power in those six directions and then over here on the right these are our goals and so we can see laterally both left and right we’re looking for these numbers left would and right would direction to ideally be less than four percent in freestyle we’ve got hand drag and upward and as you can see ideally we want both of those to be at zero regardless of whether

you’re a sprinter or a distance swimmer we want four percent maximum left and right we want zero upward and hand drag and if we can achieve four four zero zero that leaves us 92 percent out of the 100 to be applied between propulsive and down these two numbers here propulsive and downward and this is where we have to separate it depending on whether you’re a sprinter or a distance swimmer now we’ll talk primarily about distance because I think you deal with a lot of triathletes and a lot of distance swimmers so a distance swimmer what they’re looking for is to get that propulsive number up north of 70 percent and their downward force to be you know somewhere between 17 and 22 call it 20 percent so the idea is that athletes not only can measure where they are but they can also understand where they want to get to yeah then the fun stuff happens and the fun stuff and I’ll tell you the the vast majority of them are carrying too much

downward force right so it’s not unusual to see a distance swimmer carrying only propulsion in the 30s about 37 percent propulsion and downward at 50 okay I’ve got too much downward force and I’ve got insufficient propulsion generally it’s because they’ve got a that they might have a dropped elbow but they’re not using their high elbow catch right so how do I get my elbow higher how do I get from a position at the end of the glide where my hand can very quickly go from the end of the glide into the catch that’s our goal right to go from here into here how do I implement that well I’ve got a you know watch some videos listen to my coach try using a forearm paddle do whatever and try and try and make that happen and then where we do see hand drag and downward force invariably that’s an indicator of a dropped elbow in the glide so as the hand’s coming in you see a lot of athletes they scoop and the moment

they scoop like that the elbows dropped the hand pops up they’re pushing at the water in front and what it means is that hand has got to travel down a long way before it gets into a propulsive position which is takes longer than it should and it’s wasted energy pushing down instead of going over the barrel and being propulsive so it’s a it’s not just about where you are now it’s about where you should aim to get to implementing changes and measuring the outcome of those changes and again this is where it becomes a much more interesting concept than just logging yourself up and down that bloody black line all the time and as you said with triathletes it’s not about the engine the engine’s built from the run it’s built from the cycle the engine’s great it’s all about how do we how do we implement these technique refinements yeah so the numbers that I just showed you they don’t come from a five-year academic study they come from all the contact

I have with the best swimmers in the world and looking at very closely at their data and understanding it so there’s definitely an element of gut feel from me but I can tell you that the freestyle numbers are absolutely bang-on I’ve got backstroke numbers that are really good to my butterfly is more of a guess and breaststroke I have no so we have fly back and free available in the format that I just showed you for people to be able to say okay it’s one thing knowing where I am it’s about where I want to get to but breaststroke is breaststroke is a whole new animal we’ll get there it just needs some time yeah thanks Brenton eolab.com eolab.com and you can get all sorts of info in there there’s a support email address for questions that actually come to me so I I look at those every day so I’m very responsive on those so contactable and the other thing mate is I do data sessions with people even with the AI and

even with everything else you know people still sometimes need their hands being held a little bit so I’m available to do virtual data reviews with people so we can look at it together and they can better understand. Thanks buddy. 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.effortlessswimming.com www.effortlessswimming.com