Welcome to Effortless Swimming, the podcast for swimmers, triathletes and coaches. Join Australian swim coach, Bretton Ford, as he reveals the latest techniques and information to improve your swimming. Let’s dive right in. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is John Conrad, who you’ve probably heard of. He won the 1500m freestyle in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, and in his career he set 26 individual world records. He now coaches up in the beautiful Sunshine Coast in Queensland. I’ve got John here on the call today. We’re going to talk about a few things about techniques so you can swim easier, swim more efficiently and improve your swimming. Welcome to the call John. I should say to Bretton. Thanks John. One of your mantras is SwimEasy. We’ve got a book in DVD titled SwimEasy, and I think that fits in really well with Effortless Swimming, which is kind of my mantra. One of the common things that comes up is that some people will say that swimming is not easy, swimming is not effortless,

but I think the way that we speak about it, it’s about using energy in the right places and conserving energy in the right places. Absolutely, but let’s take a big step backwards. I mean, humans aren’t built for swimming. You put a little puppy dog in the water and it automatically swims. That’s not so with a child. In the recent floods, I saw videos on the news of kangaroos swimming. For human beings, and therefore it’s a fine environment, we’re taught when we’re toddlers that it’s a dangerous environment. So this sets up tension and anxiety. One of my key things is that everybody has a bit of anxiety. Grant Hackett, on the last lap of the 1500 when he’s dug it, doesn’t want to drop a drop of water down his throat from a passing swimmer. He’s going the other way, I hope. And, particularly, he’s fingertips and has to cough. Have you ever coughed at the end of the 15th? That’s not a full award. It is not fun.

So we’ve got this tension built in. And the key thing to that is to first recognise it and secondly work against it, or work to overcome it. And the thing I use now in all of my swim clinics, and I’ve got to give credit to Milt Nelms, who you may have heard of. Milt is a fantastic guy. He used to, and he recently, a couple of years ago, married Shane Gould. So he’s now become a nausea living in Dunlany, I think. But what we call the hang float, just floats completely loosely in the water like a piece of seaweed or a piece of jellyfish face down. Arms and legs dangling down, depending on body density. And even good swimmers can find this confronting. They’re not used to being perfectly relaxed in all the dead man’s float. And that’s a way of telling your fight-fight brain, your primitive brain, hey, this is okay. And what I find interestingly surprising, and particularly triathletes, because they’re bikies and runners 90% of the time, they just aren’t used to doing it.

Biking is natural for human beings. It’s a running-type movement done on a machine. But soon, sure, it’s a different world altogether. Yeah, absolutely. And you can tell the difference between a swimmer that is relaxed in the water and one that’s not, just by looking at their distance per stroke as well. And I used to coach down at the Melbourne University pool about probably five, six years ago. And the pool’s only about a meter 70, maybe a meter 60 deep. And they’d get a lot of foreign exchange students who had never learned to swim, who would go there and they’d need to be rescued in the water because of what you’re talking about. They’re going to that flight mode and they panic and they become anxious and they sort of struggle to float or swim in that depth of water. Yeah, and the other thing is that the subconscious drive, it’s part of the fight-fight brain completely involuntary. The drive is upwards.

It’s warm up there, it’s cold down there. Sharks are down there. It’s salvation up there. So we want to angle up with what I call the waterski complex if I slow down, I’ll think. And I want to get people to think of floatation depth. This is particularly true once again as swim athletes because they’re usually very little with any body fat. So they’re not good floaters. And for those guys and girls, all the more reason to swim while in the water and to breathe, particularly to the recovery, rotate more. You do real slow-mo shots of torpedo or hacket and coming towards you. They’re rotating through 180 degrees. Their shoulder points are vertical. And I often say that seems like two side strikes put together. Their shoulder points are vertical in recovery. In other words, one shoulder is directly above the other. And so people with high body density rotate more to breathe looking skyward. Kieran Perkins used to look up at the ceiling from up the sky when he breathed.

Two goggles out of the water looking skyward. That means he’s not lifting. The water’s doing the work of holding him up. He can concentrate his energies on going forward. And that kind of ties in as well to something that you probably come across when you’re doing one-on-one lessons or you’re doing private group classes. And that’s as soon as they tend to hold their breath when they’re swimming freestyle. So when their face is in the water, they’re not breathing out constantly. So can you talk a little bit about what kind of impact that has on their stroke and on their energy levels as well, I guess? Yeah, well, breathing is the most important thing we do, which causes problems in swimming because, you know, if you come across a car accident and you’ve got some Thursdays knowledge, the first thing you do is check the breathing. You know, you’re saying somebody’s breathing if they’re not breathing. And I’m being particularly sinister about this because, you know,

it’s so powerful all these emotions that we have. So seeing breathing is the most important thing we do. The source of all evil comes from breathing, or most evil anyway, because we want to get a good breath. Therefore, we tend to lift the breath, for example, while we don’t breathe out enough. Try emptying your lungs and until they’re completely empty, all the way down to the bottom. And then, you know, if you’ve still got enough air left in your lungs to cough, even if you think your lungs are empty. And I focus on exhaling because if people exhale, they’ll sure as hell inhale again. If they inhale, they’ll exhale. You know, the key to breathing is to focus on exhale and don’t lift the breath, roll the breath. Yeah, and what I recommend to some is who are having trouble with their breathing is that so take your breath and then when your face goes under the water, you’re just constantly releasing air from your lungs,

whether it’s through your nose or through your mouth or through both. And then just before you take that breath, yeah, through both and then release all of the oxygen or all of the air just before you take that breath. So you’ve got empty lungs in order to, you know, take a full breath. Now that clears the passageways too. Think of a whale surfacing, you know, that clears the passageways with a big blast and then breathes in immediately after the fact I was looking at some David Attenborough thing just recently that was showing over here pictures of whales and then the spat lasts, you know, a couple of seconds. And then you see the gap open up and the whale inhales in about less than a second. I was very surprised, you know, I thought these guys have got such these lungs. They take longer to inhale but it doesn’t take long at all to inhale and the spat, the exhale takes much longer after everything else.

They’ve got to stir the water out. So it’s interesting stuff. The only thing that particularly was once again triathletes, air resistance is their enemies. Wind, you know, it’s great to have a bike in front of you to break the air, but water resistance I think is the same thing. Well, water is your friend because you usually get to propel yourself and the key thing to remember in swimming is that water resistance, it’s a question of street lighting first of all, but the key thing here is that the submarine goes faster than the surface ship with the same power and weight. So, you know, the ethical submarine doesn’t waste energy breaking the surface. It takes sure there are waves underwater, but they create small waves of the surface that it does underwater. So the surface is the most inefficient place to propel yourself. So stay low and think torpedo rather than stay boat. So don’t try to fight water resistance by actually playing up with what you’re doing

is wasting energy. Yeah, and one of your main principles when you’re teaching swimming is swimming at floatation depth, which is what you’re sort of talking about there. Yeah, the objective is to let the water do all the work and that means you’re swimming on a straight axis from the crown of your head out your bum between your legs and then say your spine is as close as possible parallel to the water surface. And then your axis on which you rotate like a barbecued roast, you know, like a spit roast, that’s parallel to the surface of the water. You might find the same thing when you’re taking people through some technique work. One of the main things that I come across is that some of these will either be kicking too hard or they’ll be bending at their hips so that their legs are dragging below them which is causing quite a bit of resistance. So they’re sort of the two, they’re two of the main things which we sort of start with when we’re working on.

So what do you find in terms of how hard someone’s kicking to how tired they get in the water? Well, the thing is that when we learned the swim of kids we learned to kick, right, and then we learned to kick hard and that is kick hard, Johnny, kick hard, Jenny. So in our brains, our subconscious is the fact that kicking is good but kicking is the most inefficient thing we do because, you know, we’re trying to make fish tails out of our feet and they’re not built like fish tails. Flippers make fish tails out of our feet, that’s why we get so much propulsion. But kicking is just inefficient. I mean, everybody hates kicking on a kickboard and then rightfully so because it’s very frustrating, hard work. But when you’re swimming, it’s no less easy. So the fact that what I say is that, you know, a relaxing kick is not worth the effort. When Thorpey does pull, boy, and he’s got the fastest kick in the world, along with Alex Popov, what is it, 28.6 or 50 metres kicking with a pusher?

I was very inactive one day and I heard it. I know him pretty well. So he did 28.6 or 50 metres kicking and I said, that was with a dive in an underwater dolphin, wasn’t it? He looked down at me and he says, no, that was with a pushover and a kickboard. And even I get a bit nervous in his presence, so I shouldn’t have kept my mouth shut until I heard his answer. You know, pull, boy, go 10 per cent slower. I’ve seen a set of 3,100, 15 with swimming, leaving on 65 and holding 59. And without resting, he grabbed the pull, boy, and he’s leaving on 70, holding 64 or 65. With a pull, boy. And here’s the greatest kick in the world. So, you know, kicking is not worth it. Particularly in triathletes, you’ve got to use your legs afterwards. I’m not triathlete coach, but the growing triathlete coach once said, you know, when a triathlete gets out of the swimming leg, their heart rate shouldn’t be around about 130, 140.

And, you know, that’s the key thing. You know, swimming is the old man at the triathlon. Yeah, well, I like to teach for them to kick but not use effort in the kick. So, it’s really important for balance and timing. And I see too many triathletes in particular trying a two-beat kick, which I don’t think works for a lot of swimmers, mostly just because they can’t use the drive from their body rotation quite as much because they’re just working too hard on their pull. So, I think a four or a six-beat kick is usually a better option for most swimmers. And I think too many swimmers try and do a two-beat kick, but it’s just a bit too slow where they can be quicker. You know, I leave kicking up to the rhythm of the kick. I leave it up to the swimmer. Sorry, first of all, I’m talking about most of my customers are middle of the road lap swimmers, master swimmers. People who just want to swim a kilometer for a workout

or maybe going on beach trips. And, you know, to get to talk about six-beats and two-beats and they take their focus off their arms, they stay concentrating on the legs. But the legs are involved in body rotation as well as the arms. I sort of leave it up to them. Let your legs do what they want to do as long as you’re not kicking too hard. And let them find their own speed of beat. So, yeah, the other thing about kicking, of course, is when you’re kicking, you’re engaging your quadriceps, which are the largest muscles in your body. So, using the largest muscles in your body to produce the most inefficient movement which is kicking. Yeah, and coming back to your point about, you know, should they do a four or a six-beat kick? Yeah, it’s just, I mean, even for top swimmers, it’s a little bit too much to think about, okay, I want to try and do a six-beat kick here. It’s just let your legs do what they need to do

in order to help with the timing and the balance of your stroke. Don’t get caught up on two, four, six-beat. Just let them do what works best. Another thing is applying force when needed. So, I think swimming, it’s about using energy in the pool and the propulsive movements, but really switching off that energy in the recovery. So, you talk a bit about that in your SwimEasy DVD too. Yeah. Well, the rubble on the road is the pool phase of the stroke. In the catch, the only downward pressure that’s required is to offset the weight of the opposite arm, which has been in the air. So all of a sudden, you’ve got four and six kilos going upwards in your recovering arm, and so that doesn’t push you downwards. But then when the cat turns in the pool, which is forward of the head, and I can talk about catch-up and delayed pulling on in, but that’s the rubble on the road. That’s where all the action takes place. The push at the end of the stroke,

there’s quite a different set of ideas from different people, whether it’s the weight of energy or whether, you know, how should you finish with a good push-arm, finish the stroke. That depends, I think, on the strength of the triceps of the person and other things like that. But the key to the speed and pull action is the pull. Sometimes I say, well, you know, in a group of swimmers, I say, well, the biggest difference between, you know, Libby trickery and fault in ourselves apart from fitness use and talent, there are two things. One is the innate sense of streamlining and they streamline beautifully. They can feel or they streamline intuitively. The second one is the quality of their grip on the water, the rubber on the road. One of the most remarkable swimmers in the last decade and a bit is Natalie Coglum from the USA, who happens to be a Milkman’s protege in terms of stroke mechanics, in terms of coaching.

And, you know, Natalie, Libby’s 5.7, sorry about the old language, but I’m only 5.7 with 5.7 feet. Natalie’s 5.8 and repeatedly the weakest member of the U.S. Olympic team. First swim in the world in under a minute for 100 metres of backstroke. The thing about Natalie is that she, first of all, streamlining, both Libby and Natalie come out a metre ahead out of tumble turns. It’s so noticeable in freestyle because Natalie got the bronze in 100 freestyle twice too. And the second thing is, the quality of their grip on the water, and they got small hands. It’s a feeling thing. And that’s why I like drills which are like sitting close, fisted intentionally. Then open your hands up to feel, or assume with your fingers spread apart intentionally and do the same and develop a feel for the water. The rubber on the road, you know, Michael Schumacher goes a tenth of a second faster than Rubens Barrakello on the same Ferrari.

It’s fit to the pants. They’re the two big issues and the pullers in here, as I said, the rubber on the road. One of the things that I’ve been working with my squad with lately is just getting the streamline right off the start and off each turn because I’d say probably 9 out of 10 of just my squad alone. So it’s an adult squad. They’ll push off and their streamline is not good at all. Their hands aren’t together. They’re not locking in their elbows. They’re just pushing off and they sort of almost hit a wall when they push off. So we’ve been working just on that kind of streamline and that also helps to get a feel for streamlining your stroke. With coaching adults, they might not have the best flexibility as some of the kids, but you can work on that and it’s not going to be a comfortable position when you do push off the wall in a streamline position but the more you can do it, the better you’ll get and then the better you’ll be able to

apply that to your stroke. And then what I like is pushing off the wall and not kicking or moving and seeing how far you can push off just holding your breath and waiting until your body stops and then obviously the more streamlined you are, the further you’ll go with practice or with a diet eat and you can do the same thing. Usually the head gets from the way in streamlining to people start lifting their head too early and same as for the years in the 90s when I first started getting back into coaching because I was in the business world so I still recommend looking forward underwater because it’s natural for a human being to see where they go and it took force Kyle to tell me well John, things have changed since you were there and the objective is not looking down, the objective is to streamline and not use your upper neck muscles because over muscles you have a lot of energy there’s a twitchy white muscle to swing your head around

in emergencies

so yes, the head is the key thing and just practicing by pushing off or diving without moving and seeing how far you can get and I just want to talk about one more thing and that’s over exaggerating a movement in a drill or in the water to help to help get a feel for it or to help to learn that thing I know it’s one of the things you mentioned in your DVD and it’s something that I like to do as well with drills to overemphasize something so for example if a swimmer is bending their knees too much when they kick so it’s like they’re riding a bicycle I’ll get them to king with just by keeping their legs straight and so over exaggerating the straightness of the legs to help them get the feel for what they should be doing and you do quite a bit of that too don’t you yeah and I think nobody will explain to me why but in swimming a little bit of change it feels like a lot you know somebody who’s crossing over in their in their entry crossing over the other side

you get them to stop doing that they think that their arms are going out wider than their shoulders so learning by exaggeration of good and I do want to focus on catch up or where to pull because I think that’s the second biggest thing for the the I still like the old catch up I tried every single drill I can find and lay my hands on but I call it a fun touch because catch up requires suggest rushing you know take a stroke touch your thumbs in front take the other stroke touch your thumbs in front and this catch up if you like is an old fashioned word and the catch up is critical they start pulling too soon in other words your arms are rotating faster your your pull is out of sync with your body rotation if you delay the pull until the opposite hand enters that means you’ve got momentarily two hands forward of your head you’ve had the longest combination of body rotations using your body weight to add power to your arm pull

you name it boxing, golf, tennis thinking about latent fluid hitting your backhand without rotation it wouldn’t even reach the net and the wall wouldn’t even reach the net so you know you’ve got this rotation and that means I thought I just delayed pull I call it delay the pull rather than catch up same thing and this reduces the number of strokes per lap because each stroke is more powerful with the same energy and it takes you further and I was really interested in this new 16 year old kid Jordan Harrison I only saw him on the news I’d love to see some footage of him I’ll go down and see him in Southport at Dennis Cottrell’s and see his hands get to within about 18 inches of each other in front and that means my guess is that he’s doing about 30 strokes per 50 maybe even less the only person who’s done on that 30 is Thorpey 200 meter world records lap 2 and 3 in Japan in 2003 he did 29 strokes his stroke count was 29 so lap 2 and 3

he used to strike 34 when he first broke world records Grant started with striking 35 he first started breaking world records his stroke count and his last world record was 31 strokes per lap so don’t confuse ours for you with swimming speed if you’re pulling too soon you’re driving in second gear you’ve got more reds and you’re using full fuel but you’re not going faster yeah that’s right and you see it a lot when you’re maybe taking football players rugby players up where you are and they’ve got a lot of power a lot of strength and they’ll try and use that to pull themselves through the water really quickly by really rushing their hands through the water but swimming is not about that it’s about holding the water and then moving yourself past your hand and getting a good grip on it so to speak well I’ve got first hand experience of that when I had the leaf of the cooking the south city rabbit oak came the boys didn’t sense too well

because they grew up with a rugby ball and in particular the owl and the boys they didn’t like the water because they fankled at the time because they built brick outhouses and then they flat like brick outhouses and then when they pulled it’s a little bit like wheelspin in a powerful car yeah I use a lot of analogies outside of swimming which I think is a good way to pick string things and they couldn’t float either and getting back to what we started on a hand float or seaweed float when you relax your body expands in volume and people who consider themselves as thinkers and there are plenty of those in the triathlon world

with relaxation their body expands in volume for the same weight so slowly they’ll either get them back up up to the surface or even their legs will start coming up higher in a hand float so yeah there’s a lot to it yeah a lot of things to think about is no matter how good you get as a swimmer there’s always something to work on something to concentrate on but I think that’s part of the the enjoyment that comes with swimming is just consistently improving and working on different things and yeah John thank you so much for jumping on a podcast with me I really appreciate you sharing your experience and your knowledge on here how can people find out more about you about the DVDs you offer and also if they would like a private or group lessons with you yeah well I’m on the web

JohnConrad.com.au JohnConrad’s one word with a K unless on the end I’m a lucky and born foreigner otherwise when I was a kid and yeah so and it’s J-O-H and not J-L-M like some people but me because of John Hendrix who’s J-L-M at the same time but most of your customers will say John who because you know I was talking to a bunch of my kids one day in the squad in Cookin’ for the park they were about eight and nine years old but who’s your favorite swimmer and they saw Grant Hackett Libby Trickett and Libby Lenton and I said what about Kieran Perkins on their silence and then one kid pipes up and says oh he’s real old isn’t he

so that’s good for you yeah well I think most of my customers they’re sort of in the 30 to 50 year age group so I’m sure most of them have heard of you so it’s been great to have you on the podcast John so yeah thanks very much so johnconrads.com.au to get more information about John and if you’d like to get any of his books or DVDs or organize any private lessons with him so thanks again John I really appreciate it

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