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. Are you going to go through these in order, pretty much? Questions? Yeah, pretty much, yeah. And we’ll just see where it takes us. Okay. Yeah, I’ll work pretty much just right off the questions. Cool. Welcome to another episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. Today’s guest is Jeff Buah from Tridot. And this is the episode about smarter training programs. And Jeff, the triathlon coach who specializes in custom design training plans. And he works with all levels of triathletes from age groupers to professionals. And he leads a coaching team of 15 Tridot certified coaches who work with hundreds of athletes all over the world. So welcome to the podcast, Jeff. Oh, thank you very much, Brent.

It’s great to be here. Thanks for coming on. Let’s get straight into it. And if you could just give me a quick sort of background on what Tridot is and how that came to be. Sure. That’s kind of a great way to start. I think a lot of the things I’ll chat about a little later, kind of from a different perspective than most people that are listening have come from before. You know, I’d like to say I was a, you know, world champion triathlete or this world renowned coach and came up with this great idea. But I actually started, I was just a young dad, made a wife, three kids, and I wanted to excel at the sport. But I didn’t want to do that at the expense of my career and my family and the whole rest of my life. So very early on, I just, you know, got into the sport of triathlon and wanted to do as best as I could and wanted to do well. But I just realized that I needed to learn more. I didn’t want to get injured. I had so many friends that were getting injured, training buddies, had them being so consumed with the sport that they were getting divorced and all that.

I mean, just crazy stuff. It was just taking its toll. So I literally went out and just devoured every training resource that I could find. I was reading the books, webinars, everything that I could find and actually got certified as in the US USAT certified coach and got multiple levels there. And cycling certification, but I had no intention even at that time of coaching anyone else. I was just purely selfish, wanted to learn, wanted to just do the best jobs I could. So quickly, I became frustrated with the chaos that was out there. There’s so much conflicting advice. There was, you know, one expert would say one thing, one expert would say something totally differently. And it didn’t make sense. They had a bunch of theories and principles and philosophies. Everyone had a different one, but yet they were all expert, but they’re all not agreeing. So basically kind of got down to the point where I found two categories of training solutions out there.

There was the cookie cutter approach, the one size fits all, you know, might have a beginner intermediate advanced plan. You just, you know, buy it. There’s no athlete data considered in developing those plans. Then there’s some other ones that were called guesswork. Now I’ll call guesswork plans. They may have a lot of data done by an expert, highly educated coach. But that coach doesn’t have a lot of data, a lot of athletes. They’re working with a handful of athletes. All of the athletes are different. So I just thought this is just impossible for them to draw conclusions with, you know, 20, 30, 40 athletes with each one being different. And I noticed that none of them were using any kind of repeatable methodology or process and they weren’t measuring things. So I got a little, I don’t know, frustrated. It’s a good word to use. I guess a lot of them had a lot of data, but it was just snapshot data.

You know, it was a power meter file from yesterday’s race, but no, nothing that showed a cause and effect relationship. Nothing that showed me, you know, as an athlete in my early 30s, what training should I specifically do to achieve these outcomes? Everything was just theory and every single one of them sounded good, but I knew they all couldn’t be true. So I kind of set out on a mission at that point. I just knew that there has to be a better way to train. And so I have a systems engineer background and database and technology and all. So I just started thinking and studying and I just didn’t want to, I guess, to leave my performance and everything just to guesswork. And so I started studying and started looking at things and I just started defining things, looking for patterns and relationships. And over time, that would ultimately become what’s now the Tridot training system. So it was, you know, selfish at first, but, you know, as it began to develop and I began to see the application to other athletes,

I began to continue to invest in technology and process and research and to find algorithms and structures to be able to do that. So just basically in a nutshell, Tridot is a starts with a normalized process for measuring assessment. So your swim, bike and run. So you’re not looking at, you know, my last performance I did better. I was ranked in the top 50 of my age group or a top 15 of my age group for a run. And I was, you know, on the podium for the bike, you know what I’m saying on the top three. And so you’re not making these arbitrary or subjective evaluations of your performance. Instead, I have a scale of zero to 85. So on the zero end is someone who can barely move. Very beginners, 85 would be a world-class performance. And so on that scale, the swim, bike and the run are all measured. And so you do an assessment and it gives you a score in each one. So from there, we’re not only able to determine which is your strength and which is your weakness, but we can tell by how much.

We can tell degrees of training focus that we need to shift. We can, when we take into account your other athlete parameters, your height, your weight, body composition, age, all those things, we can start further predicting what your, what kind of training is going to produce, what type of results for that athlete and which one, how much those results are going to turn into race, day, time gains. Doing it further into measuring workload, the composition of a, at the sub-session level, what kind of workload, how do you quantify that? How do you manage it through the week or over a series of weeks? How does that differ from stress? And then developing algorithms into a larger program design to where you’re taking the athlete, all their characteristics and the performance data and pulling it together in a methodical way so that you’re able to reproduce the same results for the same type of athletes

and then building in a kind of a dynamic feedback loop to where you’re taking those results and the race results and assessments throughout training and you’re able to pull that back in and further modify and enhance and improve the system itself. So I know there’s a, there’s a quote out there from Lord Kelvin. He said, it’s not measured, it can’t be improved. And I kind of at first said, well, if it can’t be defined, it can’t even be measured. So we started just by defining and then further honing it and try it out today is what it is because of the results that is actually produced for athletes and it, and it continues to be improved with every single athlete that goes through the system. I love that approach that you’re using a very data driven approach and a scientific approach because if you look at the top coming from my background, the top, the top swimmers, the Olympians, they’re all using, they’re using video feedback

but in terms of their race pace and anything like that, they’ll look at, you know, what was their, what was their split up to the 15 meter mark? What was their split in and out of the flags? And it’s all very data driven and very scientific approach. And you’re doing the same thing for triathlons, which I think is a really good way to go. And the reason, the reason why I wanted to interview you on the podcast was because we’ve got a very similar philosophy and that’s about training smarter rather than training harder. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with training hard and you obviously need to do that but there’s a lot of athletes out there who can, you know, just push themselves hard in training but they, you know, they can forget about the approach of just being smarter with your training. So just being, you know, changing your session so that they’re specific to training the right, you know, training zones.

So what are some of the common training myths that you hear out there? Yeah, there’s a lot of them. One of the things that you just mentioned a second ago with the video feedback and with technique work, you see this all the time. It’s been around for quite a while. You’re able to look exactly at what, you know, what an athlete should do in the water or on the run form and you can compare it to here’s a definite right and here’s a definite wrong, here’s something to fix. But, you know, with training for fitness, you don’t have that visibility. So some of those myths out there that with that increased visibility that we’ve been able to see are things like the intensity like you mentioned before, the no pain, no gain, you know, if I work harder, I’m going to improve just by working harder and giving more effort or more intensity that that’s going to increase the results and it’s actually has a, there’s a point at which, you know, you have to work harder.

You can’t, you know, it’s not an easy thing. Training isn’t easy for sure. But there’s an inverse relationship between increased stress and the higher intensity you go or the longer duration. And so as each incremental or the marginal benefit, marginal propensity to perform better or to improve, that starts to diminish the higher you go, but the risk of injury goes up. So that first thing is just there’s certain thresholds that exist for each person. It’s different for a person. You mentioned, you know, training zones. And that’s one of the metrics that are out there is you have these zones based on max heart rate or functional threshold heart rate or a number of different ways of calculating this threshold intensity. So people have a good concept of, I know I need to vary it up to some degree. But where they don’t know is where is that threshold? How much of that intensity should I do? How much of each intensity is beneficial?

Not just in one session, but, you know, over the course of a week. And so you find people just working as hard as they can. They think the more pain and the more I can put myself through, like it’s the more I can punish my body and the more my body is able to suffer or endure. That means the better I’m going to do on race day. And that’s just completely not true. So when they try to work smarter, oftentimes they don’t know what smarter looks like. It’s guessing. They know that they’re looking for something, but they don’t have any metrics there to work. And that’s really the one of the second myths is a lot of the metrics they find in absence of meaningful metrics. Athletes, we all do. We all start to assign meaning to metrics that exist. So if you can’t explain why something happens, you look at the things you can observe and you try to attach meaning to those. And so you find a lot of athletes that are driven to look at weekly mileage thinking,

I need to get my weekly mileage to X or my or kilometer. What do you say? Kilometer edge? Okay, sure. Okay, so, you know, your training hours is another thing. I say I need to get X number of hours per weekend. I need to get more time in the pool. So they’ll go jump in for another 45 minutes to get to this arbitrary number of hours or distance. And when those things don’t matter at all, those things are derivative. Those things are just incidental. They happen if you’re doing smart purposeful training and they are what they are. Another thing is sessions per week. I’ll need to get five runs in. And something of this magic about five runs, not the purpose behind each of those five runs. Each one of those is purposeful. If you’re benefiting from each one of those, then those are good things to do. And if that total is 20 hours a week, so be it. If it’s 10 hours a week, so be it. Whatever that is, and those thresholds are what the meaningful metrics are,

what the sessions are comprised of, and then the total distance, the time at duration, all of those things. Another one that’s very common is just the fact that more is better. So it’s not so much the intensity, but it’s just volume period. You know, base training when you talk about a periodized approach. So athletes will say, okay, I need to be purposeful. So I need to have these periods during my season. And base has come to me for many, many athletes, just high volume. It’s just a ton of volume during that period, which is one of the worst things that you can do for a lot of athletes that need to develop. They spend most, especially long runs, long swims too. For athletes that are slower runners, often they’ll, in a base period, they’ll run a marathon. They’ll try to do these long runs to improve their runability. But what they end up doing is training themselves to run very slow. They’re generally heavier, they’re not, it’s not the pro doing this.

It’s a heavier athlete, the ones that have poor run form. So a good age group can maintain good run form for 40 to 60 minutes. And then the form starts breaking down over time. So someone who’s doing these consistent long runs is teaching their body to run slow. They’re teaching themselves most of the time that they’re running to run with bad form. They’re introducing way more stress on their body than they would if they had shorter runs and would teach them to run faster. And we found in looking at all of these different areas that, about these myths that athletes are wasting, on average about 40% of their total training time is non-productive. Either the harm from it, the stress from it, they’re not recovering, or it’s just not even stimulating the response that they’re trying to achieve. So essentially 40% of what they’re doing on the Tridot system, our athletes are actually able to produce better performance gains on 20 to 30% fewer training hours.

So those myths really add up when you start embedding those principles or philosophies that are just educated guesses into how you build your training plan. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that, you know, working harder or doing more hours training, one of the things that that reminds me of was that I think it was about 30 years ago with swimmers at least, was that they were told to not, you know, just something funny that, you know, one of the things about training that’s kind of changed over the years is about 30 years ago, as soon as we’re told not to drink during training because it would help them improve, it would help them get tougher. So essentially that’d be dehydrating themselves over an hour, two hours, and not being able to drink so their performance would just drop. But, you know, it’s one of those things that I think was done a number of years ago, but, you know, coaches and athletes are now switching on to these smarter training programs

and being specific with what they’re doing and leading into that. So what do you think some of the key components are to the intentional type of training that you’re talking about? Yeah, I think, you know, everybody out there is intentional. I mean, they’re not doing things by accident. You know, it’s not, oh, I just ran a 10k. It’s deliberate in what they’re doing. So it’s just the degree to which they are intentional. And you can have intentional activities. I guess you’re always engaged in intentional activities, but I’m talking more about the outcome, knowing that that activity is going to lead to that outcome. The cause and effect is what I’m talking about, the intentionality, rather than a trial and error. Like here’s a philosophy or here’s, you know, I’m sampling somebody else’s workout. I’m going to see how this does or, hey, here’s what works for this athlete. Let’s try this. So that’s what I’m talking about. Not the trial and error approach,

but I know what outcome is going to come from this type of training. So some of the things that are necessary for that to happen. One is to define things, to have that definition and the standardization and be able to know specifically what are you tracking and what are you managing. That’s the incorporation of athlete data. That’s the measurement of workload, the measurement of intervals within a set. How long should they be? How long should the rest be? How long, how intense should the rest is a complete rest or not complete rest? And being able to measure that at the sub-session level, plus the weekly and monthly or mesocycle level. So what is being measured and how is that defined? Next is, beyond definition, is the measurement of that and how is it managed? So what are those thresholds over a time that you don’t pass? Or how much difference does it make? If you have a 50-year-old athlete versus a 30-year-old athlete, what changes?

What do you manage differently and by how much? What are those trades off? And is it the same for every discipline or is it different for the different disciplines? Some of the things cycling, for example, doesn’t have the same changes over time as you age. Athletes lose muscle or some muscle mass, but if they keep working out as they get older, they can retain that muscle mass, but they can lose bone density more quickly. So it impacts older athletes more on the run than on the bike or the swim. So how do you manage those and what are those thresholds and where do they come from? And to get to some of those things, one of the things that you have to have is a repeatability. You have to have a methodical approach that you go through certain steps. Kind of back to that quote, if it’s not measurable, it’s not improvable. If you’re not measuring these things and doing something in a progressive or a certain fashion every single time,

you’re not able to tell what changed. There’s just too many dynamic variables and you can’t attribute an outcome to a cause. And then the last thing that you need is data. And this is from a homogeneous population. So you have to have a basis or a control set. You have to say when these training variables were applied to 50 different athletes that meet the same criteria, what happened? And that’s where I never found that when I was first starting out. No one could ever produce enough of the same athletes that they treated and trained in the same way. Everything changed. The athletes changed. The methodology changed. The metrics they were trying to use changed or didn’t exist. And so there was never a way that they could actually attribute a specific training technique to a specific athlete or circumstance or an activity. Yeah. And I was listening to the radio yesterday and they’re interviewing an AFL football, which is Australian football over here.

And he was talking about football players being in the system. And it sounds very similar to what you’re sort of talking about is having a system there like the tri-dot system, for example, where you can plug in your numbers and it will produce going through the system that will produce a training program that will spit out this result. And it’s similar to that AFL training system that all of the AFL players go through. So that’s, you know, and, you know, as much as people, you know, personally myself as well, I sometimes like to, you know, you like to wing some training sessions and things like that. And you want to have that. Sometimes you want to have that excitement of not knowing exactly what you’ll you’ll go and having that, you know, not being 100% sure whether you go this time or you might just knock it out of the park and go faster. But, you know, going through a specific training sort of system and plan, it can really produce better results than if you are winging it like I’m talking about.

So what are some of the advantages of having a personalized training program for you? Yeah, well, basically, it’s better performance results for your injuries and more enjoyment of the sport. I mean, it’s just, it helps. It makes all the difference in the world. I like to, you know, think of a, it’s kind of a, it’s not even in the same sports. I mean, but it’s a metaphor or a comparison. If you’re cooking something, you’re cooking a casserole, you know, sticking it in the oven and ask you, you know, how long, give me instructions for cooking a casserole. Say, how long do you put it in there? How hot do you turn the oven? Do you stir it or do you let it cool after you serve it? Do you let it sit there? Do you just take it out? You know, and if I asked you what are those instructions for a casserole, you’d have no idea. You know, it goes some hot, you know, it goes cooks for a while, but it just, it depends.

It depends on what’s in the casserole. What is it made of? How much of it is there? And, you know, what are those different in ingredients, elements that are in there? The type of dish, how big the oven is. All of those things matter because there are laws of physics that apply across the board. It’s not subjective. They always apply. And our bodies are, in training for a triathlon, is much, much more complex than cooking a casserole, but the same truth as whole. There’s physiological laws and physics and things that happen chemically to our body that make us respond or not in different fashions. So, when you’re looking at a personalized plan, you have to realize that specific training produces specific results. And it does it over and over and over. Specific training produces specific results. Random training produces random results, which can include no results at all or injury. So, the more specific you can be, the more knowns that you can have going into a training program,

when you’re designing it, the better. A lot of athletes will use just an arbitrary progressive overload approach. So, they’ll just run, you know, four miles this week in four and a half necks and then five and then six, and they just add up to a particular race distance. Or they try from a progressive overload intensity wise. They just try harder, try to run faster, bump up to paces every so often, and just try to run faster. That would be, or more, you know, going back to the myths, or more. They just try to run longer for a longer duration. So, that would be equivalent to going back to the casserole analogy, is saying, hey, I want to improve faster, so I’m just going to turn up to oven hotter. It’ll cook faster if I just turn it up to 900 degrees, you know? Or on the flip side, hey, let’s cook it at 200, and I’ll just leave it in there all day long. You know, everything that you do when you’re sticking something in an oven is going to get it hotter.

You’re going to have some gain, some improvement performance. But at the end of the day, just like with cooking something, it may not cook at all. It may be partially raw, or it may be burnt, you know, charred. You don’t know what you’re going to get unless you consider what’s in the oven. So, you have to consider those things, the training variables, you know, the main ones, intensity, duration, frequency, sequence, and technique. So, those things need to be managed and manipulated for every single training session and across a week, or mesocycle. When you’re doing each one of those, you need to also consider every athlete’s performance level, gender, age, their weight, body composition, sport age, training background, developmental stage, hours available to train, and the list goes on. But those are the main ones. And when you apply it, if you think of, here’s an example that’s not cooking, but it’s some athletes.

So, if you had, say, you’re designing a training program for someone to run a half marathon, and they run a 22-minute 5K, you know, you’re going to make it that level. You start designing this program. You might assign that to be intermediate. You know, I don’t know what you’d call it. But how differently that training program can be depends on that individual. If that individual that you’re designing that for is a 22-year-old former cross-country runner that weighs 150 pounds, that athlete, that’s not a very good time. They have a whole lot of potential for improvement. Their training should look, you know, a certain way when you start building that out. If you take that same result, that 22-minute 5K, and how are you going to train a 54-year-old man that weighs 240 pounds, that’s an exceptional 5K. There’s probably not a lot of room for improvement there. And at that age and that weight, a whole lot of extra training is going to introduce a lot more trauma

than the benefit that that athlete would ever receive. So just one little variable difference, you know, basically at well three, age, body composition, and weight of the athlete, makes an enormous difference when you come to a totally different training focus. First of all, bike versus run. Your approach to those training sessions is going to be vastly different. So basically you have to do the right work. The right work works. Just doing a work or just this random approach. You’re not going to get anywhere near the results that you would. You’re going to train a lot longer. You’re going to have a lot more injuries. And you’re just going to get frustrated and not enjoy the sport as much. I love the analogy of the casserole in the oven. And they’re the ingredients that you’re talking about, you know, using that analogy is the age, body composition, weight and gender and all those sorts of things. So it’s a really good way to think about it.

And you also mentioned, so you talk a lot about the two primary fitness types and you keep it simple as in there’s power and there’s stamina. So to link it back to what we normally mention is, power is like your sort of lactic tolerance and your power type of swing and then stamina, which is your, you know, your endurance and your longer swims and things like that. Can you go into a bit more depth about your power and stamina and how you incorporate those into your training? Definitely. There’s a lot of different abilities out there that people talk about, your endurance, your muscular endurance, your power, your explosive power, static power, speed. You know, all these different words and when athletes start getting technical and start trying to train smart, they start chasing a lot of different abilities. And what I’ve found in kind of going back to the, you know, philosophy and talking about, you know, my approach,

I don’t really consider that I have an approach or philosophy. It’s just what tends to emerge from what I see in the data. What kind of results are we getting? And what I’ve found through literally thousands of training cycles is there’s really two things that athletes need to work on. They need to work on their threshold power or we’ll say two things fitness wise after you use mechanics and technique. So you need to have the proper swim form, run mechanics. But after you learn that it’s threshold power, threshold power and stamina. Stamina, let’s define both those. Threshold power is an all out effort for approximately one hour. Most people are comfortable or familiar with that, you know, that definition. So stamina is just an intensity and a duration for longer than an hour. So that’s what an athlete is going to train for that is race specific. So an athlete trained for an Olympic race in most of them is going to train

out or near threshold is race pace and especially for sprint is over that threshold. But any of the longer distances there, the athlete’s ability is going to be limited by the threshold power. So if you think of a tent, you know, being your overall fitness, the longest tempo is the threshold power. Stamina can never be your stamina ability or that intensity can never be more than your threshold. And so the objective is to reach as much of your threshold for the longest amount of time possible. And we know what some of those numbers are so that we can look at, for example, a bike intensity on a full iron race for most athletes is going to range from 67% of threshold to 85% of threshold. And that difference is how long it takes that athlete to finish the bike. So the longer their bike, you know, the lower threshold or the lower percent of the threshold they’re going to be able to maintain because it’s a longer duration.

So focusing an athlete on increasing that threshold, that’s the ceiling from which they begin to start to develop their stamina. Another thing to think about with both of these is that you cannot significantly develop both of them at the same time. So when you’re trying to develop, you know, it’s either a one or the other. If you’re developing stamina, it takes a whole lot of time to build it, obviously, because it’s a longer duration. The single sessions that you do during the week need to be much, much longer. So it takes most of your energy, most of your capacity to improve. And your recovery is recovering from these long sessions. When you’re already carrying a very, very high training load, you don’t have as much energy and recovering capacity to develop your threshold very much. You know, pros obviously have more ability to do that, but they’re performing the races much quicker. So their races are eight and a half hour race days, you know,

or four hour race days for halves. They’re not the same as most age groupers. So when age groupers are approaching these abilities, they should really focus on one or the other. And do one is very well as best they can. So with the stamina, that’s something that you want to train and develop that ability when you need it. And basically, you need it leading up to your race. You don’t need that ability to ride at it, you know, X percent of your threshold for five, six hours. You don’t need that in December unless you’re racing in January or February. So it’s being smart about when you’re, what you’re developing during what phase of the season. And building power is always the first thing you do. So I have an example of an athlete that let me give you one, you know, here’s a thing to remember by so fast before far or strong before long. Either one of those, you build that power first and then you work to extend that at your race distance intensity level

where there’s the swim, the bike or the run. I had an athlete that actually got into Kona via the lottery. He wasn’t working with me at the time. He knew me. We chatted. He wasn’t really even training that much. But on April 10th, this is about three years ago, April 10th, I get this email, it says, Jeff, I’m going to have to start training here. So we had exactly six months to get ready for Kona. A very difficult course. Had not been training at all. Never done an hour in a name before. And so we had six months. And so, you know, the initial, an athlete would think, you know, I need to start learning how to go for 15, 16, 17 hours. And so what we talked about is I told him, let’s train for a shorter race. You’re a good athlete. Let’s train for a 13 hour race. And I asked him what his times were. What’s your, your worst time? Your, the time that you take. Say, hey, I’ll be satisfied with it. And he said 17 hours.

I just want to finish. So what’s your kind of serve it? And what do you think you’ll get time? He said 15 hours. And I said, what’s your jumping up and down, doing back flips time? And he said 13 hours. So I said, let’s train for a 13 hour Ironman. So we started just working for the first several months in the, in the water. It was nothing but drills. This guy went from a 15, 15, 15, 800 meter swim to a 1155 in about two months. So it shortened by almost 20, 30 minutes, his, his swim time. He had learned to ride the bike actually in his 30s. He was an adult that learned to ride, ride the bike. So we developed that skill. Same thing. We increased his threshold. So that about four to five months out, his thresholds and his power of speed was, was so good. He was able to race a lot better. So on race day, he actually finished in 1322, but he had a flat on the bike and had to carry his bike for 45 minutes. So he beat his, his jump up and down goal by almost 20 minutes with

the approach of building power first and then extending that to the duration that you need to finish whatever race you’re racing for. Awesome. And we, that’s what I find for swimmers who might be starting out and they’re not too confident in the swim, we get a very similar result with our master in freestyle program. Just going through drills and improving the stroke and then, you know, in building the power and then you can build on the fitness after that. So that’s, you know, that, that’s awesome. Now let’s, let’s talk about race execution. So I’ve talked a lot about training and how, you know, how important that is leading to races, but what, you know, what specifically, you know, sort of the, to teach athletes in terms of race execution and how’s it all tying together? Yeah. Well, one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of athletes makes is not having a plan basically. They’re just kind of guessing and winging it,

trying to figure out what they should do. Failure to meet race day execution or race day, expectations rather is never a training issue. So athletes very rarely tie training data to their race expectations, but they’re very, very quick to have a failed expectation and then immediately go back, I need to do this differently in training. I need more long runs. I need more speed work. I need this, that, the other. So they drive that drive the connection from race result backwards when they didn’t start with build their race execution plan based on their training results. So race day, I mean, there are times when you just have a great day or horrible day. That happens. But by and large, racing should not reveal your fitness. You should already know what your fitness level is from your training data. You should be able to predict race results and pacing and come up with a very specific race strategy. We call that race execution or race X.

So going into a race, you know exactly what your pace is going to do. A lot of athletes will try to hone that over many, many races over time. You know, here’s what I tried to do in this race and then three months later a different race and then, you know, later that year or the next year. But the thing that happens, maybe that strategy is the same, but their training, the way they quantify their training and use their training data isn’t consistent or they’re different. They’re, you know, at a minimum, they’re a year older and probably a little heavier, you know, every year. So things change. So being able to tie that training data specifically to your race execution. I mentioned before there’s, we do that with Trida as being able to come up with those based on your functional threshold tests. Your long single sessions, we do race rehearsals, which a lot of people do, but making those very specific on a specific percent of your threshold over that duration.

And then all of the workloads on your longer rides that you’ve done previously set you up for that. So you’re doing long rides, for example, that are not just steady state rides, but they have very specific intervals in them that are at higher levels. Maybe is, you know, 20 minutes at threshold, followed immediately by 15 to 30 minutes, you know, at race pace or near zone three. So it’s improving your ability to recover while you’re still working hard and then you’re able to take those performances and tie them directly to a race rehearsal and then those race rehearsals through your race day. So some of the other, you know, that’s bike, that’s very bike-intensive. I know it’s even harder on the swim. You don’t have anything to measure by. But another big thing is the off-the-bike runability. A lot of athletes struggle with that. And even, you know, anybody that’s listening, go out and search for it. Look for any comparison of off-the-bike runabilities to your standalone runabilities.

So if I run a, you know, a three-hour marathon or a five-hour marathon, what should my off-the-bike ability be? And that data out there doesn’t exist anywhere. You find a couple of people mention it. One person says it’s about 20% or 20 minutes slower off the bike than standalone. But that is for elite runners that doesn’t apply to people that are much slower. And then think of all the things that impact that when you’re trying to develop that. Your actual, your runability matters for sure if it’s a three-hour, five-hour marathon. But so does how long you’ve been on the bike. If you’re coming, if you’re starting the run, you know, at the 12-hour mark with the same runability as someone who’s starting it at the nine-hour mark. And that’s just a huge difference. Your weight makes a difference. Over time, the amount, you know, running a, you know, a 200-pound person, running a 330-marathon standalone is not going to run just 20 minutes slower

on a full at the end of a, you know, 12 to 15-hour day. So all those things matter greatly. And without data and without a whole bunch of people to compare to, you just can’t arrive at those. So the data is important, but then so is going into each race, connecting training data and having realistic training-based expectations that are set prior to racing and then revisiting those immediately after the race before you attribute just random execution plans to your training and trying to modify your training. Yeah, that’s right. And that’s something that I’ve found is that, you know, as an adult athlete, your racing results shouldn’t come as a surprise. It should be an expected outcome from the training that you’ve been doing. So if you look at the top swimmers, like, let’s say the pool swimmers, let’s say you’ve got someone training for 100 freestyle, they might just be training for that sort of second 50.

So let’s say they want to go, you know, it might be, like I say, 56, for example. So they might need to come home in a 28-5 for that second lap. Well, when you’re doing back-end speed sets in training, the aim is to be able to hit 28-5 in training, much of, you know, putting all that work. So when it comes to race day, the only reason that you, you know, don’t hit that expected time is if you’re having a bad day like a tapered ride or something like that. But, you know, your race results should be an expected outcome as a result of your training. And that’s what you’re talking about, which I think is, you know, it’s the right approach because if you’re, you know, just, you know, winging it like we were talking about and just, you know, you’re not sure what time you’re going to do. It’s because you haven’t been testing or tracking the right things in training. I’ve asked for, you know, something that you can provide

for our triathletes that listen to the podcast. So you’ve kindly given away free training for the triathletes who are interested in this stuff. So let’s say someone’s training for an Ironman or a Half-Ironman or an Olympic distance race, you know, and they’ve got a couple months to build up to it. If they’re interested in this sort of stuff, then you’re offering some free training. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Absolutely. Well, it’s not exactly free training. We’re looking for very specific people, but we’re asking for your feedback. Call it a triathlete free for feedback program. So in our normal training, we get all the training data. We get all that stuff we need, but we’re looking for some more subjective mental understanding, a bunch of additional information feedback. So what we’re offering is for athletes who want to participate in that program just to let us know. And we’re looking for athletes who have at least one season’s

triathlon experience, who have done at least one triathlon, obviously. They plan to compete in one this following year in the next 10 months or so, at least an Olympic or longer Olympic Half-Iron Full Iron. And that they’re getting ready to start training in the next couple of weeks, two, three weeks. If they’re able to meet those criteria and give us their feedback, we’d love to give them some free training. So we have a website page set up just for you guys to where you can go there. Just give us your name, email. I’m not sure what’s on the page. I’ll have to go look. But just give us your email. We’ll give you all of the information on how the feedback works, what it is, and details of the program and those qualifications. I think they’re pretty basic, but we want legit people that are serious about performance or serious about training smart, using their time effectively, avoiding injury. And if they can give us that additional feedback,

it helps us to improve what we’re offering server, our athletes better. We’ve done this a couple of times before and just got some incredible feedback. The response was just outstanding from the athletes, and we learned so much too. So we’re just happy to extend that to your athletes, Brent. Awesome. Thank you for that. So if you’re a triathlete training for anything Olympic distance are over and you’re looking to start shortly. For example, we’ve got the Melbourne Ironman happening in a couple of weeks’ time. And there’s going to be quite a number of athletes who are going to register the next day for the next year’s Melbourne Ironman. So if that’s someone, if that’s you, and you’re looking to get some very specific and personalised training, then this is something that’s definitely worth checking out and considering. So thanks, Geoff, I appreciate it. And you mentioned it was limited to the first 200 athletes

because I know it’s very time and energy intensive for you because you are working with coaches. It’s not just something that they can access online. You’ve actually got coaches working with the athletes that are interested in this. Right. We have a team of coaches. So we design all the programs, work with the coaches. The coaches work with the athletes based on different, whatever your preference is for how much interaction you want with your coach. But we are limiting it to 200 athletes. So the first ones that they come and qualify might take a few days to verify everything and to finalise the group after you get the information. Do you want me to go ahead and give that web URL? Yeah, yep, go for it. Yeah, so that’s just try.com forward slash effortless swimming. And so you’ll see the information right there as soon as we get your information. We’ll shoot you an email with all of the details. Make sure everything’s crystal clear.

You understand how the program works and get you that free training and we look forward to getting your feedback. Good stuff. And for those that are listening on their iPods or their iPhones and they’re not on the computer, I’ll provide a link on our effortless swimming.com site. Or you can go to swimmingpodcast.com and you’ll be able to see the link to this interview there and you can access the offer there. So Jeff, thank you very much. Where can people find you if they want to find out more about what we’ve talked about and where they can find try.com? Yeah, just try.com is the best place. So we talked about the science. We have a lot of athlete testimonials, kind of description of one how it came to be, what it looks like, what the science is behind it, the methodology, a lot of it’s right there. Good stuff. So try.com. Jeff, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. I know that for the triathletes

that are training for those Olympic distance or longer events and even swimmers who are thinking about what the training plan should look like, I think this information covers more than just triathlon. So this is great information. So thanks again, Jeff. This is excellent information. Definitely. Thank you for having me, Brent. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for joining us on the Effortless Swimming Podcast. To get transcriptions, bonus videos, and to be the first to hear about new episodes, go to swimmingpodcast.com.