Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to episode number 271 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. This episode is titled Single Point of Failure because there’s often things in systems that if it breaks, it stops the entire thing from working. And what made me think of this was my wife’s got this blender. It’s one of those things that you’ve got like a smoothie cup and you can put the blender on the outside and then just blend it all in one in the cup and then you can drink from that same cup. Now during the week the component of the blender that’s got this rubber seal around the outside but it has the blade in the middle. That rubber seal came out and it got caught in the blade and it split in half. Now the entire thing doesn’t work. You can’t blend anything unless you want all of your ingredients to be leaking through where that seal was.

So this blender has got this single point of failure that if this rubber seal comes out, you lose it or it gets broken. You can no longer use any of the components because it’s just going to leak. And it got me thinking about that with swimming. And I was running clinics on the weekend in Brisbane and we had a number of swimmers who were doing one particular thing with fair stroke that was stopping them from getting faster. It was that single point of failure in the stroke where nothing else can come together. Even if you’re going to have a great catch, you’ve got perfect breathing. There might be something else there that’s stopping them from getting the stroke to come together. And the way that you can think of this if we’re thinking of what are these actual things and what can we do to make sure that we don’t have them in the stroke. I like to go through it in terms of the order of how we want to improve your stroke.

So we would start with the body and that single point of failure that I see with how you hold your body, it’s typically being too bent through the hips and through the waist, not being straight through there. And we do sometimes see people are sort of sticking their bum out, they’re bent through the waist and their legs are kicking like they’re cycling, like they’re riding a bike or like they’re running. And when you’ve got this bend through the middle half of the body, there is no way you’re going to be swimming any faster even if you improve your catch, even if you stretch out more because the amount of drag that gets created when you’ve got this single point of failure through the hips and through the legs, then it’s that thing that just stops you from really getting the stroke to work at all. So that’s the first thing that I was saying was just too much bend through the hips and waist. If you can hold this tautness through your body, so you’re long through your spine, long through your neck, you keep things straight,

then you have this nice streamlined position all the way through the water and you’re much, much more efficient. And it’s so much easier to sit near the surface of the water too with your head hips and heels at the surface. So that was one of the first things that we had to get them to do was figure out how to hold their body correctly, where they switch their core on, squeeze their butt cheeks together and making sure they’re not kicking like they’re riding a bike. Now secondly, we had to make sure that the head position was in the right position. So they weren’t either looking too far down or putting their chin too far forwards, because if your chin’s too far forwards for most people, it just makes the breathing awkward. It makes the hips and legs drop and that can be the single point of failure for a lot of people where they’re just never going to get their back end up or they’re never going to breathe properly

because they’re looking in the wrong spot. So when they do look down towards 45 degrees or a little bit less, then it can even you out. Now the other single point of failure was with the kick. There’s a couple of things that I see here. One really common one that I don’t see discussed that often is sometimes people will be kicking and their feet will be turning outwards. So you should be pointing your toes, turning your feet slightly inwards while you keep your ankles relaxed as you kick. Now sometimes people I think for balance and stability, rather than turning their feet in, sometimes their feet will turn outwards and we see the toes pointing off to the side and every sort of second stroke they’ll have their foot turning outwards. And it creates a lot of drag, puts the foot right outside the body line and it’s just acting as a breakout behind you. And that small amount of surface area, what looks small, it really adds a lot of drag

and it just limits your speed. So when people can kick in the bucket, like a ballerina pointing their toes, then that can really get rid of that single point of failure with the kick. So that was another really, really common one. And another one is usually just the breathing, how you go about breathing. Now sometimes, and there was a swimmer there on the weekend who was having trouble breathing, like his heart rate was too high. He couldn’t get the breath in the right position because he had to turn his head up to the sky because he was sitting so low. But he was sitting so low because of those first few things. He was kicking like he was riding a bike, he was bent through the hips and waist. So once we got those other things sorted, then he was able to start breathing a bit lower and looking to the side, not looking up to the sky. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form Goggles.

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and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort, and my pace. And I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work with. To get your pair of Form Goggles and save 15% off, use our link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout. And that will get you 15% off your pair of Form Goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout. So sometimes you’ve got to get these other things in place first, but we need to make sure that you are breathing to the right position because your head determines what happens with the rest of your body in a lot of cases. So if you’re looking too high or you’re throwing your head around, that can cause everything else to move around. So if we can just look to the side, then bring the eye straight back down, minimize the impact or negative impact that the breathing has on the rest of the stroke,

then that can get rid of that single point of failure with your stroke. So they’re the main ones that sort of impact the foundational parts of your stroke. If we’re thinking of improving your swimming, think about it like building a house. You want a strong foundation. You need that strong base. You need the concrete there. We don’t want to build on the sand. You need to have a good concrete base to build on. Then you can build the rest of the stroke. And if those things aren’t in place, it’s very hard to improve your catch and pull and those other types of things. Now another single point of failure is tension. There was another swimmer there on the Saturday who was very tense through the hands in the recovery and the catch and pull and was kind of cupping the hands as well. And this was just something that they weren’t necessarily aware of until it got pointed out. But then when they made the change to keeping the hands soft and relaxed,

especially over the top of the water, they just said, this is so much easier and their stroke began to flow. They got a really nice rhythm happening. So if we’re carrying excess tension and we’re not relaxed in the water, then that can stop you from getting any quicker. It stops the whole thing from really working and being able to keep the heart rate down. So we need to be able to keep things relaxed to keep that heart rate down. And especially excess tension in the hands and forearms is where a lot of people do tend to carry it as well as I guess having that tension in the kick, trying to keep their hips up and their legs up and kicking really hard and frantically rather than having that nice, fluent, relaxed ballerina in a bucket type of kick. So if we can just relax things, have just enough tension to hold the form and shape, then it’s much easier to progress from there. And something that I want to bring up here

is a single point of failure that can happen in open mortisiming. And it’s if you’re not sighting the right way. The way that I’d recommend most from this site is sight and breathe. Where you look forwards, then on the next stroke you turn your head to breathe. You can keep a really good rhythm in your stroke. You can keep a great body position with your stroke when you sight and breathe, sight and breathe, as opposed to having the head up for three or four strokes and then putting the head back down. And sometimes you do need to do that just to get a look at where you’re going. But generally the sight and breathe method is what most people should be using when they are swimming in the open water. Because I’ve seen people who are just working so hard and their heart rate is up very high because their legs are sitting quite low because they’re trying to keep their head up really high for a couple of strokes and then go back down

for a few strokes and then go back up and the head is way above the water rather than having the sighting as part of your normal stroke rhythm. So if you’re not sighting and breathing make sure you change it and make sure you get that sorted. It takes about 15 minutes to sort of get that dialed in and have a look at one of our videos on YouTube just look up sight and breathe, effortless swimming and you’ll see that video there where I go into detail on how to do that because it’s just something that can stop you from swimming comfortably and sighting easily in the open water and it’s a very common one for newer swimmers and newer triathletes that I do see quite a bit. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and got your thinking about what would be the single point of failure in your stroke. Is there something that’s stopping you from getting any faster that you can feel is happening that you have an idea might be happening?

So let me know what is that thing that might be the single point of failure for you in your stroke. If you’re wanting to go into a bit more detail on these things I’d recommend the five core principles training inside of our membership at effortlesswimming.com that goes through the right order to progress things in and it’s got a bit of a checklist that you can go through so am I holding my body the right way this is how you do it am I rotating the right amount this is how we go about developing it and it’s got the different drills there that you can do as well within your training and you don’t need to do a lot you can just do one or two things at a time but progress in the right order build that house with a strong foundation then everything else becomes a whole lot easier. Thanks very much for listening to this episode if you are listening on Spotify listening on iTunes I’d love it if you could leave a review and that helps us get to the top of the charts

we’ve been sitting pretty consistently at number one or sometimes two and three in a lot of the major countries in the world that do listen to your swimming podcast so we’re right up there in the swimming category and I appreciate you for listening to these episodes if you’ve got any ideas of things you’d like me to cover on these episodes send us an email at support at effortlesswimming.com and I’ll make sure to read those if you do have any topics that you would think would be great to cover thanks for listening I’ll catch you next week

thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com