And I noticed that when, when someone’s working on changes to their technique and stroke, they’re often up in their head a lot and it can be hard to coordinate all of these little different. 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.

Hi Brenton Ford here. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. This is episode number 104 where we’re talking about going from manual mode to automatic. And the analogy I like to use when it comes to training versus racing is going from a manual car to an automatic car. And in a manual car, you’ve got to worry about when you’re putting the clutch down, changing gears, especially for a learner driver, someone who’s brand new, they’re going to be really up in their head trying to get the timing right of all these things. And it can make it very clunky. And I noticed that when someone’s working on changes to their technique and stroke, they’re often up in their head a lot and it can be hard to coordinate all of these little different elements and put these things together. But if you can practice that enough in training and you can have that high focused swimming where you’re intentional, you really focus about what

you’re doing, if you can do that in training to the point where it starts to become more automatic in your training, then you get to the point where you’re racing and you can completely, well almost completely switch off from thinking about your stroke and you can just go into the race and just worry about how you’re pacing it, how you’re siding, whether in the right spot. You can just go into race mode and any technical focus has been done and it’s been made automatic and it’s become a habit because you practice that in training. So I like to use that analogy of when you’re training, use that as your manual mode. As you’re thinking about your stroke, nearly 100% of the time, you won’t have as much flow as you would when you’re racing. It’s going to be a little bit different, but with that sort of approach, that’s when you can start to get into flow. You can become a lot more automatic when it comes to

racing because as soon as you overthink things when you’re racing, as soon as you get up in your head, you might delay something by half a second. You might take the focus away from how you’re pacing things and that’s when you can start to get up in your head and you see that happen, especially at the high level. As soon as those athletes step out of flow, they step out of automatic mode. That’s when they start to make mistakes. So that’s why I like to practice manual mode in training, automatic mode in racing. Where we’re really going to be getting into manual mode into the nitty-gritty of your technique is at our Hawaii camp at the end of March. So myself and former Olympic swimmer and coach Gary Haring, we’re going to be running a five-day camp in Waikiki with a group of 12 swimmers and triathletes and open water swimmers. And that’s where we’re going to be doing daily underwater filming and analysis where you’ll have the chance to see

what the things are that we can work on in your stroke. You’ll have the chance to practice those and then you’ll have the chance to kind of put it together in a session in the afternoon. So the morning is going to be all about technical focus, all about your stroke developing as a swimmer. The afternoon is going to be all about putting those things into play, starting to make them to become automatic. So if you’d like to find out more about the camp, go to effortlesswimming.com and click on the clinics and camps link and you’ll find the details there for our Hawaii camp, which is March 20 to 26. I’ll see you on the next episode.