You can get inspired by a book like Born to Run and then just go out and start barefoot running marathons. If you’re a marathon runner, it doesn’t work like that. It takes years and years and years and different motor patterns to condition your tendons over a long period of time to adapt to a new movement pattern, particularly things that you do repetitively for long periods of time, like running or swimming or anything like that. So changes aren’t fast. They’re slow and conditioning is something that you do over a long period of time. 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 back to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest for part two of this podcast is Sam Fenton. Sam, welcome back. Thank you. So in the first episode we talked about the high performance model and a way to basically

keep people who start sport at a young age, how to keep them in that sport for longer and how to have them, it’s almost like having a better attitude towards fitness and health later on in life and having them to continue that healthy, active lifestyle instead of the churn and burn kind of model. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So big change now from what we call a physical literacy model. So huge in Canada, they’ve institutionalized physical literacy right throughout the entire country and big in a lot of other countries, but Australia, we’re just getting on board now with it. So sport Australia is getting right behind it. Now that sport is under DHHS as well, so now sport and health are linked together by funding and politics, I guess. So it’s a really big thing in Australia now that’ll be rolling out over the next few years and getting into the school curriculum. And that’s where I’m doing my PhD studies in that space of getting schools to do

that stuff. So if you haven’t heard that episode, that was part one of the podcast series with Sam. And today we’re talking about something that I think 99% of our listeners will be interested in. And that’s talking about feet and ankles and how you can go from having an anchor at the end of your legs to a propeller. And I know from experience working with a lot of adult swimmers and triathletes that ankle mobility or flexibility is a real issue for them. And more times than not, their feet are slowing them down rather than assisting them. So we’re going to look at today a couple of things that will help you improve your range of motion with your feet, even if you think that it’s just done for if you can’t get that any better than where you currently are. We’re also going to look at how will some exercises as well that’s going to help you basically just become a better kicker. And I’m really interested in some of the things you’ve got to say,

because you’ve studied this in depth. And I’d say I know a little bit about it, but no, I knew as much as you. So let’s let’s get into it. OK, all right. So you’ll just have to allow the screen sharing thing so I can pop that up here. But just the way people listening, they won’t have any visual as well, I guess. But I guess this was a research project I did for my master’s as part of a master in high performance sport. And and I wanted to I was fascinated by research that had been done by a huge team by Dr. Rajat Mittle and a guy called Frank Fish, which is a pretty apt name. And a huge team of researchers and a big bucket of money by the US Navy to put together supercomputers and a huge system to

to analyze every particle of water. And every particle of a dolphin to to figure out what was the most efficient way to move through the water, obviously with the end goal for the US Navy was a submarine that can’t be can’t be detected. But then after that research that they they broke down every molecule of water, every molecule of the dolphin, how it moves through the water and all of that sort of stuff and how efficiently it moves through the water. They they had all of this gear that had this research team and they had nothing else to do after this project finished. So so Dr. Rajat Mittle rang up the US swim team. And this was when Michael Phelps was at his peak and they tested the top 50 swimmers and did exactly the same research on them. The outcome of that was that Michael Phelps was the closest person from that from those 50 swimmers to to swim in to emulate the movement of the dolphin, but particularly of particular interest.

What was happening was the propulsion that was coming from his feet. As we know, as a lot of people might know, he has rather large feet, but it was how he used those feet to propel through the water that was of particular interest.

Have you allowed the. Yeah, you’d be able to bring up this. Yeah, so people are listening to this on our iTunes or on Spotify. Sam’s showing a video. So we’ll make it as good as we can if you can’t see the video. But you can also find this on our YouTube channel, which is the effortless swimming YouTube channel, which we ought to find if you just look it up on Google.

Yeah, OK, so for me as a strength and conditioning coach for swimming, the interest for me was the extra efficiency and speed that you get from the underwater dolphin kick, which is why we’ve seen, you know, everyone exploit that 15 metres either end of the pool in competitive swimming. So and the reason for that is the reduced drag, the reduced energy expenditure and the slightly holder speed and the slightly higher speed comes from holding the speed that you get from the push off the ball or the dive that you get to start. So when you hit the top of the water, then you’ve got surface drag

and you increase in energy expenditure. So so you might swim at the same close to the same speed, but using heaps more energy. And I think for the triathletes out there and those just trying to learn how to swim faster or not be slowed down by their legs or be slowed down by their feet, this is where it starts to get important, this information. So so the basic sort of four sort of quadrants of research that we didn’t know about that was out there already was the the Von La Boke one was the the underwater the dolphin studies that was done then on the US swim team increase and increase of dorsiflexion strength and internal rotation strength both from the same study. That’s what really interested me because there was nothing like that out there and everything that I read and everything that I’d asked swim coaches ahead of doing this study was that pliability of the ankle or flexibility of the ankle was what was most important.

So what this study was suggesting, which was new to me and I think new to the swimming world, which is why I wanted to do the research was that there was a huge strength component.

And there was another Japanese study that was done that showed five degrees of extra plantar flexion in a computer model increased speed and efficiency. So I think for anyone watching out there, I think that’s probably one of the key things is that a small increase in flexibility and an increase in strength through your feet can make a big difference. Now, what I did was put that together in a study.

And I just skipped the next slide there. So what I did was put that into a study looking at the range and strength. So so I chose a couple of swim teams where I knew I could get really good coaches. MLC where where you’re currently being doing a bit of work, Brent and and none wanting some club. And I had a couple of coaches there help me out. And I had Andrew and Andy Andy Cameron do the do the actual physical dynamometer test to test the strength of the feet and the flexibility of the feet. And what I came up with out of my study was just a good protocol, which is just a twenty twenty five meter underwater swim and looked at whether strength and range was were factors. But we put everything else through, you know, we put everything else through the mill as well, everything that you would expect. So all of the upper body range, the the streamline range,

you know, and I had lots of swim coaches telling me what’s important in the underwater dolphin kick. Some say it’s the hips, some say it’s the upper body, some say it’s, you know, natural talent. You know, people have lots of different reasons for performance and what came out of this study. We put it all through a

statistical analysis and what came out was that 30 percent of the performance was explained by the range and flexibility put together, which is which is what I expected from the previous studies that have been done. But it hadn’t been done before in a in a in a practical competitive setting with with age group swimmers. Do you mean do you mean strength and flexibility or range and flexibility? Yeah, as I said, yeah, yeah, so strength and flexibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So with the statistical with the statistical modelling that we did,

every every bit of data that we gathered goes through. And then the the regression analysis spits out a couple of models that showed the biggest improvement. And so the model that came out with the biggest improvement was a right was a mixture of the range and strength,

which, again, I expected from computer modelling, but again, we hadn’t seen it in a practical setting and it showed up showing that, you know, it was responsible for 30 percent of the performance. So so it’s a really, really big factor. And I guess maybe I’m skipping ahead, but I guess a big question for a lot of a lot of people will be thinking now is, all right, that’s that sounds great. How do I now improve those two things? Yeah. And that’s what every swim coach said straight away when they saw me doing the study. As soon as they saw Andrew, you know, with the dynamometer doing that doing the testing and me sitting there with my spreadsheet and those sort of things, they were like, does that make a difference? And I said, well, that’s a hypothesis. I think it does. And and they’re like, well, what do I have to do? What exercises? And they’re like, well, do I do ballet exercises? You know, things like, you know, the all those foot movements

and foot stretching and foot strengthening. And the answer is actually yes. So those stronger feet, smarter feet are really, really important. A really there’s some other really interesting studies that I haven’t spoken about where that they did do on age group swimmers, where they they showed that skilled age group swimmers who were skilled in the underwater dolphin kick were grabbing vortices that came off their knees because because humans are clunky, we’ve got all these joints. Dolphins are smooth and they, you know, and they they move like a, you know, they’ve got a right down to the end. It’s a wave that goes through their body that generates the propulsion. But because humans have hips and knees and ankles, there’s there’s all of those places there, those segments of the body that create lots of friction in the water or vortices in the water. But what they showed was that the skilled swimmers were actually grabbing the vortices that were going in the opposite direction

coming off the knees and then then grabbing those vortices and turning them into a jet stream aimed in precisely the right direction. So so what we know is that there’s there’s a lot there’s a lot more to the story that it’s not just flexibility, it’s strength and skill and and what I believe. And and and this is, you know, a lot of research down the track. There needs to be done. But there’s there’s a huge element of proprioception here of getting that feedback to motor control loop and being able to and feeling on your skin and I know this from, you know, working with swimmers that work at a really, really high level of skill that teach me a lot about strength and conditioning is that they have such a feel and they can feel the water on their skin and they adjust to that. And that’s why they learn how to propel themselves through the water and they learn to avoid resistance. And they also can feel that through their feet.

And and what what we know now that skilled swimmers are doing is they’re actually grabbing water says they’re finding areas of water that are moving in the opposite direction, grabbing them with their feet, turning them into a jets jet stream and creating propulsion, which is amazing. It’s amazing to know that that’s happening. How do they, you know, it’s boggles the mind in terms of how much

neural power or brain power or, you know, you know, utilizing that proprioceptive feedback loop that it would take to actually understand what’s going on, let alone understand it and turn that into moving really, really fast through the water. So, yeah, so for a long story short, the key, the key, I mean, the several key to this, but around the feet, the feet are super, super important in performance. They either speed you up or they slow you down. And you need to have strong feet, smart feet and the right amount of flexibility. So if your feet are just floppy, then that doesn’t necessarily help.

And thinking from a lot of the triathletes I work with, particularly if they’ve come from running background, very stiff ankles and often quite limited. What what could those athletes do to over time improve it? And we know that we don’t want to talk about this last time is we don’t want to just sit on the feet and stretch you’re talking the ligaments because it’s not great for them. So what can I do to just gradually improve it? Yeah. OK. So the thing is what we’re talking about going back to that five percent study that was done through computer modelling and Japanese study.

A little a little bit of extra range makes makes a big difference. And it’s probably better to say things like range and mobility than flexibility, because when you say flexibility, people think, oh, well, if I just jump on my feet and rock backwards on them, then that’s going to then they’re going to be more flexible. And yes, they will be more flexible, but you might cause a lot of damage, particularly if you have stiff feet to start with. So you might just be tearing at the ligaments of your feet. And once you’ve you know, once you’ve stretched the ligaments, you’ve created instability. You’ve created probably a much worse situation than you started with. This is and this is the this is the juxtaposition of

things that you need from a human performance perspective for triathletes, because running on land, you increase performance through stiffness and then running on water after running on water swimming. Sorry, you improve your performance through through your mobility and skilled and creating a skilled wave movement through your body. So so that’s so that’s the big challenge. So it’s it’s mobility stuff. So the more the more you can do with conditioning, your tendons. So that that means rolling from so with a foam roller or a tennis ball or a myofascial ball of some description or a myofascial roller is rolling from your knees all the way down. So the connective tissue goes, you know, it goes up through your feet. You’ve got all of these like strings that go from your toes right up through your shins, connect around sheaths around your tibialis anterior or your big shin muscle and and all of your other muscles around your feet.

Or which is also an internal rotator, which also is a big part of how you internally rotate your feet, which is a big part of how you hold hold your feet to create propulsion in the water as well. So so you need to do control work where you’re controlling what your feet are doing. So really simple stuff. So with with our summers, what we do is just circles in circles out and pull up as hard as you can and push down as hard as you can. So if you do that, we are able to pull down this the share screen because I reckon I don’t know if you’re recording this. It might not get you I’m showing that motion. So OK, so just showing it with my hands. So so if you’re so doing circles out with your feet and and you and you’re creating as much dexterity as you can through to your toes. So you try right through your foot. So that’s back of your foot. You’re trying to bend your foot backwards. You’re trying to rotate right up right around push down as hard as you can

and push up now for our stiff footed friends. They’re going to start cramping probably within about 10 reps. All right. So if you’re pulling up as hard as you can, pushing to the side as hard as you can and pushing down as hard as you can. But what you’re actually doing is because because all of those tendons are running through your feet, running through the bones, you’re starting to free free them up and you’re starting to push and pull and push and pull them through a range that they might they might not have ever gone through. So so you’re starting to open them up and starting to get them moving. You’re making your feet smarter. You’re getting your feet and you’re watching them too. So you’re getting a sense of your feet becoming more aware of your feet. So you’re connecting visual neurons to motor neurons to receptors that you get when you get pain. And if you have sore muscles the next day, you have more receptors as well.

So you’re building up more and more skill, more and more

receptors and motor neurons, receptor neurons that can can develop that whole feedback loop. It’s going to make your kick a lot better and it’s really, really important because if you think about doing a long a long swim as part of as part of an overall triathlon, you don’t want your feet slowing you down and making you work harder and wasting energy that you could be using at the end of your race. So it’s really, really important. And in terms of the rolling, so you’re talking about rolling out like through through the front part of your your leg, your shin and even on the side a little bit by the sounds of it. Like through there. Yeah. And what about the the calves can as well? Is that going to help or is it more just on the front? Yep. So so yeah, there wouldn’t be in terms of plantile flexion. So so pushing your foot down.

So so this is the top of your foot. So when so when you kick on the water and this and this is just as much for freestyle kick out in the surf as it is for underwater dolphin kick, you want to create this surface here where you’re pushing back and and and projecting on the water.

There’s more to it there. There’s actually a scaling action involved as well, which is using the Bernoulli principle, which is a whole another thing to get into. But but yeah, it’s it’s really, really important that you roll everything from the knee all the way down to the end of the toes to condition the fascia and fascia takes a long time to condition a long, long time. So that’s why it’s important that you take your feet through those range. You actively take them through that range. It’s not a passive stretch again, which is why just sitting on your feet and rocking back is not such a great idea really for really for anyone. That’s not something that I’ve ever encouraged. I always see it and swimmers keep doing it all the time. And look, I’ve recommended it before as well. So it’s good to have it’s good to have a few different ways to improve it. So that’s looked at at the range of motion. And now what are you doing in terms of strength?

Yeah, so just just with a band of actually, I’ll put up a YouTube video of Ruby doing this out of the study as well.

But yeah, just just again, just pushing down, which is, you know, plan up flexion, pushing down with a with our band, you know, like a ribbon band around your feet. So pushing down as hard as you can, pulling up as hard as you can and turning in and turning out. So and have you got the band around your feet the whole time as you do that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Gotcha. So yeah, just like a fair ribbon, fair band, like a similar one that you use for your shoulder, shoulder rotation, the internal and external rotations and stuff like that as well. Yeah, same deal. You can put a link. You can put a link to the video in your in your feet down the bottom. Yeah, but yeah, it’s just pushing down, pulling up and being able to create that circle against against resistance to strengthen the muscles. Like I said, with no band, just just doing those movements, pushing down, pulling up and doing circles outwards and doing circles inwards. If you do 50 reps, each of those, that’s a couple of hundred reps right there, you’ll be conditioned and you’ll be improving your condition. And like I said, for our stiff footed friends, that’s, you know, they’re going to start the muscles will start burning after about 10 reps or so if they’re pushing.

Yeah, I look so many clinics on the weekend and yeah, quite a few people said they cramp all the time. They cramp in their in their feet. They cramp in their calves and and so that stuff’s obviously going to help. Is there anything else that would help them avoid cramping there? And like I think a lot of times that it seems like it’s just stiffness through the feet and through the through the calves and just through the entire leg from all the running and riding and stuff. But what other things would you suggest that they do there? Yeah, it’s not just yeah, look, it’s it’s it’s like a conditioning through those muscles, too. So right as as as you would know, and you would have experienced as well.

If, you know, when you get back in the pool after a long time and and you’re getting cramps, it’s it’s in those muscles the least condition that’s where you start cramping. So yeah, look, the huge issue with feet and I don’t want to get controversial here. Do it get controversial. Yeah, look, if but I think it makes sense. If you think of strapping your foot down in a in a moon boot in in one of those boots, if you’ve ever had a broken foot or an ankle or whatever it is, you strap your feet down and what happens to your feet? I’m not sure I’ve never. Well, they just don’t get used. So I guess they some of the muscles waste away and probably lose or you lose conditioning. Yeah, so you lose conditioning, you lose control, you lose strength and you lose muscle. Now, unless you do something to gain that muscle back,

you’re you know, you’re permanently

a little bit less able to do something right because you have less muscle and less and less strength. Your physiology has changed. Now, if you strap your foot down into a shoe and this this goes for bike shoes. So ski boots, snowboard boots,

any type of shoe that you strap your foot down really, really hard into, you’ve basically strapped your foot down into a moon boot. So then what you’re relying on is everything above above that part of the chain to do all the work. And then all of a sudden you’re doing something that requires a lot of work from muscles that are used to being, you know, fixed, fixed down and laced down or, you know, if you crank your shoes up in your on your bike as well. So and there’s no movement allowed in all of those situations. So we’ve got it. We’ve got a pretty strong culture of strapping down our feet and and and really anesthetizing them and not and not not appreciating them, I think. So but there’s, you know, the whole barefoot movement in the class action against the vibrant five fingers as well. But the answer to that is that

you can’t get inspired by a book like Born to Run and then just go out and start barefoot running marathons if you’re a marathon runner, doesn’t work like that. It takes years and years and years and different motor patterns to condition your tendons over a long period of time to adapt to a new movement pattern, particularly things that you do repetitively for long periods of time, like running or swimming or anything like that. So changes aren’t fast. They’re slow and conditioning is something that you do over a long period of time, which is not a it’s not a sexy thing to say. If you want to if you want to sell products and you want to sell something, you say, you know, fast, easy results.

But the reality is a little bit different. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And look when that I listened to that book on as an audio book and got my vibrams, went for a few runs, got super tight calves and machines were in pain for a while and and didn’t use them since. That’s right. Yeah. Guilty. Yeah, and a huge on-site suit went in a class action against five. And so. Yeah, so the you know, it’s so the there’s the there’s the inspiration and then there’s a real story. I mean, if you’re a Tamarind Indian that grew up from a child, you know, running like that in that sort of way on bare feet, that would be fine. But if you’ve grown up all of your, you know, all of your life in a moon boot and then all of a sudden you want to you want to do this, you know, different, completely different style, which puts completely different stresses on your body. It’s it’s not going to work overnight. It’s going to take a long time to adapt.

And the audio are, you know, the longer it takes those adaptations to to kick in. So that’s why it’s great to do this stuff with with little kids. And you see, you know, countries like New Zealand with with their small sided barefoot games in getting little kids to play small side games of rugby and bare feet. And it’s a big part of their culture, you know, and look at what the All Blacks did over the last couple of decades. So, yeah, there’s there’s different ways to go about it. Have you I mean, I guess, yeah, you’re what have you seen with the kids that you’ve worked with in terms of doing these strengthening exercises, like how long does it take to see results? Is it noticeable for you or for the coaches over the course of a couple of months to to see their kick improving? Like what’s what have you seen? Yeah, we can say anecdotally

that we’ve done it and, you know, they’re kicking is getting better. So it’s it doesn’t it doesn’t automatically and necessarily transfer straight over the pool. And I haven’t done a study on it with our own swimmers. I’ve only done a study to say that well to look at whether if you’re stronger and more flexible through there does that improve your underwater work. And, you know, and it did. So that’s what and that’s what I was expecting. And the outcome of that for me was to always include the foot exercises that we do in our in our warm ups and exercise routines

and just be just be very aware of it and make sure that we’re always doing that part of the training and generally as a as you know, Trent, as a swimming club, we do we do pretty well for for a country swimming club. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Well, and that’s a drug and swimming club as didn’t mention that before. But that’s where yeah, where I still compete for them. And that’s where I grew up swimming. And that’s where dad coaches as well. So Sam, that’s great. I think we’ll leave it there for this part two episode on feet and ankles. And that’s for me, you know, working with a lot of adults, swimmers and triathletes that give that’s given me a lot of hope that there is ways to improve their range of motion through their feet because it’s often a limiting factor in a big, big way. And like for me personally, I focus a lot on the front end of the stroke the catch in the pool, because if you’re wearing a wetsuit,

look, that’s mostly what’s going to make the biggest difference is that stuff. But certainly your feet can slow you down and we say that all the time. So, Sam, thanks very much. And we’ll be back for part three where we’re going to talk about deep core work and how you can develop your deep core strength and how that translates to swimming and better coordination through the rest of the body.

So thank you, Sam. Thank you. 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.