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.

Really trying to get the message out there that saying I’m swimming and I’ve got to swim through the pain and swim with shoulder injury doesn’t have to be a thing and we can really work with swimmers and we’ve seen it over the years and we can bring them away from injury or out of injury or avoid injury by working on the arm recovery. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Tracy Bowman. Now, Tracy, you have been on our most popular episode ever. I think it’s I don’t know what it’s that lately, but it was something like 70 or 80,000 views on YouTube last time I checked. And the first episode we did completely like blew up in terms of a podcast. And I think the reason for that is you explain things in such a not a different way, but in such a way that I think people can really understand it and very nuanced and there’s a lot of I think detail to it that people resonated with myself included. There’s a lot of

lessons I’ve taken from that podcast and a lot of ways that you teach the stroke slightly differently than what I used to because of some of the terminology you used in the way that you teach it. So I’m excited to get you back on for I think a third episode now and get it into some parts of the stroke that we haven’t covered or maybe have only touched on. So looking forward to this episode. So thanks for joining me. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s crazy to me how many people talk to me about, you know, listening to your podcast. And so yeah, thank you first of all for giving me this opportunity and this platform to sort of share some of the crazy ideas I perhaps have about swimming and the crazy ways I have about talking about swimming. So yeah, great to be back. Thank you. I’d love to love to start with recovery. So I’m recovery in freestyle and when we sort of caught up a couple of weeks a couple of months ago

and I was hearing you explain the recovery and I thought, oh, that’s a really good way to describe it. I think it’d be great to share on our podcast. Yeah. But let’s before we get into that, why is it important to get the arm recovery over the water? Right. What’s the importance of it? Yes, I think the arm recovery is one of the most elusive parts of the stroke to people for people who are wanting to go and improve their swimming. There’s not there’s lot out of there out there that people can use. And I don’t think there’s, you know, much information. People sort of glaze over it like everyone’s really wanting to get into their streamline or get into a really, you know, effective catch and what’s going on with their legs and so on. So for me, it’s been an interesting journey. As I said this, I think before, you know, I have the opportunity to work with so many swimmers over the years and kind of use that as a

laboratory to see the cause and effect and have the over and under water cameras that I, you know, have in the studio here in Brisbane and back in the UK to be able to really see what is happening when, depending on what’s going on with the arm recovering above the water, having a look at what’s going on underneath the water and how that’s affecting the whole body position, the whole body line. So it really sort of took my interest and I really worked with it quite a lot to find out ways that we could work and talk about the arm recovery. It’s a tricky one, right? Because the arm is sort of out of sight, out of mind, because as we’re recovering, it’s sort of back here, we’re sort of focused in the water and it’s kind of not happening. So it’s much easier to focus on the stuff sort of underneath you and what’s kind of in front of you and your visual field. So the reason why it’s so important and then I’ll go on to the cause and effect of why I

find it so important is that as soon as you take any body part out of the water, it becomes a lot heavier than it was when it was just in the water. And because we are swimming in an unstable environment, obviously when we take any weight out of the water and even we’re still above our center of gravity, it’s going to affect the ability for the swimmer to stay aligned, streamlined or connected. And that then stops them being able to get a proper catch. It stops them being able to do their legs correctly because all the limbs are then used as bracing tools rather than just lengthening and sort of anchoring tools, if you like, for want of a better way on how I describe it. And so if people can really understand how much sending that weight or using that weight can affect their swimming both negatively and positively, then I think we could really help people to work on the arm recovery way more. And through doing that to improve people’s swimming, of

course, that’s what we want to do. But, you know, as you well know, my biggest thing is about reducing injury and swimming, really trying to get the message out there that saying I’m swimming and I’ve got to swim through the pain and swim with shoulder injury doesn’t have to be a thing. And we can really work with swimmers and we’ve seen it over the years and we can bring them away from injury or out of injury or avoid injury by working on the arm recovery. So there’s a couple of factors involved in this because we’re thinking about cause and effect. We’re thinking about where we’re sending our weight and then we’re thinking about, OK, well, how can we use that weight in order to actually give us what I like to call free speed? So what I’ll say, first of all, is what are some of the pitfalls with the arm recovery? And I think that will help sort of demonstrate and explain what I’m saying. So, you know, as everyone probably knows, is the

brain associates us to swimming flat. The brain doesn’t really compute with the rotation. Everyone rotates in free style because they have to. But the brain thinks that we’re just flat. You know, if you throw a dog into water as always the example I use, it’s going to do this to keep its nose up and it’s just going to be square. If you throw a human, don’t try this at home, into water who can’t swim. Typically, they’re going to do this. They’re not going to start doing all the rotation. And so that’s what our brain understands about swimming until we can reeducate it. And because of that, what it’s always thinking it needs to do is it needs to lift the arm over the water because it thinks that we’re flat. It needs to lift the arm over the water. And so what that then creates is this huge world full of people swimming, taking their elbow behind them, taking that elbow behind the front or plane and locking up the shoulder

joint. So when they go behind the front or plane, they lock the shoulder joint and they have no choice to get that arm from here to here. That’s unlocked. And I’ve demonstrated that so many times it actually hurts me to bring that forward. So I can clear the actual joint in the kind of socket. It can’t move without me doing this. So then what we have as a result is we have a dropped elbow, a hand led recovery. But what that causes not only impingement after doing that, you know, time and time again, you know, depending on what people are doing. But what it also causes is it causes me not to use my scapula in the arm recovery, which is a big bone. And it causes most of my arm that is now above the water to be behind my head. And, you know, if you just think of the human body, we have lungs up here, and then we have a whole lot of bones and muscles behind. And so our center of mass center of gravity thing is already

against us. So when we think about these, all these bones, which I like to call recovery bones, let’s just use that terminology for now, are behind you and sending you even more backwards. And so then the tendency to try and get into balance all the time is sort of like you’re chasing yourself, rather swimming in front of yourself. That’s kind of how I describe it. And then the knock on effective doing that is because I’m bracing with the other side, then I don’t have a catch because it’s gone because it’s braced. My legs often will splay. And, you know, I know that when you do your clinics, you see that, you know, you see this all the time, you know, when I’ve been in that the clinics with you, you know, you talk about that bracing and people do this really nice flutter. And then all of a sudden at some point in their stroke that will happen. And largely, I think often that’s to do with where the arm is recovering. But what it

can also do is give them a sort of hammock effect in their body. So they have their sort of, let’s say their shoulders and head at the surface here and then sort of hanging thing going on and the legs up there. So it breaks their whole whole frame. It breaks their whole unit. And then they do it again and again. So it just becomes more of a battle rather than that fluidity where they maintain that length and then use the arm recovery as like a stabilizer wheel on a bicycle or an arm of an outrigger boat. So keeping the vessel from head to feet and recovering the arm within the plane that should be moving in, not behind it and more out to the side and more as one unit. And so how I talk about it is that I have the people really thinking about the whole unit being one. So the whole unit moves, including the scapula. So from the scapula all the way to here moves forward just from the rotator streamline position, it just moves forward and the lower

arm literally just hangs until it’s forward enough. And then the whole body will rotate. Why? Because now we’ve shifted weight forwards and on the side. So we’ve maintained our lateral balance through the rotation. We’ve sent the arm recovery to the front. We’ve shifted that weight and now we can use that weight to tap into our rotation and send us forward and then do the same one with this one. It’s a real it’s been a real change and process that I’ve been over through the years. You know, I went from breaking down sort of individual bones and structures in the arm to now literally I just say one unit and what I do is I just demonstrated in front of the client and I just get them to sort of recover the arm and tickle your fingers. Let’s just call it to recover the arm, tickle the fingers and I get them to mirror me and then I’ll demonstrate it. And all the while I have another coach or something saying I open the arm, tickle the fingers and

they can just kind of create this mantra if you like. And then they mostly just go and do it because it’s so different for the most part to what they’re normally doing. And so because we’re calling it something different, we’re talking about it differently, you’ve given them the why. It’s been phenomenal to watch just on the last camp I’ve just come back from in Heron. That’s literally what I did. We had all the people. I don’t know how many were there in my 13, 14 or so. And I just said, right, spin 180 and off you go. You know, recover your arm, tickle your fingers all the way, you know, just a few strokes. So they just looked amazing because they were using the whole unit rather than focusing on where the hand exits and where the hand entry enters. So, yeah, that’s kind of been my process over the last few years with the arm recovery. That’s really interesting to hear you explain it that way because when you see it done well and what comes

to mind for me is the footage I shared with you with shared with you of Sam Short. So Sam Short, he’s on a tear at the moment. He’s got the strain trials for common games and he’s he’s just off world records at the moment. And I saw that one day. It’s like, yeah, so close. And yeah, his recovery, whether he’s going easy or whether he’s going hard, he’s exactly the same. So relaxed over the top and he’s relatively wide and he’s using that one unit, the whole arm together just to just to kind of swing it forwards and it places out in front and he gets this really nice momentum with it because he’s carrying that weight over the top and he’s using that to extend forwards and rotate and he just does it beautifully. And that’s what I noticed when I was filming him and watching him at the pool a couple months back. And then it’s like it’s become even more evident the more I’ve got into the footage of his stroke. And you see that with

really good consumers like Katelyn Deckie is very similar also way that she comes over the top. And I especially notice that when I’m running clinics, like you mentioned and you see like swimmers who I think they’re quite often just thinking high elbow recovery and they think I lift this elbow up that arms behind them this shoulders if you think of their shoulders here the upper part of their arm is not aligned with their shoulders it’s behind them. And you do that 2,000 times you’re going to you’re going to have some shoulder pain and it’s very hard to avoid. And as you see I’ve come home after a week of running clinics and I’m like God my shoulder is so sore because I’ve been demonstrating the wrong thing to do. The wrong thing. I know, right? Yeah, I’ve got it. I’ve got to back off that a bit. But yeah, we sit all the time just with these awkward yeah, movements over the top. And so even though the arm recovery is not necessarily giving us

propulsion itself. It’s it can impact what is happening with the arm that’s in the water and our body line and our rotation. So if you do it really well it can play such a big part in the rest of the stroke. And so that’s why I thought it’d be a great thing to to cover here. What what challenges do you see people having when it comes to going from the wrong way of doing it? Like you described to then eventually going to the right way? What sort of things are they experiencing or getting out of that the bad habits? Yes, so that’s a really good question. I think the trick is or the pitfall is whichever way you want to look at it is the hand. People are so focused on their hands in swimming generally. But when we’re talking about arm recovery they they think and just just like you just said they you know they trying to take get this high elbow. And you know if you look at that footage from Sam Short I was showing a client yesterday because I was like

look this is exactly what I want you to do like it’s genius what he does with his arm recovery and where he ends up with his streamline. And if you look at that from behind what you see is the I just keep things really simple the upper arm and the scap moving just forwards towards the front wall of the pool that what people are always trying to do is lift that elbow and that creates the illusion of a high elbow. So if you look at Sam Short’s video he is well beautifully within his frontal plane. He’s got a lovely arm if you look for him he looks like you’ve got a high elbow. But I think what people misunderstand is they think the high elbow happens through lifting when in actual fact it happens through rotation. So it’s the road you rotate the elbow into and the illusion of a high elbow. So I think when people are trying to do that because they’re lifting and so focused on where the hand should enter that they just create that. So the hardest thing

that I find to you know that swimmers struggle with is turning off the need to move the hand or put the hand anywhere. You know during my coach training when I’m training coaches or whenever I’m speaking to swimmers in camps or clinics or one to ones in the student studio. I never use the word hand ever. I never talk about it. I try my hardest to get them to think about it because the more I can stop them thinking about it the more chance I have for them to use their upper arm bone keeping it simple and scapula and being comfortable with taking it what feels ridiculously wide and forward. And when they first start to make that change they their brain is telling them that if they were to do that they’re going to recover under the water and the brain fights it so much. And so you have them do it and have them practice and have them take a video and notice that when they are doing the movement the arm is not in the water because they’ve got rotation.

So it’s I think it’s more a challenge of what the brain perceives should or shouldn’t happen or will not happen versus the actual movement pattern. When they once they can get the why and understand it then it becomes just so beautifully fluid and starts to look a lot like Sam’s arm recovery very quickly. So I think the why is the most important thing why not use the hands? Yeah, it’s and that’s like the way I’ve always explained it is you like you don’t if you don’t want to lead with the hand you don’t want to be swinging that hand forwards because then it’ll essentially be behind you. So it should feel like it’s coming from this this upper part of the arm to draw it forwards and that hand is and the lower arms just a passenger along for the ride. And I think the high elbow often gets misinterpreted from being physically very high in the water to that’s what people think they need to do based on the term. But to me it means the elbow will

essentially be pointing mostly to the sky. It’s not necessarily directly up but somewhere in that direction as you are coming over and recovering correctly. So to me it’s like high elbow means elbows pointing mostly upwards there as opposed to behind you which is what it will do if it’s more of a hand led recovery. And so I played around with this a bit since filming Sam and sort of watching him swim and being playing around with a wider, very easy relaxed recovery over the top and you’re exactly right. It feels very wide compared to what I’m used to doing but it’s not. It’s in a good range. It’s very comfortable and it just feels so easy coming over the top and what I find when I do it well is I can put the effort under the water instead of over the top. So you’re applying the force in the right direction in the right part of the stroke but more than anything it just allows it kind of feels like I’m floating through the water

when I do it. Nice, I like that. Yeah. And that’s the way and I use that terminology because Sam described it that way when he’s feeling really good and I find the same thing. It’s like, yeah, actually that’s kind of how it feels like you’re just floating through the water. So it’s such a I really love that with the floating because it’s what it tells me from a coach perspective and no doubt also tells you from a coach perspective. And if we think about what the how the scapula they are floating bones. And so when we have the scapula and upper arm moving the whole arm just forward is one unit. So it’s this really nice idea of the unit just floating forwards shifting weight and maintaining momentum whilst recovering and that easy fluid floating feeling is almost such a great feedback loop and wide just like you said. So I love that floating element to it. That’s so I had Tom Barton on the podcast. He is a physio who’s worked with a lot

of the Australian swim team. And one of the things he mentioned about the shoulder blades of scapulas was we want the shoulder blades will float. They’ll float up and sort of down along the rib cage and they’re going to they’re going to move up and down through the different parts of the stroke. So we never we never taking them down and back the whole time. For sure. I’ve been in my period. They’re just going to they’re going to move. They’re going to slide. And so must. Yeah, they have to. Yeah. And the other benefit here too, I think is I coach a lot of triathletes and open water summers. If you have a wetsuit on, you are probably going to feel a bit more restricted through your recovery just based on having that on. But this way of recovering is so much more conducive to wearing a wetsuit because you’re not trying to get into these awkward positions that are maybe already awkward enough without a wetsuit on. Yeah, wetsuits are a big thing.

And for me, like I always recommend if a swimmer is ever going to spend any money on any kit that they should put the money towards a wetsuit that has one mill in the shoulder because it could be the difference of keeping them in or out of hospital. And the reason I said that I’ve had two clients who have ended up in hospitals through having, you know, two thicker arm section of a wetsuit and with the wrong recovery because it’s always pushing it’s giving resistance. So that’s the first thing. Never save money on the wetsuit. The other thing is really learn how to put it on properly. And, you know, people don’t pull it up enough. So if I can give one tip to anybody wearing a wetsuit, pull the calf halfway up your calf and pull the arm almost to here so that you’ve got plenty of material to work around that shoulder joint and up into the groin. So you’ve got plenty up here and you’re not sort of feeling restricted. And if the wetsuit is right

and you’ve put it on right, you should be able to do this movement and this is the arm recovery movement. Now, just how it’s just straight to the side. It’s not back at all. And it should feel pretty much like it feels now if the wetsuit is on properly. So that would be my top tip to anyone who’s listening and wears a wetsuit. It’s one of the biggest things I see. That, yeah, great tip. And you, so a friend of mine, Sam Sheppard, he owns and runs Great Ocean Wetsuits. And I’ve talked to him a lot about this because he’s deep into the design of wetsuits and the material and that kind of thing. And a cheaper wetsuit will be thicker through the shoulders. It will last longer. So you kind of getting, the more you pay the less it’s going to last but they still last a good amount of time. But basically, yeah, the less you pay the thicker the material, the longer it will last, but the more restrictive it is. More chance of injury.

Yeah. So what I recommend for a lot of people if they’re, say, training in a wetsuit or swimming weekly in a wetsuit, you’re probably better off going for a sleeveless, a cheaper sleeveless wetsuit. You’ll have that freedom through the shoulders unless you really need it for like to stop the cold. If you’re down here in Victoria, for example, in Mintae, you might need a bit extra. But if you’ve got a training wetsuit, I think go sleeveless. But a good wetsuit from like a mid to high range wetsuit, they’re designed in a way where with the cut of the material, it’s basically not going to restrict you too much. Like I wear which one is it? The gold version of the Great Ocean Wetsuit. And it is like, it is so good. Just like it’s very thin through the shoulders. It’s kind of the top level one, but it is very free through the shoulders. Whereas I have had some other wetsuit brands that have just been like, you can feel it basically.

But yeah, with the right cut, it’s money well spent, especially if you’re prone to shoulder niggles and injuries and that sort of thing. Now I want to jump into the next topic here, which is connection through the stroke and through the center of the body. Because it’s all well and good to have this great recovery, beautiful catch and pull, a nice body line. But if all these different things are working separately and they’re not connected, you might, you could go from being like a 130 swimmer to a two minutes swimmer per 100, just based on whether these things are connecting up and working together. And so it’s one of the things that can feel a bit more challenging, I think, to get. But when you see someone well connected, that can be all the difference. And so you mentioned prior to the call that there’s a couple of things that you’ve been thinking about and working on with your swimmers lately that has really helped.

So I’d love to get into some of those things because it’s such a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to swimming better. Yeah, and I would say it’s the biggest piece of the puzzle because without it, nothing else can work effectively or to its greatest potential. Because just as you say, because everything is disconnected. So everything’s kind of working, but it’s not working together. And the key element in really great swimming, and it doesn’t matter, you know, I know we’re talking now freestyle, but in any of the strokes is to be able to work on the components of the stroke and then learn how to synchronize them so that you are tapping into the larger muscle groups in the body rather than isolated smaller muscles that may fatigue way quicker or get injured way quicker. Bringing this all together is the key. So when, you know, I think I talked about this a little bit on the first podcast is the first step for working with swimmers in our camps

or in the studio or clinics is how can we set that first? I call it middle, the middle prong of the trident. So from head to feet, if you like, how can we set that and how can we maintain it and how can we allow the swimmer to not compromise that at any cost? And that’s where the trick is. So, you know, over time, as I’ve, you know, as I’ve got the joy of, you know, working with clients and seeing things happen and, you know, a lot of the stuff in the endless pool because the endless pool gives you so much feedback because of the resistance of the current and, you know, you can feel so much more in the endless pool. It’s why it’s the, you know, the best by far place to ever learn to swim. But it is also the best place to learn how to coach it and how to understand how the body works in water. You know, we get that length through the body and think about being tall, but how can we help the swimmers to maintain that

for first of all 25 meters or 50 meters and then eventually, you know, for their triathlon swim or their 10K or their, you know, channel, whatever it is and not lose it when they start to work on other parts of the stroke. So how I describe it and just as a kind of a recap is the first step is to connect the legs to the torso because that’s where we’ve got our biggest hinge at the hip and when we’re rotated through 90 degrees and now lying on our gravity, if that’s not connected, we’ve got either both or one or the other are going to be the two separate moving parts that just create resistance and make us tap into the smaller muscles because we’ve lost our opportunity to tap into the sling system through the body. And so, you know, over the years, I have used like anyone who has worked with me or read the book or anything knows that I come up with crazy analogies to get people to do things. And the one that, you know, the biggest one I use for this

is I have people stand in their feet. So that sounds like a really weird thing to say. Their feet standing in their feet. And what I mean about this is I want people to tap into the skeleton. I want them to almost imagine they have zero soft tissue while they’re just focusing on this. So they’re standing in their skeleton, in their feet, and they become really sort of grounded into their feet and they sort of want to work on getting equal pressure through both of the feet. So they’re really centered and the feet should be underneath the hips. Then what I do is I have them imagine that they have a book here and I don’t mention this. So I never use the word A-G-A-D and I always spell it out because as soon as we think that, then everyone’s trying the length and just from the neck. And then the rest of the body isn’t connected. So by eliminating talking about this, I have found that it’s much easier for people to connect the skeleton,

knowing that every single bone is designed to go on top of another in order for people to be able to carry incredibly heavy weights here around, you know, water and all the things. The skeleton is literally designed to do that with minimum effort. Like they couldn’t travel 20 kilometers with, you know, liters and cages on here. So if you know- Sorry, just sorry, Trace. Just for those that are listening, I’ll say the word just on top of their head. I’m pointing. Yeah. So I’m trying to avoid saying on top of their head, but yes, I forget. I always forget that this is a podcast so people can’t see me necessarily. Thank you. And so that’s how I started up. And when I then get them to stand in their feet and imagine that they have a book, I’m pointing to the top of my skeleton at the moment. Then I have them really think about taking the whole, it’s almost like getting air in between each of the bones all the way up. So they’re creating this length with each joint,

not just the neck, which is often the case. And then I ask them what they feel and very often, and anyone watching or listening to this, even if you’re in a car, like it really doesn’t matter, even if you’re sitting in a car or on your chair, what you do is you find your seat bones and you sit into your seat bones and then you just have the rest of the body just sitting in those bones. And you just imagine as you’re doing, as I’m talking about this, that you’re literally taking each bone. So the pelvis, the spine, the ribcage, all the bone. And I just try and keep everything as simple as possible away from each other with the intention of sending the book that is at the top of your skeleton towards the ceiling or the top of the car or the sky. And what people feel when they do it in that way is they feel something deep, deep within, suddenly goes, and I call it like this warm hug. It’s like your skeleton’s getting this nice warm hug

of the soft tissue that’s wrapped around it. And what I’m finding that’s getting in the way most for most swimmers is everybody talks about core in swimming. And for the listeners and the viewers watching or hearing this, when I say the word core, I would guess that I’m gonna be conservative and say 70% in kids more. People think that’s abs. And so when I say core in swimming, people are crunching the abs. Now as soon as I crunch the abs and you’re listening or watching to do it, as soon as I crunch the abs, my skeleton, I’m just gonna keep the language really simple, just fold slightly. And so now I can no longer carry the water on the top of my skeleton or the book or whatever it is, it’s all just an analogy. And what I also can’t do when I’m crunching the abs with the thought that’s gonna make me long. First I’m making myself shorter, but what I’m also doing is closing down access to my diaphragm. So now not only am I not long because I can’t be

because the abs are kind of shortening the front of my body, but now I can’t take a diaphragmatic breath either. So I’ve found a lot of people, I’m going there with my fingers, you know, I teach a lot with my hands and do lots of tactile, I’m going there in their abs and think, let those go. And then I get them to kind of slump down into their skeleton and you can do this just sitting in your chair and you kind of just slump and imagine your bone just sort of slumping down onto each other and then do it again. And they then feel that deep inside. And that’s what I’m teaching them to get to know and to learn. And then what I’m doing is I’m having them then take that to the pool. And as they push off, obviously, because we don’t have our skeleton on top of each other when we’re swimming because we’re rotators through 90 degrees. So now I have to have them learn how to create that from the wall. So I have them push off the wall imagining,

and I’m using my phone here as if it’s a book. So they push off the wall, they make connection with the book and they’re imagining that they’re creating that length all the way through the skeleton and using the momentum from the push off to maintain the feeling. Then using the pressure of the wall to maintain momentum, take it into a couple of strokes and maintain the feeling until they got it. And it becomes a little bit like learning to ride a bicycle. Once someone has tapped into it, which is easy because everyone’s tapping into it all day, every day, walking around. They just need to learn how to tap into what their body already knows in a horizontal position. Once they tap into it, the body goes, okay, that’s easy. And it just becomes the easiest, beautifulest, most beautiful way of creating that length and never compromising it. Then you add all the other elements of the stroke that we hear so much about onto that,

but it always becomes, is what I’m doing on my catch or my arm recovery or my legs, whatever, is that affecting or compromising what I’ve built here? If the answer is yes, reintroduce this and then introduce it until you can do it without compromising that. Because otherwise it’s like having a boat that has a whole bunch of hinges down its hole and it can do this. That’s literally what it’s like. The boat’s not gonna go very fast, very quickly, very far, very quickly. So there’s some. Really, yes, that’s so good. I mean, it always, my approach is obviously really similar to that, just in terms of we’ve gotta get this unit of our body, we’ve gotta get this whole thing connected because if it’s not, well, it doesn’t matter what the other stuff is doing because things are gonna move around. And as you said, the hips there, that’s where we can tend to hinge. And you really start to notice it when people have got that curve

or that bend through there. So how do we get them to keep that straight, keep that connected, and then building the rest of the stroke from there? And the thing I notice, I’d say most at clinics is the first few things we work on, head, body, legs, basically getting all of that to be connected, when we work on that is typically when people look the best, they look like they’ve improved the most when we work on those initial things. And it is so obvious. And I know last time I was running clinics up your way, I think you might have come over just as we’d sort of finished working on that aspect of the stroke. You know, geez, they’re looking really good. And then they were, like this one was looking beautiful because they had exactly what we talked about in place. And it’s night and day as a coach watching when someone does that. Then sometimes, like you said, we introduce other parts of the stroke and maybe they forget about keeping that posture

and it falls apart a bit, but we always got to go back to it. So I think the way you explain it there is, yeah, it’s really useful and it’s simple, but it’s not necessarily easy to do consistently if you’re not used to it. So I’d like anything that’s going to take time and it’s, you know, you might fall out of that position, but of all the things I reckon start with that, like always just start with that. Yeah, for sure. And use the wall. The wall is your best friend when imprinting these new movement patterns, doing short repeats using the wall as your floor, if that makes sense. You know, when you’re standing, you have the floor to use. So use the wall to take the sensation into horizontal. Don’t be tempted to always do a whole length. Just, you know, really short repeats. Okay, I’ve got the sensation. Now let’s take that into the length and build it in, you know, build the pathways, the neural pathways and strengthen them

and then they won’t disappear. And that’s when you really see the pace clock, you know, the timer come down. You said, oh, wow, I was doing two, now I’m doing 150, now I’m doing 145. That’s where you’re going to get your biggest gains to begin with for sure. Excellent. Well, Tracey, I know we’ve both got to head off in a second here, but I want to mention what we’ve got coming up. So we tried to organize this last year, but just calendars were too busy, but… Yeah. This year, I’ve got the day booked. We are going to run a clinic together, October 25th in Melbourne, and we will have the details in the podcast, show notes, the description there for anyone who wants to join. We haven’t worked out exact numbers there, but it’ll be a small group because we want to be able to do video analysis, work with people on an individual basis there, but we’re going to run a full day clinic October 25th in Melbourne. And I’m really looking forward to it

because just like obviously we see things very similar, but the way we describe them, it may be slightly different, but I’m really, yeah, I’m just really looking forward to coming together and then basically going through the whole freestyle stroke and teaching it step by step in the right order and using video as well to help the swimmers there on the day improve. And yeah, I think I’ll personally learn a lot from it. Me too. And looking forward to it. For the swimmers who are there, I think you’ll get a lot out of it, especially if you have enjoyed these podcasts that we’ve done together. So I’ll put that link in the, yeah, in the description or the show notes if you listen to this or watching it on YouTube. And yeah, it’ll only be, I think maximum, maybe a dozen people or so. So a very small group, but I’m looking forward to that come October. Yeah, be great. Trace, thanks again for being on the podcast. I’ve got no doubt that this will be a big hit as well

because you explained things beautifully, very simply. And there’s a lot that I’ll be able to take from this in my own coaching. So looking forward to seeing you in October, if not before then, but I appreciate you being back on the podcast. And if anyone’s listening to this. Thank you for having me. How can they find out what you’re doing? How can they get in touch? Yeah, so if they go to swimmastery.online, they can see some online courses. They can find us at the studio in the swim studio in Brisbane. There’s clinics and camps, you know, being added all the time. And they can do virtual coaching with me or even just send them video analysis, the same sort of stuff that you do. So yeah, swimmastery.online and yeah, you’ll find us there. Thank you. Thanks, Tracey. See you soon. 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.