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. So you want to swim smarter and swim faster? Then you need EO Swim Better, the only swimming device that lets you see the previously unseen. Because the first time, you can understand exactly what your hand is doing on every stroke, analyze and adapt your technique, see the effect of every single adjustment and all with the device that you won’t even know that you’re wearing. Swim faster, fast with EO Swim Better, a stroke of genius. Dive into the Swimming Evolution at eolab.com forward slash swim better. Use the code Effortless a checkout to receive your first 12 months free on an annual gold membership. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Joe Freel, he’s an endurance sports coach best known as an elite triathlon

and cycling coach as well as an author of multiple books. Joe’s most popular book and most well known book is the Triathletes Training Bible and on this episode, Joe and I talk about swimming technique. He talks about his PDLC method, which I think is a great approach to improving your technique very similar to what we cover in our clinics and eight week faster freestyle course. We also talk about the five and two training methodology. What you should do each week and that’s the five and two method. We also talk about how your body and your VO2 max and your strength changes as you get older. And what you can do to delay that regression in VO2 max and strength. We also talk about how triathletes need to approach this from a little bit differently to pool swimmers and what some of those technique changes are. And we also talk about what Joe’s been interested in lately. What’s peaked his curiosity and kept him researching and learning about

different parts of human evolution. So let’s get into this podcast episode with Joe Freel. I really enjoyed this episode recording it. So I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to it. Let’s get into it. My guest today is very well known coach and author, Joe Freel. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Brenton. Glad to be here. I got introduced to you by Mark Evans, who was on the podcast quite recently. And I’ve known about you for a long time, heard your name around the triathlon circles because you’ve been around for a long time. And I think a key figure in endurance training with the books that you’ve written and the knowledge that you’ve shared. So it’s great to have you on the podcast to talk about some of these things. And specifically for the swimming side of triathlon. And before we got on this podcast, we were talking about what do you think would be probably the most relevant thing for triathletes listening.

And you said something that you’ve worked on with triathletes when you’ve been face to face is the skills, is the swimming skills. And I love to hear that because that is what we specialize in. I love to work on technique and skills with athletes because there’s just so much to gain, no matter what age they’re at. And I had a camp last weekend up in Queensland and had an athlete in his late 70s come along. And over the past 12, 18 months, I’ve been working with him on his technique. He’d never done any filming or analysis before. And even in his late 70s, he’s he’s still looking for improvement. And I love to see that. And I know you’ve done a lot of work with people as they they get older to help improve their, their VO2 max and their endurance. But also skills is a huge one for swimming, because no matter what your age, you can you can get better at it and see improvement. And unlike the VO2 max, which will drop off for people as they age,

skills you can improve over a lifetime. So with that in mind, what sort of things were you looking at when you work with people in person in terms of the swimming skills? What sort of things do you see stand out? Yeah, well, as as we talked, she had a very, very briefly about at the start of this conversation this morning, you know, what I what I found with triathletes, especially is that if they started swimming or six years old, seven years old, they have no problems whatsoever. They’ve got it figured out. But unfortunately, at least in the US, most triathletes come into the sport and they’re in their thirties, forties, fifties. And they have absolutely no idea how to swim other than what they did when they were kids playing around the pool. And so but they come from a sport like like usually running or perhaps cycling. And so they think the way they’re supposed to become better swimmers is doing the same things they did in those sports, which is basically

doing intervals all the time. And that’s going to make them faster, but it doesn’t work. You really can’t do it that way. Swimming is an entirely different animal compared with running and cycling. Water is a very thick medium to try to move your body through compared with air. Air is very easy to move your body through, although it’s got some resistance. Water has got I don’t know what the number is, but hundreds of times more resistance than air has when you’re trying to move your body through it. And so it doesn’t really matter how many intervals you do. All you’re doing, if you’ve got poor technique, poor skills, you’re just creating a lot of bubbles around yourself as you go through the water. You’re really not doing anything to make yourself faster. So when I put on camps for athletes, the things I think that what we’ve always done is so they’re usually one week camps because we start off the very first day with a 500 meter swim time trial

just to find out where they are. So we’ve got a baseline and they came into that day fresh because I told them before they come to the camp, it’s going to be a week long. They’re going to put in probably 20 hours or more of training, which almost none of them have ever done. And so they need to get rested up before they come to the camp. So they come to come to us fresh. And on day one, they do a 500 meter time trial. And we record those those those numbers for for posterity. So we know what’s going on in the future. And then for the coming week for the next five days, all I do with them is work on skills. We never do a single interval. We never swim more than a 25 at one time. All they’re doing is swimming to 25, working on a skill and stopping at the end of the 25. At the end, at the end of that 25, we talk about I talk with them about what I saw, what they need to be working on individually. And it’s for the next 25.

And I talk again about what they need to be working on individually. And there’s four things I work on with. I won’t go into those right now, but we record them throughout the session. So every day we record every athlete. And then every day we go over every athlete’s technique on that video so they can see see themselves because most athletes don’t really they think they’re doing things right, but they don’t they don’t really realize what’s going on. So we’ve got an underwater camera taking a look at them and we can see what it is. And I can point out these things and tell them how to correct this. And we boil it down to four things. So I’ll go to those four things. Now, if you want me to or we can say that for later, how do you want to do it? That’d be good. Let’s go on to those four things. OK, I started working on this many years ago. Because I realized working with that with swimmers was not really going very well

with just trying to get them to be to be better. And they were given so much information, so many ideas on how they could improve the swimming and the idea just didn’t work. You know, there’s all kinds of things out there. But what should an athlete be doing to swim faster? For example, a very common thing that I run into talking to athletes is they have a coach that tells them to have their fingers closed in the pool or have them open in the pool, they get both at both instructions. And I would say that’s like that’s like a two percenter. You know, you may get two percent better if you forgot which of those things you’re supposed to do, it may make you two percent better. And there’s other things that they do that are really detrimental to the performance. And so what I’m trying to find is things are more like 80 percenters. They can make this change. They can get 80 percent change in their in their speed in the in the in the pool.

And so I narrowed it down to four things. And what I saw, these are the four things I work with them. We have to work with them in a in a in a procedure in a process over time, I found. So every day when I have these these athletes in the camp, every day I introduce one more of those four things to the very first day we work on what I call posture is easy, but you’ve got to do it. And it’s amazing how swimmers who start late in life have terrible posture in the pool. It doesn’t matter what you do as far as everything else you’re doing. If your posture is poor, you’re never going to be a good swimmer. They always have this situation where they’re swimming with their tails down. You know, their their buttocks are below the surface. The water in their heads are up. They’re like in this position in the water, not exaggerating it. It’s much less, much less extreme than that. But they’re never the last. Their butt is way below the surface of the water and their head is breaking

its surface surface of the water. That’s called posture. And so I work on one thing with them on that because they’re all doing the same thing. They’re all looking at the wall that they’re swimming toward. But they’ve got their heads up and got their heads up in this position so they can see where that wall is and they’re swimming at it like this with their heads that that caused their hips to go down. So we work on getting their nose pointed toward the bottom of the pool. That’s the first step. And as soon as they get their nose pointed down, their hips come up. It’s the first thing that happens. The hips come up close to the top of the water. So now the key is how can they watch where they’re going? So I teach them something that I also teach them on the bike when they’re doing a triathlon or a time trial. But you should do on the bike is you should keep your head down. But every few seconds, you bring your head up to look to see what’s coming up.

So you put your head down, bring it up. Put your head down, bring it up. In the pool, you don’t have to do that. All you get is put your head down, punch your nose down and roll your eyes up. So you’re looking through the tops of your goggles. So my eyes are looking up here. But my nose is pointing down there that are bringing your head up in this position where you get your eyes now in the middle of your goggles. We want your eyes atop of your goggles. So we do all kinds of drills just to get this and get them to understand how to do this. And then we start throwing in things like, OK, we’ve got to be able to site when you’re an open water swimming. So when you site in the open water, you’ve got to bring your head up out of the water and see what what what’s your what’s your landmarks are that you’re using to to make sure you’re swimming straight line. So we’ll work on drills for doing that, how we go from being a nose down

position to bringing your head up above water, how you do that. And then get back down into the into the aerodynamic water dynamic position again. So that’s the first thing we do on the first day. We spend about a half hour just working on that until everybody’s got it, everybody’s got to figure this out. And we video record each athlete and show them where their head is. So they know where it’s at. Have you found easy? Have you found that the video will people think they’re looking down, but they show them on the video and they go, oh, my God, I can’t believe I’m actually looking directly forwards. I thought I was looking down like it and it’s such a simple thing with the head position and it’s an easy one to change. But even just with that alone, the perception is just so far off with with a lot of swimmers, which I’ve found quite interesting doing a lot of video work as well, where they think they’re looking down.

But they’re just not when you actually look at the video. I agree. Yeah, that’s that’s why we do the video so they can see themselves doing the things that we’re talking about or not doing those things. So the video becomes this feedback for them. We show them the video before they can get out of the pool. We shoot the video and while they’re still in the pool, we show them on the mini screen for the camera we’ve got. We show them what they’re doing so they can see it right now real time. So we don’t wait 24 hours to show them. We show them right now immediately. So they can go right back into the water again and work on it again. Shoot the video again. Show them again. Shoot the video again. Show them again. The idea is they’ve got to get some feedback from someplace. And swimming is a strange sport because you really can’t tell what the rest of what your body is doing because of the water and the position your body is in.

It’s not like running where you can look down at your feet and see what they’re doing. You really can’t look around when you’re in the pool. You’ve got to trust yourself to be doing the things the right way. So I agree. That’s that’s a that’s a challenge. And we really have to work on that with all the athletes. So that’s day one in the camp. Day two, we go to the second thing. These I call these four things. PDLC, P was posture. D is direction. Direction has to do with where their where their lead arm is pointing when they reach out. So what is all too common is they reach across their face. So if I can demonstrate that here, they reach in this way. Their arm crosses in front of their face or maybe right in front of their face. But they think it’s right in front of their shoulder. That’s what they think is going on, but it’s not. It’s over here someplace. And so all these drills, we do to help them learn how to do that the correct way.

The most common drill I do with them is something I call penguin stroke, penguin, penguin swimming, penguin swim with these little bitty wings out to the sides. They never crossed their wings in front of their face. The wings always stayed the side. So we start off doing a drill where that what I tell them what to do is what I want you to swim and I want you to put your hand outside your shoulder when you make entry into the water, outside the shoulder. And it takes it’s amazing how long it takes them to figure that out. The fish, the ones who have been crossing over at their hands in front of their faces or even worse across their body. They think when they’ve got it in front of their shoulder, that’s out it’s beyond the outside of their shoulder. They think it’s wide. That’s right. We’re supposed to be right in front of your shoulder. So we show them that video and they learn real quickly. When I feel like it’s wide, when it’s too wide, it’s actually just right.

So what I tell them is from now on, all I want you to do is a is a penguin drill. Whatever you swim, you’re always doing the penguin drill. So never think about what you used to do. Think about swimming like a penguin. You know, there’s other drills we do, too. I do a drill. Well, there’s a whole bunch of things we do. But the idea is we’re teaching a skill and they do that. We do that drill for about a those drills for about a half hour video. Recording every athlete head on recording underwater so they can see where their hands are going and we do it over and over and over until they get it right. One thing I left out here is what we do is on before we even get in the water to do that drill, I have them stand on the deck with a partner. They stand facing their partner. They bend over at the waist as if they’re in a swimming position. Head nose pointing down and they reach out in front of themselves with their hand and put it where they think it should be

to be in front of their shoulder and then their partner who is with them corrects, takes the hand and puts it where it’s supposed to be. Then we do it again, put the hand in front of the shoulder and they put it back again in front of their face. The partner takes their hand and moves it back in front of their shoulder. They do this over and over and over until they feel on deck what it feels like to have your hand in front of your shoulder. Then we get in the water and we do the drill, the penguin drill. And so and we record them so they can see it again in that regard too. So we do that. That’s the second day and that that’s a little bit harder than than posture. It’s getting a little bit harder because they’ve got these built in habits of how to swim and this one is a really hard habit to break. That’s why I tell them to swim like a penguin all the time. If this is one of the habits, bad habits you have.

Those people who don’t do this, who don’t have this bad habit have to just hang in there with us as we get through this with all the people who do in the in the in the group because there’s going to be lots of athletes who’ve got this problem. So that’s day two. Day three, what we work on is what I call length

and start out on the deck.

And on the deck, what I have the athlete do is stand if there’s hopefully there’s a wall like there’s maybe like a the locker room wall or something there as you came out in the pool, there’s a wall there next to it. That’s perfect. If you have that, have them walk over to the wall, face it and reach up above their head as high as they can. So they’re in this position, put your hand up as high as you can. And then I say, let’s get a little bit higher. They reach up even higher. And I say, let’s get even higher than that. So now they go up on their toes. That’s let’s get higher than that. So what they do is what I teach them to do is if you turn your body slightly to the side like this, you can get your hand higher. This little rotation you do with your body at the hips, get your hand even higher yet. And so I talk to them about why this is important and with triathletes, most triathletes swim like tugboats, I tell them.

Tugboats are wide and they have they have no speed because they’ve got all kinds of drag. And that’s what most triathletes swim like. They swim in this this position where the shoulders are always in this posture. So the shoulders are always going like this. They never rotate their shoulders enough to get this posture like this, which good swimmers do, they swim in this tugboat position. Good swimmers swim like speedboats to get as narrow and skinny as they can in the water by reaching out as far as they can with that hand. So that’s the next thing I teach them is how to do that. And so we go through drills for that. There’s a whole series of drills I go through. We do the same thing on the deck again with the partner. So what they’re supposed to do is get in that position, reach out as far as they can. The the partner puts their hand where it should be and then helps them rotate their shoulders so they get a good body position in the water.

And that gives them even more length, just like they did when they were standing against their wall with their hand over the head. If they rotate their hand like we’re body like this, they get their hands even higher. So this we’re trying to get the speedboat way of swimming as opposed to a tugboat way of swimming. So we spend an hour or another half hour in the pool just working on that. Recording every athlete who goes through drills. One of the drills we do is I call belly to the wall. What they do because most athletes have a hard time and understand that they’ve got to actually rotate their body is a little bit as they swim. It’s not just like this. It’s more like this as you swim. And so the belly to the wall drill is as they swim, is to take the right hand into the water, they rotate their body to their belly button points to the left wall of the pool. So it’s a exaggerated role. Their belly button is now facing the wall.

Then their left hand goes forward and now they want their belly button pointing to the right side, the right wall. So go back and forth, swimming at 25, just doing that, just doing this, getting used to what it feels like to have your body do this by exaggerating the movement. I don’t really want them pointing their belly buttons at the wall when they’re in a race. But I want them to get the feel of what this movement is like so they can begin to get a sensation what your body feels like when it’s rotating. So we exaggerate it, which is what you have to do sometimes to teach the skill to athletes, exaggerate it. So we spend a half hour doing that. We record the athletes and we show them how to how to to do it on their videos. And then we come to the fourth day on the fourth day. We get to the last thing, P D L L was length. Now we’ve got a C P D L C. The C is catch and it’s amazing how athletes have been told

about the catch over their entire time and that they’ve been swimming. But not a single one of them knows what it means. You can ask them what they’re told and say, well, reach over a barrel. Or they get some other instruction. And I tell them, what is that supposed to look like on the deck? What do you do when you reach over the barrel? And they really don’t know. That’s kind of like they’ve got this vague idea that somehow they’re supposed to reach over a barrel or whatever it was they’ve been told. And so I got to now work with them on a catch. And so the catch is now changes a lot of things. Now we’re becoming open water swimmers. Open water swimmers don’t swim the same way pool swimmers do. If you watch open water swimmers, this this came to me once and I was watching a I was on on the at a race and our men. And I was on the on the it was a race with the water. It was swam in a canal. And so I could walk along the edge of canal.

I could watch the swimmers down below me. And so the first wave was the pros and I watched the pros go off and I walked the ways with them and the next wave came and it was age group athletes and I watched them. And it dawned on me all of a sudden they weren’t doing the same things. In fact, if you look at if you look at the pros open water swimmers, the pros, what you’ll see is when they’re when they’re taking their stroke and their and their hand comes out of the water, it comes out of the water above their elbows. It does not come out of the water below their elbows. They don’t have elbows high. They have hands high. That’s what open water swimmers do. They have their hands high. Look at look at the start of a race sometime for the pros and look at the same start for amateurs. And you’ll see the amateurs have their elbows high. The pros have their hands high. That’s the start of the catch is getting your hands high

because what happens is we’re telling athletes become to become open to become pool swimmers. But they’re going to swim in the ocean or they’re going to swim in a lake and the water is not calm. It’s not a good thing to put your hand in like we’ve been teaching to do. We typically teach them, put your hand in relatively close to their heads and insert your hand into the waters. If you’re putting your arm into a sleeve or reaching into your mailbox, I’ve heard all kinds of things about how to do this. And what the athlete winds up doing when they do that is something I call the death move. They wind up putting their hand in a position where their hand is is above their elbow.

That’s the position they wind up in when they stretch their arm out. Their hand is above their elbow. Once you’ve got your hand above your elbow, you’re dead in the water. You’re not going any place. You can’t go any place until you’ve got your hand below your elbow. Now you can go someplace. That’s what they don’t understand, is that the difference between this and this. When you put your hand in the water next to your head and then you reach out, what happens is your elbow drops and your hand comes up and you wind up in the death move.

So we’ve got to get rid of that. And the way to get rid of that is learn to swim with your hand above the water instead of entering next to your head. The hand is coming in above the water and when it hits the water, it fingers in the water first. We’re trying to get your fingers in the water first, not the palm of your hand. The fingers in and point your fingers at the bottom of the pool. When you do that, your elbow automatically comes up and when you point at the bottom of the pool, start the stroke as soon as you get your hand in the water. You start, you immediately have a catch. And so we work on all kinds of drills for that. And there’s just a slug of drills to do because everybody has a hard time with this one. That’s why it’s the fourth thing that I teach because I want them to go from the easiest to the hardest. And this is by far the hardest one to learn is how to get this catch. Once they get it, they’re amazed

at how fast they move through the water. So then we do drills with this. We do a drill where they swim freestyle three strokes, flip over onto their back and swim backstroke three strokes. But if you’re going to go from a freestyle to a backstroke, what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to catch the water with your hand and pull your body around. Pull your body around to a backstroke. You cannot pull your body around if your elbows blow your hand. You can’t do it, it’s impossible. So they have to learn to do that, it’s going to make that movement. They’ve got to get their hand down to grab the water and pull with it. And then they can go to a backstroke, three strokes, backstroke, and then pull your body back around again and go back to a freestyle. So we do that. We do that drill over and over and over to swim in 25s and video recording underwater. So we do the same thing. We’re showing them what they’re doing, how we can get it right.

We do an on-deck thing with them again for the partners, partners showing them how to get their hand in the right position with their head. They’ve got their noses down so they can’t see their hand. So that’s PDLC. And what I tell them is if you can master these four things, forget about everything else. Forget about everything else they’re teaching you. Get these four things right and you’ll become a faster swimmer. You won’t get a golden medal at the Olympics, but you’ll be a faster swimmer than you are right now. Hopefully you’ll get down to like 90 seconds per hundred. If it gets you down to 90 seconds per hundred, think how great that would be. So then that’s four days. Of course we had the first day, which was a test. Then we have the sixth day. The sixth day is we work on whatever the individual’s unique weakness is of those four things. We work on that with each individual. Then we go to the last day of the camp.

The last day of the camp, if now put in more than 20 hours of churning, swim, bike, and run, they’re tired, they can’t wait to get home. They really don’t want to get back in the pool again, but I have them do another 500 meter time trial.

What do we think? What do we find? We find that 90% of the swimmers, 90% of the triathletes improved their times just by doing 25s. And the only thing they worked on was technique and they got faster. Sometimes it’s only a couple of seconds. Sometimes it’s 30 seconds. Sometimes it’s remarkable what they change they make. It’s like 90% of them get improvement in their times just by doing drills on 25s. Never doing a single interval the entire week. Nothing hard whatsoever. In fact, they’re very tired coming into this day. So they’ve got everything, all the cards are stacked against them and yet they swim faster. Most of them do. The ones who don’t swim faster, I think are probably because they’re so tired, they just can’t do it. And I suspect they’ll be faster when they get home if they keep on doing the stuff. So then I tell them the last day, now you know you can get faster doing this, no more intervals. Until you can swim the gold time

we’ve worked out for each one of them, no more intervals. Just work on your technique. Just work on those four things. Every day, when you go to the pool, especially the base parade, every day when you go to the pool, all I want you to do is swim 25s. Swim a 25 and work on those, of those four things, which one is the weakest for you that you need to work on? Just swim a 25, focused on that. At the end of the 25, stop on the wall, lay back on the wall, look around, see what’s going on, forget about swimming for a minute. What are you gonna have for supper tonight? What are you doing at work? Take as long as you want. I don’t care how long, don’t time it. And then start bringing your focus back again to that one thing you gotta work on, swim another 25, focused on that one thing, stop at the wall, and so forth. And so do that for like a half hour. That’s all I want you to do, entire base parade, is swim a half hour swim 25s,

just working on your particular weakness of PDLC. Every day, do that. That’s all you’re working on. If you have a master’s program you’re swimming with after that and the coach on deck tells you to do something different, reach over the barrel, put your fingers together, put your fingers apart. What do they tell you to do? Say, okay, I’ll do that and then forget it. And come right back to doing the four things that I just taught you, PDLC, because that works. We just proved it works for you. So keep on working on those four things. So I’m trying to get overwhelming information here, but that’s what I do with swimmers in a camp is those four things.

I was smiling all the way through that because, first of all, I love that approach. I love keeping it simple because I believe a lot of coaches overcomplicate things. And I’ve read some comments on, let’s say some videos I’ve put out on YouTube and I’ve had someone in there just give this big spiel about, well, you should be doing this, this, this, this. And as a coach of 17 years, I can’t understand what they’re saying. I’m thinking someone who’s been in the sport for a year or two, they’re not gonna understand this either. So the best way to teach something is the simplest possible version. And I really like your approach there. And it’s very similar to the approach that we take at our clinics. And I’ve tried to refine this over the last eight, nine years that we’ve run these clinics. We start with a similar thing, post your head position, make sure you’re holding your body and your head correctly. Then we go on to,

we do call it alignment, just making sure you’re in line with the shoulders. Then we work on that rotation side to side. And again, not too much either. So I see a lot of coaches telling people to rotate much more than what they need to. So I think rocking side to side, rather than rolling side to side, because we do, I do see a lot of swimmers, and I’m sure you do too, or triathletes, when they’re going to take a breath, they’ll roll to 90 degrees. They lose their balance and the leg splay and things fall apart there. So we work on rotation. And then we pretty much just focus on the catch or the catch and pull or whatever you might like to call it. And that’s it. They’re the fundamental things that’s going to make someone who’s a two minute per 100 swimmer. They’re the fundamental things that’s actually going to move the needle for them. And it’s, when you explain it like that, it can seem like, no, that’s too simple.

Like there needs to be more to it. But when people see themselves swimming, they go, oh my God, I can’t believe I look like that. And I feel myself three weeks ago and I looked at them and I can’t believe I look like that. And I’d consider myself a pretty reasonable swimmer. But yeah, people can see, okay, I’m not actually doing the things that I think I’m doing. So if you just can be intent with sticking to the fundamentals and just working on your technique and not fogging yourself for the next couple of weeks, if you’re around that two minute mark or a little bit quicker, you are going to be seeing results if you can just get those things right. So I’d love to hear that approach because it gels a lot with what I’ve tried to develop over the years. And I mean, I learned from a lot of coaches and try to use things that I find helpful. And I really liked the one too about being on the wall, getting that extra little bit of length

where you rotate in the body, you get in the shoulder to come up and the hips to rotate a little bit. That’s a great one just to show that extra length because when we do six, one, six drill with the six kicks on the side, take a stroke and swap, a lot of swimmers, they just, they’re flat. They’re not rotating at all. So it’s like, yeah, let’s exaggerate that rotation, get you used to it. And then we’ll dial it back a bit, but let’s exaggerate these things to learn it. So I mean, for me, this is kind of great confirmation in a way that, okay, I think we’re taking a good approach here. And you’ve had so many years in the sport and worked with thousands of athletes, I’m sure. So it’s great to, great to hear that. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form Smart Swim Goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improve with Form Smart Swim Goggles,

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Yeah, it does work. It’s amazing how when you make things simple, athletes get better. The more complex we make things, the harder it is for them to understand and we don’t get any place at all where things are really complicated. So I kinda keep it in the back of my mind all the time when I start thinking about things that I wanna do with an athlete to get them to improve their performance. First thing happens to me is I start going through all the details. I’m starting to think about all this stuff and I have to remind myself, keep it simple. Keep it simple, that’s what it’s all about. It doesn’t have to be complex. And the athlete will improve faster and better and become a much faster athlete if they simply learn some of the basic things and get these basic correct. Now, if I’m talking about somebody who’s an Olympian, different story. Now I can deal with it. It’s a much more complex situation now with this athlete.

But this athlete’s got a much better understanding of what’s going on too and has mastered a lot of things about the sport. But there’s still things we need to work on with. Still need to tweak things. And so consequently, working with an Olympic athlete is not anywhere close to working with somebody who started swimming when they were 35 years old. It’s an entirely different animal. So you got to treat it entirely differently. Yeah, very true. And one of the concepts that I think is very simple is the five and two training concept. Could you talk a bit about that for those that may have not heard it before and where that originated? Yeah, originated with me. The almost everything I do with athletes originated with me, the PDLC, for example. But I realized that I was working too hard because I’m training too hard. This has happened decades ago because I would get pretty worn out fairly quickly. Fairly early in the week.

And by about Thursday, you know, every week, I’m like dreading the Saturday workout because I’m already just dragging my heels as I try to run or swim or whatever I’m doing. I’m just tired all the time. And so I began to realize, you know, the problem is I’m just working too hard. I’m doing too many hard workouts. I need to do fewer hard workouts. That’s the key. And I started reading more and more about the benefits of doing easy workouts. And so I started shifting my personal training from high intensity all the time or nearly all the time to low intensity nearly all the time and high intensity rarely. And so what evolved from that was what I called 5-2 which is five easy days every week and two hard days every week. Easy days could include a day off. So if an athlete wants to take a day off, that’s fine. In fact, that’s a good thing to do. So instead of training five days easy, we train four days easy, but certainly a day off is easy.

So you get five days easy every week and two days hard. The idea is on the easy days that you really go easy. On a RPE scale, one to 10, you’re doing a one or a two.

You know, it’s way down there. It’s really quite low. You’re really not pushing yourself at all. But when it comes time to do one of the two hard workouts every week, now you’re doing something’s more like a eight, nine or possibly even a 10, which is not usually the sort of thing you need to be doing, but some much, much higher intensity. So we only do that twice a week. And I try to separate the two hard workouts for athletes. So if they do a hard workout on Tuesday, the next hard workout is gonna be two or three days later. So it could be if it’s on Tuesday, have the Wednesday, Thursday easy, Friday could be hard or Saturday could be hard. If Saturday’s hard, then Friday’s easy. So every week is five days easy, two days hard. If you do that, so you’ve spaced the workouts, the hard workouts, so they’re always separated by two or three days, the athlete comes into the hard workout much fresher. It becomes a higher quality workout

to get a lot more out of it. And besides that, we’ve now gotten a lot of aerobic fitness out of this too. There’s a lot of stuff out there now about zone two, the benefits of zone two for aerobic fitness and quite honestly, that is exactly what it is. You’ve gotta get a lot of time in zone two to improve your aerobic endurance. Triathlon is an aerobic sport, is not an anaerobic sport, it’s an aerobic sport. You need lots and lots and lots of time aerobically. What does that mean? Well, that means basically trying to keep your lactate level below two, and we’ll get into details on all that, but keep it easy. And if we keep the lactate levels low, then you’re working on your aerobic system. As soon as the lactate level starts to go up, as soon as you start to accumulate lactate in your blood, you’re no longer improving or enhancing your aerobic fitness, your aerobic endurance. Now you’re working on something else,

but it’s not aerobic endurance. Most athletes spend far too much time in zone three. If we talk about a five zone system, they’re spending far too much time in zone three because they think to get more benefit out of that, and it’s only slightly harder than zone two. Well, they don’t really realize what they’re doing. They’re accumulating lactate. When you accumulate lactate, it screws up the entire aerobic system, and so you don’t get the benefits you would have gotten out of the lower heart rate. So that’s basically five, two in a nutshell. It’s five days easy, two days hard. And the thing that ties in with that same idea is that we’re gonna emphasize zones two and zone five. What you’re doing for, you do a lot of zone two and a lot of zone five. Zone five improves your two max. It’s the best indicator there is of your fitness. How fast you can go at VO two max is, if I just knew that about every athlete, if I could just get,

we have a list of athletes who are gonna start the race and they can tell me what their velocity is at VO two max, I can pretty much tell you how the race is gonna turn out. Who’s gonna win? Who’s gonna be second? Who’s gonna be third? Write down the list. Because velocity at VO two max or on the bike powered VO two max is really the key to performance. And so we get to elevate your VO two max and that’s gonna drag along your speed along with it. And so you’re gonna become, you’re gonna start doing a lot more zone five stuff and a lot more zone two stuff and no zone three. We’re only gonna do zone three if the race you’re doing calls for zone three, like a half Ironman for a lot of athletes would be done in zone three. Well, we’re gonna spend a lot of time in the specific preparation period getting ready for zone three, that’s okay. But if your race does not involve zone three, if you’re doing an Ironman, you’re gonna be in zone two,

there’s no reason to be doing zone three. If you’re doing a sprint distance race, you’re gonna be in zone five, there’s no reason to be doing zone three. So we narrow it down to what are you training for and let’s make sure we get the intensity right for that event that you’re training for. So it’s five to five days easy, two days hard, emphasis on zone two and emphasis on zone five. That’s kind of the whole concept in that show. And with that sort of training, let’s say zone five, are you thinking much about that in the pool with triathletes or is that more why I can run, how would you split up those sessions? It’s basically the same thing. But I don’t start doing anything as zone five as an athlete in the pool until they’ve got PDLC figured out. There’s no reason to go out there and go as fast as you possibly can. If all you’re gonna do is fall apart in the pool and start making lots of bubbles around yourself

and not go into any place any faster. So that’s the first thing. Once they’ve got PDLC under control, they’ve got it figured out and they’re now a master swimmer, now we can start working on things like high intensity training. So now we can go back to doing intervals. Now we can do that zone five stuff, accelerations. All the stuff we’ve gotta be able to do like when you’re going around a buoy and open water swim. Things you gotta be able to do to come out of that buoy and accelerate again. So when you start doing things that have to do with the sport itself, the start of the race, the start of the race is always fast. If you wanna be with the lead group or with any group, you gotta be able to start out fast with them. So we gotta work on zone five. But again, not until we’ve got PDLC mastered. Once we have that, now we can start working on the high intensity stuff.

It’s like trying to drive a car before it’s been completed. It’s like, yeah, yeah, get it to get it completed. And it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be most of the way there because we’re not looking for perfection with technique. I don’t think there’s such a thing, but we really want those core fundamentals in place. I really like that approach. And something that you’ve spoken a bit about recently is the transition is people go from their 40s, 50s into their 60s and 70s and the decline in VO2 max and their capacity there. What mental advice do you have for people as they transition through that period? Because I mean, even I think personally, for me going from my late teens, early 20s, you’re invincible, can’t get injured. And then as you go into your 30s, you start to realize, okay, you’re not invincible. You need to be a bit smarter about your training and your approach. You need to do a bit more strength training

and recovery and those sorts of things. So what sort of mental advice would you have for someone transitioning from the 40s and 50s into the 60s and 70s? Yeah, there’s things that change. As you mentioned, you’ve hit the nail on the head there. One of the most common things that changes is your VO2 max starts to decline. That’s been going on probably since the athlete was in their early 30s. That’s been going down. And they may not have noticed it because they’ve gotten smarter. They’ve become better at training. They’ve become better at racing. They know the nuances of the sport. And so they may be able to keep this hidden by the, they may have started losing their VO2 max aged 32, but aged 37, 38, 39 are still doing pretty well because they’ve figured out all this stuff about how to do this sport. They don’t realize it’s going on in the background, but by the time they’re in their mid 40s, typically they’re very aware that something isn’t right.

And by the time they’re in their 50s, it’s become obvious. It’s like, there’s no way to hide this. I do not have the VO2 max I used to have. And this keeps on going. Every decade, the athlete gets a little bit slower than they were previously. And it really is difficult to deal with with the athlete because you can make changes. You can stop it temporarily. You can stop it, slow it down. You can even reverse it temporarily, but you’re never going to get to go back in the other direction in the long run. It’s always going to keep on coming back down again. But the idea is to get it up as high as you can for your age group and your gender. So that becomes one of the goals of training is to keep that high. That’s where zone five comes in stuff. The stuff you do in zone five, the idea is to improve VO2 max. Now, the problem is, especially with running, that athletes are more likely to get injured when they’re doing zone five.

They push themselves too hard. So if I talk, you know, if I talk into a group of athletes and I tell them the ultimate VO2 max workout is something like four times four minutes at zone five with two minute recoveries. The next day, the athletes in the audience will go out and start doing them and start doing their workout immediately. Four times four minutes as hard as they go with two minute recoveries. And what’s going to happen is, especially if it’s running, they’re going to get injured. They’re going to push it too hard. You can’t do it that way. You cannot start out immediately at the top. You got to start out building very slowly. So if that four by four is the ultimate workout, we’re going to start with 15 seconds on, 15 seconds off, then every five, we’re going to take a break for about three minutes and then go back and do it again. So we’re going to start very, very piecemeal and bring this together with a few seconds at a time.

Then we go to 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, move to a minute on, minute off, minute and a half, minute and a half, so forth. Then we finally get them up to four minutes on, four minutes off at zone five. But we’ve done that over the course of, gosh, three or four months. We just can start out immediately jumping on the track or in the pool or on the bike and immediately starting trying to do that. You kind of built up to it very slowly so they were, their body adapted. And that’s where athletes, that’s why athletes mostly get injuries is because they don’t allow their body to adapt. They push it too hard. They can, they push their limits, they’ll get faster. But all they really do is they wind up putting themselves in danger of being injured and therefore actually slowing themselves down for a long time and starting all over again once they finally recover from the injury, whatever it may be. So that’s the first thing you got to be concerned with

for aging athletes is VO2 max, muscle atrophy. That’s one thing that happens with athletes also. They start becoming, as they get into their 60s, 70s, they become lazy. They quit drifting in weights and they quit doing hill workouts. They quit using paddles. They quit doing things that give some muscle to them, give them some more muscle mass. And because of that, they lose the muscle. It starts atrophying. And once it starts atrophying, it’s very difficult to turn it around. You’ve got to be very, very focused on doing this and something you need to be doing all the time. So that’s the second thing that’s very common for athletes, especially under 60s and 70s. Not so much in their 50s, but it’s going on and they just don’t realize it. The final thing is body fat. They’re gaining body fat as they lose muscle mass. So body weight may still stay about the same, but they’re gaining fat while they’re losing muscle.

And so consequently, we need to do something about that. What the search is telling us anymore is that aging athletes, especially 60, 70-year-olds, but really all aging athletes probably, should be getting more protein in their diets. And more protein means more muscle, basically. If you do something to stimulate that muscle like lifting weights. So that’s the starting point for them is doing something that increases, gets more protein in, so we can start doing things that build muscle mass, but you’ve also got to be doing things along the lines of the produce muscle mass, like lifting weights. Those are the big three. They all tie together. They’re all related in some way. And the bottom, the thing that ties them all together mostly is sleep. If you get adequate sleep, by adequate, I mean at least seven hours of sleep a night, if you get adequate sleep, most of these things won’t be flying as rapidly as they would have otherwise.

But unfortunately, as we get older, we tend to have a harder time sleeping. And so it becomes more of a challenge to get seven hours of sleep a night, to improve your sleeping. But I even hear athletes in their 30s and 40s saying they don’t wanna sleep very much. They try to get as little sleep as possible so they can get up and get started again the next day as fast as they can because they can sleep when they’re dead. Well, the good thing there is, if you do that all the time, you’re gonna be dead much sooner than if you got seven hours of sleep every night. And it’s been connected with Alzheimer’s also. Poor sleep is a good way to wind up with dementia. So when you’re in your 70s or even 80s, possibly. So sleep is kind of like the common denominator for all of these things, but most athletes, I’m afraid, don’t give sleep nearly enough importance in their lives.

I get it in some ways where I like to get up early in the morning, I like to go training early, I like to be up before the sun’s up because I’m excited to sort of start the day. But if I go to bed at 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock, it’s too late and I’m gonna feel the effects. So there’s that philosophy of the harder I work, the more success I’ll have, which is true to an extent, but you’ve gotta be smart about it. And if you’re thinking long-term, that’s what I really like about your research into this and the things that you talk about is you are looking 10, 20, 30 years down the track for a lot of athletes that’ll be listening to this podcast. And I think the first step to stopping it is that awareness. This is gonna happen, it doesn’t matter who you are. When I was in my 20s, I thought, I looked at people in their 30s and 40s and went, I can’t believe you’re complaining about a sore back and all these sorts of things.

You think you’re gonna be able to escape it, but as you get a little bit older, I’m in my mid 30s now, I look back and think about some of the things that I thought as a teenager or 20-something and went, oh my God, I was so naive back then. This happens to everyone, but you can get a step ahead and just make sure you put some things in place and you’re just consistent with the training, the strength training and you’re smart about it and you can make sure you’re still at the top of your game at your age bracket, whatever that might be, but you’ve just gotta be aware of it first of all. Are there any other things that you look at or maybe you wish you knew when you were younger?

Yeah, pretty much what you just said a while ago about realizing that things are not gonna be the same when you get older. You know, I’m now 79 years old. I’ve been doing this since I was in junior high school since I was, gosh, 12 years old. And so all these things have happened to me. I’m very familiar with all of these things from a personal account. My VO2 max has gone down. First time I had my VO2 max tested was when I was 40 years old and it was 65 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which is okay, nothing great, but it’s okay. Now it’s like 45. So it’s gone down 20 points over what, 30, almost 40 years. It’s gone down 20 points in almost 40 years. I’m losing about five points per decade, which really isn’t too bad, but I’m not happy about it. So I still do my VO2 max intervals once a week to bring them up, to try to keep it up high. I’m a cyclist. I do group workout every week with a bunch of guys who could be my children

and they give me a hell of a workout. And so I’m always doing things to try to keep pushing myself to be the best athlete I can be as I get older. And people who I look up to are those people who have done that already. And I know lots of them. They’re all, many of them are friends of mine that have really kept state active over their lifespans or now some are in their 90s, even though one guy who was over a hundred years old was still working out every day. So those people are amazing and they’re my role models. I try to learn from them everything I can.

And Joe, before we wrap it up here, because I appreciate, you know, we’ve been on this podcast for almost an hour now. Is there anything that’s been capturing your curiosity lately? What’s been peaking your interest there that you’ve been researching or thinking, oh, this is interesting to me. I want to find out a bit more about it. You know, one thing that always interests me is how we got here, how we came about as humans. But I don’t know why that interests me, but I follow Paleoarchaeology on Twitter, just so I can see what they’re talking about. This whole idea that our ancestors, things we’re good at now or not good at now, came from our ancestors 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years ago. And so I look at this zone too. For example, we talked about a little while ago, and I look back at how the hunter-gatherers, you know, 20,000 years ago, how they hunted. What’d they do? They hunted typically two days a week. They went on a run to find a deer

or whatever they could find, a big animal, and they ran it down. We’re the most endurance-capable athletes on the planet. No other animal has the endurance that we have. That’s what we’re good at. So a deer can just very, very fast, but they can’t survive being chased by humans. So eventually the deer just gives up, falls down, collapses, and that’s the end of the deer. And now the hunters bring the deer back to their camp

and they feed for two days. Maybe three, but how big the animal was, then they go out and they hunt again. And all this zone, all this training, all this running they’re doing is zone two. They’re not sprinting until the very end. It’s all zone two. It’s just this nice rhythm that goes on for a long, long, long time, in some case hours, as they’re chasing an animal, trying to wear it out, and they always win. So we’re still doing the same things. We’ve evolved to work out hard twice a week and go easy five days a week and go when they go hard to really go hard and we go easy to really go easy, but to go for a long time, we’ve evolved to do these things over the course of,

I don’t know how many thousands of years, but it’s just part of our DNA. And so we’re doing things now that we’ve learned to do, but they’re all very good for us. So if we try to beat them back by doing things differently, trying to work out five days a week hard, it’s not gonna work. We’re not designed for that. I love it. There’s something about zone two, where it’s just got this nice tempo when it’s like a drum beat that just sort of sits in the background. And for me, it’s a really satisfying type of training to do where I don’t really find it monotonous. I just find it enjoyable once you get into the groove of things. And I know from my swimming background, you had the distance swimmers and you had the sprinters. And the sprinters didn’t, most of them did not enjoy that zone two, that easy work. Although they’re very good at it because they would just go very easy. More zone one, they would never put in much effort at all,

yet could pull out a really good sprint. But those endurance athletes that I used to train with, just just love getting stuck into a long set. And yeah, to me, that’s a really enjoyable type of training. And I think it’s really interesting to look back and just see where does that maybe originate from? Or how does it time to where we are today? So I think that’s fascinating. Any projects, what are you working on at the moment and where can people buy your books and find out more about you if they haven’t come across you before? Yeah, in a nutshell, I’ve just finished off a project, just now finishing off a two year project called The Craft of Coaching. It’s a multimedia online series of 17 modules that we put together. There are video recordings, there are roundtable discussions, there are interviews, there are articles that people or I have written on all kinds of subjects trying to cover everything that a coach has to deal with in their coaching.

Just now finishing that off, you can find it by just by searching the internet for craft of coaching. So that’s the biggest thing I’m working on right now. And I just finished off revising my triathlete’s training Bible. The last time I wrote it was 2016 and it needed to be updated. So I just finished that project, off took me about two months to rewrite large portions of it. And that’ll be coming out probably about the end of the year or the first of next year.

Can I ask about what you updated? You know, what were some of those things that you revised?

A lot of things on intensity. I set up my intensity zone system back in 1987. And I thought, well, it’s time to take a look at that again. And so I did. And I made a lot of changes, like heart rate zones, power meter zones, so forth. So I went through a lot of things and just made, started to update, going back to the research and looking to see what we now know that I didn’t know in 1987. And so I’ve changed all the zone system that I’ve been using and tried to keep it simple, but somehow it still came out rather complex, I’m afraid. I think the center of one of my friends is a PhD in exercise science at the University of Stirling in Scotland. And he said back and said, way too complicated, which he should have said, that was a good thing to say. So I had to keep on rethinking the thing. I got down as simple as I could, but I think it’s still too complicated for him. But anyway, so that was the biggest thing I changed.

And that then required all kinds of changes throughout the book on, wherever I talked about intensity, I had to make changes on what the intensity, how you came up with that intensity. Gotcha, that’s a funny one, isn’t it? It’s just so, everyone’s got a different idea of it and how they would classify zone two and zone three and all these sorts of things like it’s, yeah, it’s a bit murky. So the fact that you’ve been able to feel like you’ve been able to keep it quite simple, I think is good, but it’s a hard one just to condense into a really, simple couple of sentences or a small graph or something like that. My table had 10 columns and 10 rows. So it was not very simple. And I think I got it down to nine columns and 10 rows. So it changed a whole lot, but I had to have all that stuff in there just to be able to explain it in the book. So I kept referring back to that one table throughout the book. So anyway, that’s the newest thing for me.

Fantastic. Well, Joe’s been great having you on the podcast. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and the things that you’ve learned over your years of coaching. And some things that we’ve covered is the PDLC, I really liked that approach. So for someone going to the pool, you can think of, all right, what should I work on first? I talk about it like building a house. You need to build that foundation. You got to build it in the right order. And so posture, direction, length and catch, really liked that approach. And then number of drills as well. You talked about exaggerating some changes to be able to actually see a difference in your stroke because we find people just don’t do things enough to actually see any sort of difference. So I’ve got to exaggerate it first and you can always dial it back. And you just talked about some of the, talked about five and two, two hard days, five easy days. Again, it’s a really simple way to think of

what should I be doing with my training? And there is a tendency for people to over train because they want to push harder to have more success. But if you’re smart about things, you can go a lot further. And especially the consistency of things as well, where if you train consistently for six months without injury, you’re probably going to be a lot further ahead than if you pushed it too hard in months too when you had to sit out for a month, you’re going to be further behind. So just being able to have that consistency and not get injured. So Joe, thanks again for being on the podcast and I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Brandon. I enjoyed it. 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.