Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. In podcast, before we get into today’s episode on should you wear a watch when training, is I want to let you know that Hell Week will be opening up very soon. So if you’d like to book in for Hell Week, which will be held in the middle of October in 2018, and you’d like to get notified when positions open up, then go to effortlesswimming.com, join our newsletter, there’s a little subscription box on the right-hand side, and I’ll send you an email once we open positions up, and the reason you might want to do that is because there’s going to be only about 20 spots opening for the camp. And last year it booked up very quickly, and we had people who wanted to get in last minute but we couldn’t because it was full. So if you’re interested in attending our Hell Week swim camp, which is held in Thailand

each year, then subscribe to the newsletter, and I’ll let you know as soon as positions open up. Now should you wear a watch in training to track your swimming? I’m old school on this. I prefer to not use a watch at all when training. Now open water is a little bit different. If you want to track your race, all good, go for it. If you’re swimming open water and you want to track your distance or see how far on or off course you’ve gone, go for it. That’s fine as well. But if you’re using your watch in training, then what I’ve found is a lot of the focus on the important things is taken away and given to starting and stopping the watch and checking your pace and checking your distance on the watch. So instead of using your watch when you’re training, take it off, leave it at home and see if you feel any better when you’re swimming because the important stuff is really your technique and how you feel in the water and how fast you’re going and how well

you can judge your pace based on your perceived effort. And I find that the watch can detract a lot from that. It’s a little bit different than wearing a watch when you’re running because when you’re running, you can take that quick glance at your watch and you can just sort of see how fast your pace is every day. You look down and that’s it. But with the watch in swimming, too many people rely on that to count their distance, to get their time and to tell them all this other stuff about their swimming that isn’t really necessary like their swolfe score and all that sort of stuff. So if you do wear a watch in training, a little experiment that I’d like you to try is for two weeks, leave the watch in your bag or leave the watch at home and just see how you go, not using that to track your swimming. Yeah, you might need to look at the 60 second clock or the stop clock at the pool to get your timing and your pacing.

And you might need just to count up how far you’re going in your head. But I can guarantee that the focus that you put into your technique into how things feel and to your perceived effort and how that relates to your times in the pool, that’s going to pay off a lot more than having a Strava profile that looks really good because you’ve swum 12Ks this week. So that’s my little test for you is if you do wear a watch, see how you go for two weeks without using it. Now, if you’ve got a coach that wants you to wear the watch to track the swimming, then just put it to them. See if they’re happy if you do not use it for two weeks and you’re just going to manually track your training and see if it works. And if for any reason it doesn’t feel any better or you don’t improve or you don’t find that your ability to judge your speed based on your perceived effort, if that doesn’t improve, go back to the watch and you’ve lost nothing.

But for the swimmers that I’m coaching, I like to try and avoid using a watch because it takes away the focus from the important aspects of swimming. So this has been another effortless swimming podcast. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Be back very soon with another podcast. 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.