There’s lots of ways to skin that cat, but we need to remember as the workload increases, our tissue capacity needs to keep pace with it. And normally with these injuries, these overuse injuries, it’s as simple as the workload exceeded the tissue capacity. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast is episode number 187. My guest today is Brad Beer. He’s a physio and a physio to probably a lot of names that you’ve heard in the triathlon world, the swimming world, the surf Ironman world and probably the running world as well. And not only that, you’re a pretty well experienced runner and triathlete as well. So Brad, welcome to the show. Brenton, thank you very much. So your background as a physio has provided you with a lot of experience working with athletes of all levels

from probably fairly beginner level, but up to a lot of professional triathletes and on from there you’ve been the head physio at the Super League Triathlon with the bar and endurance team. So what are some of these things that you’ve experienced and seen working with some of these guys at the very top? Yeah, it’s been a really great experience. There’s been many great experiences, Brenton and there’s a few observations that I know you would observe too with your work. With some of the pointy and swimmers. One is they’re just so committed. Two, they’re very intentional. And three, it’s interesting, sometimes the best performances seemingly come from the athlete that’s the most relaxed on the start line. And that doesn’t mean they’re falling asleep, but there’s a confidence within them. They know they’ve done the work, they’re well prepared. So I always find that quite intriguing to be able to observe from behind the scenes

what an athlete’s mental state is like before they take to the start line. So there’s a couple of immediate thoughts, Brenton, and it’s always just nice to see that they’re very intentional about recovery, highly, particularly the triathletes, highly attuned to data and workload. So they’re very athletically intelligent athletes, the triathletes, they’re really tuned in. Is there any sort of common trends that you see at that level, whether it’s with the triathletes or the swimmers or the surf, I mean, any sort of common trends you see with injuries, like what time the season they’re getting them, are there some common ones that you see happen as a result of some mistakes that could be avoided, those sorts of things? Yeah, definitely. One would very clearly be Brenton on the other side of the off season. As an athlete matures in years, an endurance athlete,

some athletes will take two weeks off, some will take four weeks. After Olympic cycle, you often see, as you recall and know from the swimming world off, and it’s maybe four weeks off of complete nothing because of that four year build up or five year build up for Tokyo. But one of the things you see with a complete off season where the athlete completely stops is on return to training for the running-based athlete. So distance runner or triathlete can absolutely be a swimmer as well or cyclist, is some onset of often soft tissue-related injuries with the return to loading. And that’s because across the two, four or more weeks of cessation of training, there’s some tissue deconditioning that happens. And then with resumption of the training load, once the load exceeds that local tissue tolerance, you might see an Achilles tendon become a bit sore or a rotator cuff in the shoulder. So that’s definitely one time

when athletes need to get it right, coming back from the off season to the start of training. And the other side of that is definitely towards the end of a long year or long season where an athlete’s been doing the training but also required to race X amount of times the triathletes might end up racing almost every weekend as they’re into their World Traffin Series events and events in between at the end of the year, Super League events, et cetera. So then you start to see that cumulative effect of workloads across a whole season and that can also produce your soft tissue injuries, your bony stress injuries as well. And I think that’s probably relevant to at least us here in Australia at the moment we’re getting locked down left front and center for a week or two weeks. Like it’s on and off. And I experienced this just last lockdown we had I think about two weeks out of the pool came back and just didn’t really give it much thought

like I just went back to the same intensity that I was doing prior to that. And I’m feeling it in my shoulders just went a little bit too hard too early and that was from just two weeks off. So what’s the answer there? What’s the solution for, how do you avoid those injuries when you do take that bit of time out of the water? Yeah, and we would all recognize that there needs to be a psychological refresh at some point. So the tapering and recovery experts all agree there has to be a down phase in the season or the calendar year. So if we make peace with this is it’s not bad for someone to have a break but as you say, there are key things to be mindful of on the return. And one is it’s a progressive return to training workload. So we try and avoid the rules of twos the rules being too hard too quick too soon too much I think we come back from an off season either really pumped up to get into it or sometimes a little bit like I could have had longer off

but typically I think most athletes are pretty motivated so they come back ready to get into it and have their best season ever. Either they’re building on a good year or they’re trying to redeem themselves from a season that didn’t go well, right? So that’s one consideration is just being aware of progressively increasing your workload. If it’s running related, if it’s running specific injuries we’re trying to minimize, Brenton, we know that it’s the magnitude of bone load that’s more important than number of loading cycles in the risk of bone stress injury development. So how that practically might look is an athlete returns to running a triathlete for example, after some time off. Restore the volume, the minutes of training for the running say it’s five hours a week or eight or 10 hours, whatever it may be three hours before that athlete starts to add intensity because it’s the magnitude of bone load which is a function of the speed of running

that is the greater risk for a bone stress injury. So that’s our key principle that athletes should be trying to not violate.

And the other part of trying to minimize injuries on return from an off season would be the tissue capacity of our bodies. So when we have a break it down regulates we do get deconditioning locally and more globally. So as the workload’s increasing the body’s tissue’s capacity which can think of in very simple terms as the strength if you like of the body or the tissues needs to be increasing as well. So that’s a progressive attempt to be doing some strengthening conditioning work. Now that can be as simple as poolside work for a swimming athlete, gym work for any endurance athlete, home programs. There’s lots of ways to skin that cat but we need to remember as the workload increases our tissue capacity needs to keep pace with it. And normally with these injuries these overuse injuries it’s as simple as the workload exceeded the tissue capacity.

And what about strength versus mobility? If you were to prescribe if you had to say let’s say it was an hour a week how much of each one would we wanna be doing and obviously it’s gonna be different for different people but where does that sort of where’s that sweet spot typically lie on how much of each and how do they go together? Yeah, such a great question. And it’s always gonna be individualized we all recognize that but just to sort of give a conceptualized answer

the remembering what we just shared and that is that it’s the deficit in tissue capacity which is primarily a strength or a weakness of certain tissues that presents the problem. It’s not typically because an athlete’s gotten stiff on an off season or during the season. It’s because the workload’s gone up and the tissue capacity rotates at a calf calf muscles that affect the Achilles tendon muscles on the side of the hip that affect the tendon on the side of the hip they have not kept pace. So if an athlete had an hour a week and I know it’s a fun little game

I would love them to spend 60 minutes of the 60 minutes available working on tissue capacity, endurance, tolerance and all those factors. Now that is not saying that a bit of mobility work hurts or isn’t important but it’s just stating how important the strength and conditioning element is for an endurance athlete. If they only had one hour. Yeah, that’s good. That’s really good. And you host a podcast yourself physical performance show you’ve had a lot of elite athletes on there as well from runners and swimmers as well as well as triathletes and with those guesses there been anything that’s come out in conversation that’s perhaps surprised you or that has led you to taking that on board and implementing that as part of your sort of physio practice or how you go about your own training. Has there been any examples of that? Can I give you two things, Brenton? Certainly can. Well, the first would be it’s always we ask one set quest

in two actually at the end of the show and one is what’s one key piece of advice you could dispense to help people listen in perform at their best and whether it’s a featured expert, athlete, coach it’s surprising but not surprising at the same time how common people talk about commonly people talk about consistency and being consistent and it’s kind of almost fun to hear because we know it’s important but I don’t think we can be reminded enough on how important it is. So that would be one of the key themes that’s emerged across the five years of sort of weekly outputted episodes. The other key theme, Brenton which I’ve certainly taken on board as a practising clinician, a sports physio but also as a keen recreational recreational competitive athlete is just the importance of fueling. And if we talk about ways to try and minimise injuries will arguably this is probably the biggest emergent theme for endurance athletes

in the last decade of sports medicine. And that is as an athlete’s workload goes up their fueling needs to keep pace. It really affects things like bone stress injury risk if an athlete has three or four indicators of low energy availability then they are 15 times greater risk of developing a bone stress injury. And how often do you see elite runners, triathletes succumb to a bone stress injury that really cruels their season and all that momentum behind it. We’ve featured some key minds on this dietetic experts, physiologists and it’s a common theme and the summary of how to fuel for your training is fuel for the work required. So if your workload goes up athlete A, B or C please fuel accordingly. We often don’t change our eating patterns much yet it’s not difficult for a triathlete for example to go from 10 hours of training a week to 15 hours. There’s a one third greater demand on the body for fueling yet we wouldn’t eat necessarily 30% more.

So that deficit can quickly add up and it can really result in an increased risk of injury and it can certainly decrease performance as well which is just, it’s comical in the sense not comical in the outcomes but comical in the sense that we’re training harder to try and improve performance but we have a handbrake on it because we don’t have enough fuel on board to power the adaptations to the workload.

Is there a couple of things that you would keep in mind when it comes to the fueling in regards to like eating beforehand what’s more important to make sure you eat afterwards and refuel like where does that lie for you and what you’ve found? Yeah, this is certainly a sports year this is not my department but in learning from the guests that we’ve featured

one of the key things is fueling before session. So I grew up like you did Brenton swim training in Australia we’d be at the pool at whatever time in the morning often straight out of bed most times I wouldn’t eat something before training

and this year I turned, last year I turned 40 and I wanted to tick off an Ironman as a lifelong goal so I did one several weeks ago and in the lead up to that I’d had a few bone stress injuries Brenton so I was very aware of making sure my fueling was where it needed to be to try and avoid another bone stress injury so I was very intentional about eating before every session eating after and then something I often tell athletes is they recover from a bone stress injury is eat more than you think you need so we underestimate how much fuel we need it’s very difficult to eat enough when you’re doing 10 hours plus a week of training so I’m personally sticking food in my face most chances I get. Yeah, and what about now? Has that changed since completing the Ironman? What sort of training volume are you doing at the moment? Yeah, well it’s gone from sort of 15 hours a week Brenton’s around anywhere from 8 to 12 at the moment

so it was meant to be the Gold Coast marathon this weekend but sadly as many people be aware that got cancelled with COVID.

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it can be a bit more challenging to come up to speed as quickly as someone that’s got those skills from early on so I started swimming in Brenton at 11 due to a friend of mine at Grafton High School Gordon Kilby who actually reminded me recently that I reminded him actually he commented on a post I put up about my cans I’m in performance and he said I said you were the reason I started swimming good and he said you were the reason I stopped so it was Gordon Kilby that got me into swimming in Grafton Brenton but I fell in love with the domestic triathlon seen on TV in the 90s the twoies blew the Accent Accenture series it had a few naming sponsors over the years but Brad Bevan was the dominant force in that domestic televised triathlon world and he was what I wanted to be in life Brenton so that was my early start at 11 in triathlon

and did you and haven’t you gone on to treat work with Brad Bevan and probably a bunch of those guys that you aspired to be? Yeah, I often think about that if you had a told that 11 year old star-struck boy that one day you’d get to work in the end of their careers with these guys and athletes I should say I never would have believed it so I don’t even had two paths in mine triathlon or physio so it’s been fun to morph the two together. Yeah, I can imagine is there anything that you’ve because for me personally right so coaching a lot and then when it comes to my own swimming sometimes I sort of take my own advice I’d give to other people and sometimes I just I do my own thing because it’s just what you do how’s that been for you in treating people? Have you had injuries because perhaps you haven’t followed the own advice you might give what’s that balance been like? Yeah, that’s a brilliant question I’d love to say I always practice what I preach

however I don’t and just like any athlete I’m fallible to get it wrong sometimes more often than we get it right so I’ve made most errors over the years and in some ways I’m happy to be a guinea pig because it does give you professional experience with these injuries

but I think Strava and the uptake of these digital platforms has kept a lot of athletes including me quite accountable because I do often get a comment or two on my Strava account if the session seems a little bit long or hard it might get a couple of people so comment on that so there’s an accountability that that’s brought to me which is good but I’ve practically made so many mistakes over the years I went through about five or six bone stress injuries in a 10 year period I haven’t raced a marathon since New York in 2015 and this was to be my first one six years later and the reason is I sort of bounced from bone stress injury to bone stress injury so that’s really forged a real passion for me to understand that space better and I love treating that in clinics now in clinic

and the number one reason so number two reasons I’ve developed those over the years looking back where I was simply under-fueled I was in the treatment room X amount of hours a day all week not often not eating just running from appointment to appointment I’d train in the morning, train in the afternoon I simply wasn’t fuelled enough and I was just doing too much intensity running in there so it was a perfect recipe for bone stress injuries

and why does under-fueling lead to bone stress injuries?

Great question

so if we think about training to answer this simply, Brenton we know that it’s not the training that makes us fit it’s the adaptation to the training so that adaptation is driven by our hormones our sex hormones testosterone, estrogen, growth hormone, etc and when we’re under-fueled that whole hormonal axis down regulates so we don’t have the same fire and if you like it or hormone health or hormone profile that we otherwise would so that can manifest in

for female athletes in lack of menstruation cycles or irregular cycles for males that can manifest this is something that’s been more openly discussed now and known and shared between practitioners and patients is erectile dysfunction so that can look like less morning erections for male athletes and I know it’s clunky and awkward and everything else but it’s really important female athletes have a very clear scorecard and that’s did the monthly cycle happen yes or no if not there may be an under-fueling component there particularly if it’s gone on for three consecutive months so these hormone this hormonal hormonal down regulation affects the the reproductive systems and it affects bone health so if there’s not enough fuel on board then bones can lose density which increases the risk of a bone stress injury

and then it’s a hard thing to have shown in the science but it would make sense that if bones are at risk through under-fueling so to a soft tissue’s tendon injuries which is one of the most common triathlon related injuries and swimming related injuries if you think about the shoulder so to summarize and simply it’s we need those fuel levels to optimise our hormonal profile which they direct everything whether it’s our reproductive system our tenocytes for our tendons our bone cells for our bones it’s it’s the key I was training with a a lady who does sort of that kind of work with with the elite athletes primarily females and she’s done a lot of work with the women’s AFL talking to some of those teams that kind of thing and she was saying that when she was a an athlete she was a runner as a junior and it was basically if you had your cycle that month then it was seen as a failure you haven’t trained hard enough maybe you’ve

eaten too much it’s like so it was so backwards and so her education now and what she’s trying to teach and get across is that is exactly that it’s like your overall health is much more important than being underweight and really like to be able to run fast because that is not with long term and it’s probably not going to be the best thing for your sporting and your sporting results in the long run as well absolutely it’s not just about health because a lot of highly ambitious motivated athletes would choose a performance outcome over their long term health like in the short term like it’s not unexpected that’s why they’re elite athletes but you don’t have to choose between them in fact if you want optimal performance you need to have an appropriate level of fueling you need to have a maximise sex hormone profile all of those things and in the swimming world I can’t recall the exact paper but I recall Dr. Margo Mountjoy on an expert edition

of the podcast I host the physical performance show and she was she’s an IOC sports doctor who was really the one that championed the change in naming from the female athlete triad to what we now know it as relative energy deficiency in sport because 50% of the athletes on the planet are males it affects males too they just don’t have a menstruation cycle Dr. Margo Mountjoy spoke about swimming out outcomes and they ran trials where they looked at swimmers that were purposefully underfueling versus those that were fuelled appropriately and I think it was a 400m time trial their 400m time trial performance was down in the group that wasn’t fuelled appropriately so we don’t have to choose between long-term health and right now performance measures in fact you can have both if you eat your cake and eat it if you have your cake and literally eat it too so there’s a greater awareness and it’s something that I’m so passionate about

as a health practitioner is educating athletes about this I look back at my 10 years of junior triathlon from 10 to 20 and I was likely underfueled the whole time and I picked up low bone density as a 36 year old I found out I had osteoporosis in my lumbar spine and I’d always lived a healthy life I was pretty stunned I went and had my bone density check done purely as a interest just to see where I was at and couldn’t believe the results now fortunately I picked it up I’ve worked sort of diligently in the last four years and I’ve improved that it’s now in the osteopenic range in my lumbar spine 70% of our bone density is genetic but I look back and I do think the lack of knowledge in the 90s and underfueling was no doubt probably part of what I’m now experiencing there you go and with the swimmers that you have come in to the clinic and that you work with is there something that you typically prescribe for them if they come in with shoulder injuries

and those sorts of things the majority of issues that I come across when people come to our clinics is shoulder injuries which is no surprise and sometimes it’s caused by technique when we slow it down we see there’s a pretty obvious reason why you’re having pain and issues there but then some of it is perhaps overuse or it might be just from sitting at the desk and having a bad setup there’s so many things that can cause it is there some pretty common ways to overcome some of these injuries that you see? Yeah definitely it always is prudent to have an accurate diagnosis Brenton because once that diagnosis is made then you just apply the right principles to get the treatment outcome you’re after and to think simply about shoulder pain a UK colleague of mine Adam Meekins who is a well-known shoulder focus physio Adam speaks about breaking down shoulder pain into really four groups one’s the weak shoulder two’s the stiff shoulder three’s the unstable shoulder

and four is the shoulder pain referred from the neck so if we quickly rule out a few we’ll be left with 80% of the presentations that the swim population the triathlete population will experience and that’s the weak shoulder so then the neck referred ones from nerve roots in the neck mind you there can be very rare occasions where people have a bony growth on their shoulder and that’s why someone presents with shoulder pain often it’s very good to have an x-ray the unstable shoulder that can present problems you know this Brenton from the elite swimming world there’s often such great mobility in these elite swimmers and sometimes that can become pathological so that’s that excessive range of motion which we see in the elite swimming swimmers can be people that have had trauma to their shoulder so dislocations etc the stiff shoulder you don’t tend to see outside of the very mature folks so the people with glenohumeral osteoarthritis

or arthropathy with the stiff shoulder in their 70s 80s whatever it may be and that can also include frozen shoulders our frozen shoulder is often over diagnosed sometimes we lose a bit of movement we get a bit sore and stiff and we go I’ve got a frozen shoulder but a true frozen shoulder is is often seen in the middle ages and more predominantly in women and it will last 12 to 18 months so we don’t often see that in the active population so much but the last category the first category we started with there which is where most of the listeners of your show Brenton if they’ve had a sore shoulder or if they develop a sore shoulder will sit a weak shoulder so it’s a soft tissue injury to the shoulder and it tends to be most of the time a tendon driven pathology or pain so it’s a tendonopathy that term tendonitis is now dead in the water we talk about tendonopathy and quite simply the reason it gets sore is because the training workload like we touched on

at the very start has exceeded that shoulder or the rotator calf’s capacity to cope with that workload so the way we get that right is we increase that tissue capacity at the shoulder and that’s through exercise but Brenton the exercise has to be progressive you can’t get some exercises day one and still be doing them in six weeks there needs to be gear changes along the way to make that harder and heavier and therefore develop better strength and soft tissue resilience I think you put that pretty well that’s interesting

I’m just thinking of the swimmers that I have come across that do come in and they do have some issues with the shoulder and I think a lot of them will spend a bit of time out of the water to let their shoulder heal and then they’ll get back into it now we talked about this at the start what would be the maybe the right approach for those that have got pain obviously they should go and see someone like yourself like a physio to go and get it treated but would that time out of the water if it’s three or four weeks would that actually make it potentially make it worse Great question Brenton I think if people think about injury rehabilitation or recovery as a two-sided coin and on one side of the coin you’ve got this strategy of calming symptoms down so calming down the upset sore shoulder how do we calm it down you just mentioned it Brenton it might be necessary or it might be wise to have a period out of the water so whether that’s three days

or two sessions or one week or two weeks that sometimes is a key requirement to get a timely outcome with recovery someone needs just to chill out take some time out let the shoulder settle down so that’s reducing pain that can also be achieved through medication anti-inflammatories for example when appropriate energisics were appropriate occasionally you might have a reactive bursitis in a shoulder that could benefit from a cortisone in corticostero injection these are all calming down strategies soft tissue work manual therapies you know all the host that all the things that that encompasses so that’s one side of the coin the other side Brenton is the building up the strengthening conditioning so they’re both required where people often get disappointed and you would have seen this in disillusioned is they take the time out it feels better because they’re not using it they’re relieved they’re happy coach is happy let’s get

back in they get back in the water and the shoulder gets sore again and the reason for that is because the swimmer or the athlete hasn’t addressed that strength deficit or decrement that existed so when people are out of the pool it is an ideal time to be working on that shoulder strength deficit and that’s got to be objectified it’s no good just throwing a bunch of stuff you know you need to know where your gaps are what the numbers are and then you get to work to improve it because we know that what’s measured gets improved right and how do they what are some of those things that they should be measuring and how would they go about it or how would a professional like yourself go about it yeah it’s great I term it sort of in my notes they even put capacity test in so if it’s a case of a shoulder we’ll use a handheld dynamometer like this where you have a swimmer pushing into it to a couple of different ways you can

test it a make test or a break test so developing force maximally or just quick force development and you’ll have a swimmer up in say the abducted 90 degrees it’s a common piece of gear here it’s going out of the room right now to the next route but you’ll have a swimmer up in say a 90 position externally rotating the wall to do that internal rotation we’ll test that flexion we’ll test that often abduction so all the key areas we might do something as simple as a push-up test how many push-ups can someone do before their shoulder gets sore so we’re thinking locally about the shoulder and then there’s other tests we might do Brenton further refilled so we might want to get some side bridge measures or some hip capacity testing done as well because we know that there’s a whole kinetic chain that’s involved the swimming right yeah fantastic that’s that’s answered a lot of questions that I had for you being having the expertise that you’ve gotten

I like the fact that you’re a triathlete a swimmer yourself because I think there’s so much that you can you can take on board from your own experience when you’re delivering that that advice because often we and I was a junior a lot of my teammates would go and see physios and they’d say like don’t swim for two weeks and it’s like you got you don’t swim beer like you probably don’t do any or much sport it’s like you so then you know we ended up changing and and seeing people who knew the sport and knew what had to be done and the results from that were a lot better rather than just telling people to stop doing completely what they were doing and they could you lose your swimming fitness and you feel for water so quickly and so we needed strategies to mitigate that and so often that would be kicking with a kickboard if you couldn’t swim at all if you had really bad shoulders but having people who have got that experience because it helped

so much in physios so yeah I think it’s great that you’ve got such a depth of experience in both of those worlds and on that I often say it’s easy and often lazy advice sometimes it’s entirely appropriate but when it’s appropriate fine because there’s times when people need to take time out but bone stress injury you know you can’t run through that really stirred up shoulder that you can’t swim 50 metres with right out of the pool but it’s easy and lazy often to say take time out it’s difficult to work with an athlete to get them finding their zone of tolerance so if someone is being given that advice ask questions about why ask questions about what you need to do in that downtime but maximise it there’s stuff you typically couldn’t should be doing yeah it’s the equivalent of like a swim coach saying you’re dropping your elbow you’re dropping your elbow get it up it’s like well how do you do it most people don’t know how to do it

or how to develop it so it’s very easy to say what they’re doing wrong a way or a method to be able to change it and explain what they need to be doing rather than just telling them what they’re doing wrong and it really frustrates me as a coach when people will get told those sorts of things those simple like one off sentences or words but it’s like now give me something to actually do to change it don’t just tell me that I’m dropping my elbow all the time like I say it all the time it frustrates me as a coach the frustration I have Brenton just like you shared there is like a communication between therapists and coaches you would have seen it over the years I’ve been told I can’t swim for this many weeks and you’re left sort of as a coach going well okay what else did they say like in my opinion that should never happen there should be a phone call a text message it doesn’t take much to the coach to say here’s where we’re up to

this is what the athlete can do let’s work together to make sure they’re back assume over the years particularly in the juniors you might have seen that happen a fair bit where the coach is pulling their hair out going well where are you up to with this how long is it going to take yeah that’s exactly right well Brent thanks so much for being on the podcast and for those listening where are you based if they need a good physio and where can they get in touch with you yeah thanks Brenton on based on the Gold Coast Australia the physio practices pogo physio let it for 14-15 years more or less since I graduated and Brenton a lot of conditions and this has been one great thing out of COVID one great thing that is most things can be actually treated remotely because normally with these endurance overuse injuries it’s a mismatch of load and capacity so as long as you’re working on the load of the athlete and building up capacity

you can get an outcome so if someone did need a hand happy to get emails b.bieratpogophysio.com.au and available on all the socials as well at Brenton fantastic well Brad thanks so much and I appreciate you jumping on sharing your experience with the listeners and yeah it’s been great to be a guest on your show as well and you have 270 episodes deep now so you’ve been doing that for a while and congratulations on doing that many episodes as well because as a host myself I know the time it takes to do this but I think personally too it can be a bit of a not a selfish thing in a way where it’s like you get to learn so much and so I’ve really learned a lot today and some stuff I can apply to my own swimming and my coaching so from a selfish point of view thank you for sharing all this team it’s mutual I’ve been working on my power diamond Brenton in my swim strike so 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