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 this week’s episode of the Effortless Swimming podcast. I want to start this episode off by telling you a story about a friend of mine who’s a pro triathlete and he’s always been a second pack swimmer, never able to make the first pack. And if he ever did, he was really working hard to do it. So it would ruin the rest of his race because you’d have to put in too much effort to be in that front pack. But recently, really this year, he’s able to consistently make the front pack. And at times he’s actually led and sometimes won the swim leg, which has been a massive difference for not only his swim, his bike and his run, but just his overall results and confidence in the water as well. And he did one thing. He’s changed one thing in his training that actually made the difference and helped him go from second pack to front pack. So I’m going to tell you what he did and how it came to be. So this past year, he was over in

Europe training and racing for several months. And he started doing some training sessions with another pro triathlete who’s let out the swim at Kona, who’s often the first swimmer out of the water in the races that he does. And he started doing some training sessions with him. And he realized that when they did fast efforts, he was actually the same speed. And he said to me, I thought he was just going to smoke me in the water, being the pretty much the fastest swimmer in all of Ironman. But he was actually the same speed as him in those efforts that they were doing. But the one area that he would actually get smoked in was in the recovery efforts after the hard efforts. So for example, if they did 150 fast, followed by 250 meters of recovery, my friend would be a fair way behind, he’d be two body lengths behind, because he just couldn’t recover from those harder efforts, as well as this other swimmer. And I’m keeping

them anonymous because I haven’t haven’t asked him if I can tell the story yet. So I’m just going to keep an anonymous for now. And so I realized that his ability to get his heart rate down and to swim, swim comfortably after the harder efforts, it just wasn’t there. He couldn’t match it with the best swimmers in Ironman. So what he started to do was doing more sessions where he would go hard, followed by a longer recovery effort, go hard, longer recovery effort, and just get really good at being able to go fast and then settle back down, but hold a decent just aerobic pace and aerobic effort. So to be able to get the lactate levels up, but then just clear it really, really quickly. Because in triathlon, you said that’s that’s what happens in these these pro races, they go out fast, the first couple hundred meters, so you’re having to work hard the heart rates up, but then it just settles. So there’s always that intensity at the start, because

they’re trying to get out there, get clear water and get away from the group. But then it usually just settles and and usually the packs will often sort of form, but they’re not swimming times that are too different. It’s just that initial couple hundred meters where it’s make or break. And so what he realized was that okay, I need to be able to get out fast and I’ve got I’ve got good speed. But then the more important thing is to be able to just bring that heart rate down and settle and not drop off and be trying to hang on to that front pack. And what he started to do was training sessions like that he was able to do more specific training sessions at main sets that allowed him to replicate what he was trying to do in in races. So he gave an example set of he would do 150 fast and we’re thinking like front end race effort. So 150 fast, 10 seconds rest on the wall followed by was it 350 recovery and just easy aerobic but just

looking to hold hold a steady pace there. Then another 150 fast followed by 250 recovery and then 150 fast followed by 150 recovery and you might do that two or three times through. So that’s a really specific set for someone like him to be able to train what he needs to do in in racing. 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, including a free one year membership when you purchase your goggles for only 249 US dollars. They’ve currently changed up their offer where you can now get the goggles and you have one year membership included for free and if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to the workouts training plans and custom workout builder but you’ll always have access to the real time data

in the goggles. So you never lose access to that. My favorite thing about the form goggles is having the instant feedback of what times you’re doing what stroke rate you’re doing and also the ability to see what your heart rate is because never before have we been able to have these immediate feedback heads-up display where it’s actually telling you what your intervals are. So when I wear the goggles in training I like that I know my split for the first 50 and the 100 and the 150 so every single lap I’m getting that feedback on what my pace is and I find it’s such an important tool for being able to not only have different gears where you can switch between the different speeds that you want to swim but it helps you develop those gears and it helps you intuitively know how fast you need to go before you’re going to blow up or before you’re going to go a little bit too hard so it helps you just get really good

at judging your pace for when you do go to a race and even if you’re not wearing the goggles in a race it’s that intuition and that ability to develop your pacing that these goggles can really help with. To get your pair of form goggles and say 15% off use our link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout and that will get you 15% off your pair of goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or the code effortless at checkout and one of the reasons I tell you this story is that quite often there’s things that can cause you to not get the results that you want and it’s not as evident initially why not get the results that you want but when we look at it in a bit of detail and compare it to someone who’s got the results that we want sometimes it’s easier to find where we might be lacking with things and the other thing too is that when you actually see

what elite athletes are doing whether in swimming or triathlon and you see how they train you see how they race you realize they’re just normal people yeah that they’re incredible they can do some incredible things across the different sports but they’re just normal people and if you are able to train in a similar way as them or if you’re able to to be able to match some of the types of main sets that they’re doing or the strength training if you’re able to set yourself up in as much of a similar way as you can to them and often they’ve got a bit more time on their hands but it’s not as surprising the results that they get and you just realize that they’re normal people there’s nothing necessarily extra special about them they are just like you and I and I think that’s something that my friend realized when he was able to then start to to match this pro triathlete in the swims and in the races so if you’re listening to this podcast and thinking yeah that sounds a little

bit like me I’m doing my triathlon swims I’m doing my races I’m just blowing up halfway through the race and I’m not able to sustain it one thing to consider is well maybe you’re going out too fast that’s what I see happen quite often is that people get really excited in the heat of the moment they’re surrounded by dozens or hundreds of other people and they just go out too hard too fast and blow up from there so maybe you just need to settle it a little bit in the first 200 meters but the other thing is in your training maybe you’re not replicating that maybe not doing anything specific enough to be able to replicate what you’re trying to do in in races so if you were to do a set like the one I’ve described 150 fast 350 easy 150 fast 250 easy and then 150 fast and 150 easy if you do that set as an example what I’d encourage you to do for the easy recovery efforts is try and hold your stroke count every single lap in that recovery effort and you’ll find that

the aerobic effort that you’re putting in to maintain your stroke count is very high even though you’re not swimming fast and you’re not swimming hard if you’re holding good stroke length there then it’s going to be physically quite quite challenging so we did a set in Thailand last week because we had our high-week swim camp there and so in between the sessions that we had I just did a session myself and we were doing something that was similar but just shorter interval so I think it was 25 was 25 fast followed by 125 recovery then 50 max effort followed by followed by 100 easy and my my target there was go all out for the 50 and the 25 but then just hold stroke count for the easy recovery efforts and we did that five times and the hardest part of that set was actually the recovery part because as you’re trying to hold your stroke count trying to keep your stroke together the heart rate’s up high robically I’m working very hard there especially after coming down from the

the fast efforts but that is a really good session in itself just to be able to compose yourself after the efforts and sessions like that can be great for help replicating what happens in a race so my question to you if you if you’re listening to this is is there something that you aren’t doing quite as well in your races or that keeps happening consistently in in races where if you were to add one session a week that address that could you get a better result with your swimming and maybe that’s a fitness thing maybe it’s a technical thing yeah maybe you start to get pretty sloppy towards the end of a swim where you’re throwing your head around or you’re crossing over those those are mistakes that we tend to see what can you do in training to help bring that to life and just and start to dial that in because quite often there’s areas there where we aren’t aware that we’re not training them just because we haven’t thought about them so that’s my question to you

if you’re listening to this episode thanks so much for listening now we do have a quite a few camps coming up next year so before I sign off here on this episode I just want to let you know ones that we’ve got organized currently we’ve got the Galapagos trip so this is like a swimming swimming holiday swimming tour of an incredible place out in off the coast of Ecuador there Galapagos islands I’ve got a link on our website and it’s I’m going to go there I’m going to coach you and do some underwater filming and analysis at the start and at the end of the camp and I’ll be there working with you throughout the camp while you’re swimming in these incredible locations so this is our first trip there and I’m really excited to head over there because of this place I’ve always wanted to to go and finally being able to organize a trip there so I’ve got our Galapagos trip in May we’ve got our Maldives swim camp in September

and then we’ve got our whole week swim camp in Thailand which is in October so they’re all up on our our website now or they’re about to be if you if you can’t see in there so go check those out at effortlesswimming.com join me at a camp I’d love to see you there I look forward to these things each year because there’s nothing I love more than getting a group of people together myself and some of the our other coaches and just spending five days or seven days together and working purely on your swimming while basically having a bit of a holiday it’s beautiful in these locations everything’s provided and you can just switch off and only think about your swimming so it’s a great opportunity to not only improve but really just to get around a group of like-minded people make new friends and hang out in some of the most beautiful places in the world so effortlesswimming.com you’ll see the camps there and I look forward to

meeting a lot of you there in the next 12 months thanks for listening see you next week 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