Effortless Swimming

I want to talk a little bit about breaststroke and what you can do to bring your times down, and be more relaxed, more comfortable and swim faster breaststroke. I got a email out from one of our Effortless Breaststroke customers this week and he’s been taking his son through some of the drills over […]

If you’re looking to improve your butterfly, then it makes sense to improve your rhythm because butterfly is all about rhythm. Here’s two drills from our Effortless Butterfly program which you can find at EffortlessButterfly.com and that’s a training program where we go through a series of drills which will take you step-by-step through the […]

This week is hell week.  And like I promised you last week I was going to give you one of our workouts from hell week. So that’s coming up very shortly. The rest of the workouts I’m adding in to Effortless Swimming Membership Program which is our online swim coaching program. So head on over to […]

Next week I’m taking my squad through a “hell week”. Which is one week of very, very challenging training where we increase the intensity and we increase the duration of our main sets. We also add an extra session in there. The reason that we do this is because with one week of solid training […]

John Konrads holds 26 individual world records and won the 1500 m freestyle in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. He now coaches up in the beautiful Sunshine Coast in Queensland. One of his mantras is “swim easy”. In this podcast episode I will talk to John and see how we can prove how swimming […]

Now, if you’re like me and you’re not a very good dancer because you lack rhythm on the dance floor, it doesn’t mean you can’t be a good swimmer. In swimming, you need to have a good rhythm because it reduces the amount of dead spots in your stroke and it means that you can […]

If you’re on any sort of underwater filming, whether that’s in one on one sessions with your squad or with your group then I’ve been using a really good little set up. It doesn’t cost too much money but allows you to get high quality video and get every single angle that you need to […]

I’ve been doing a lot of one-on-one stroke correction sessions where we do underwater filming,  where we get great footage of the swimmer. We then do analysis on the computer and then we jump back in the water and we go through some drills and exercises to help the swimmer improve their stroke. One of […]

If you swim in open water whether you’re a triathlete, an open water swimmer or you just enjoy swimming out in the sea or in the lake then, you’ll need to be sighting because it’s very easy to go off track and off course if you’re not sighting. There are two main ways to sight. […]

We’re back for round two for the second podcast with my favourite nutritionist, Steph Lowe of TheNaturalNutritionist.com Today we’re talking about the two big misconceptions about food. I’ve made some changes to what I eat lately based on misinformation I learnt when I was in school. Let’s get into it. Brenton Ford:     Welcome to […]

If you’ve worn a band in your freestyle before, some of those rubber bands or those synthetic bands that you can tie around your feet so that you don’t kick…then you’ll know just how important it is to kick to balance and time your stroke. When you’ve got a band on, it keeps your feet […]

If you’ve worn a band in your freestyle before, some of those rubber bands or those synthetic bands that you can tie around your feet so that you don’t kick...then you’ll know just how important it is to kick to balance and time your stroke. When you’ve got a band on, it keeps your feet and legs together so you can’t move them apart and you’ll find your legs most likely will sink and your feet will sink. When you take it off, your legs will rise and you can move your legs a bit to help with the timing and the balance of your stroke. I hear from a lot of triathletes particularly, they say that, “I don’t need to kick, I am a triathlete.” But that’s just not true. It’s true that you’ll probably won't get much propulsion from your kick. Only elite swimmers really get much propulsion from their kick. Whereas the majority of swimmers and triathletes, they use it for balance and timing. Go ahead and get yourself a band and see just how much restriction you get when you’ve got a band on. And how much the timing of your stroke and your balance is affected when you can’t move your legs. I recommend using a tyre tube which has been cut into a band or a Finis Swim Band which are only a couple of dollars.  

Last month I did a one-on-one stroke correction session with a swimmer and she was entering too early in her freestyle. So she was entering her hand before she needed to which meant that she was creating a drag as she extended forward. So we needed to move her hand entry out a little bit. […]

Last month I did a one-on-one stroke correction session with a swimmer and she was entering too early in her freestyle. So she was entering her hand before she needed to which meant that she was creating a drag as she extended forward. So we needed to move her hand entry out a little bit. Out a little bit further forward so that she wasn’t creating so much drag as she extended forward. Now, my favorite drill for doing this is fingertip drag freestyle where you drag your fingertips on the surface of the water as you recover forward.  The reason I really like this drill for improving your entry is because if you enter too early, you’ll find that your hand and your arm will catch and it will throw your shoulder down and you’ll feel the drag that’s created when that happens. If you enter too far out, you’ll enter with your elbows so you’ll know that that’s not the right way to enter. The fingertip drag freestyle allows you to feel the right place where you should enter your hand in freestyle. In fingertip drag freestyle, main things to focus on are: it should be like painting the water with your fingertips and as you drag your fingers on the surface, imagine you’re painting the wall of a house. That’s how you should do fingertip drag freestyle. The main mistakes I see made with this is that swimmers will be too tense when they do it. If you’re tense in your recovery, what I mean by that is that you are really forcing your arm and your hand forward, then that means you’ll be pushing the water forward with your fingertips rather than dragging your fingers on top of the water.  So if you’re doing that, then switch off the energy in your hand and in your forearm so that your arms relaxed and you can paint the surface. And this drill, fingertip drag freestyle, it’s really good for helping swimmers learn to relax in their recovery. Because if you’re tense in your freestyle, in the recovery, then you’ll find that you don’t have as much energy to pull through the water because you’ll be using more energy than you need to. In the Mastering Freestyle Program, a lot of the drills are geared towards helping you switch off in the right places in your freestyle. Because swimming freestyle isn’t like running as hard as you can for a hundred meters. Swimming freestyle is about relaxing in your recovery and using your energy for propulsive moments like your pool. The Mastering Freestyle Program is filled with drills and exercises that will help you learn how to do that. The fingertip drag freestyle is an excellent drill for learning to become relaxed in your recovery and to find the right entry in your freestyle.

This week I’m in Fiji and topic of today’s video is “What do you like to do in holidays to stay fit?”. Here in Fiji most of the islands are surrounded by coral, you can’t swim around a lot of them.  So, I have do some different things to stay fit because when you stop […]