#415 : The Catch Timing Secret Olympians Use with Brenton Ford

Brenton Ford· Host0:00

That could be costing you five seconds per hundred, at possibly more. So for the same fitness, the same effort, with just better timing, you could be swimming five seconds, possibly more, even quicker.

Speaker 20:12

[upbeat music] 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.

Brenton Ford· Host0:22

There's a timing pattern that separates fast swimmers from slow swimmers, and you cannot always see it easily when you watch someone swim in real time. But when you slow the video down frame by frame, it's right there. Every fast swimmer does this. A lot of slow swimmers will miss it. But when you fix this one timing detail, you'll feel like someone's turned the engine on in your stroke. So today I'm gonna share with you what it is and how to feel it in the water. So it was about three years ago, I was coaching a clinic in Brisbane, and there was a swimmer there who was a master swimmer. He was 48, was swimming his whole life, very fit, and he was training about five times a week. And he was stuck around the 1:25 per 100. So fairly quick swimmer, but he couldn't figure out how to get faster. He'd worked on his body position, he'd worked on his catch, he'd worked on his kick. Everything looked fine. But when I filmed him underwater, we could see it immediately. His catch timing was off by about half a second, and that doesn't sound like much, but that half a second was costing him around three to four seconds per 100.