#421 : How This Swimmer Got Faster, Without Working Harder with Brenton Ford
4/7/20264 min
If you feel like getting faster in the water means you just have to work harder… push more… suffer more… there's a good chance you're taking the wrong approach.
Because here's what most swimmers think: if you're stuck swimming 1:45 or 1:50 per 100 freestyle, and you're aiming for 1:30… the only way to get there is by getting fitter, stronger, and grinding harder every single session.
But what if that's not true?
What if the real reason you're not getting faster isn't about effort at all… but about how you're swimming?
Today, we're breaking down the b...
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsBrenton Ford· Host0:00
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.
Speaker 20:10
[upbeat music] If you feel like you would need to work so much harder to get faster in your swimming, you might be taking the wrong approach. If you're at a 1:45 or 1:50 in your 100 freestyle and you look at swimming a 1:30, you might currently think of that as, "Well, I just need to get so much fitter and stronger, and I need to try so much harder to get there." That might be the case if you're not that fit at the moment, but if you're swimming three times a week and you're putting in the work and you're generally fit and strong enough, then it might not be that you need to get fitter to get faster. What we often find is that people who improve technically in their stroke, they can then really make bigger gains in their stroke with their same current level of fitness. And we had a swimmer recently who we're working with in our coaching program who last year in a race he got fourth in a five-kilometer swim, and he looked at getting faster, "How do I do it? How could I possibly get first next year?" And he'd been sending in a couple of videos, and there was two key things that he had worked on based on what we had identified in his stroke. The first one was that he had a real tendency to cross over his center line. Now, when we think about entering and extending forwards, we wanna think about swimming on train