The Swim Technique Hierarchy of Needs for Triathletes | Brenton Ford (Effortless Swimming)

That Triathlon Show

Mikael Eriksson

Health, Swimming, Endurancesports, Run, Cycling, Health & Fitness, Fitness, Ironman, Swim, Bike, Sports, Running, Sportscience, Triathlon

4.9 • 596 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2026

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brenton Ford is a swim coach and the founder of Effortless Swimming, one of the most well-known and well-respected resources of swimming knowledge for triathletes and open water swimmers. Especially for adult-onset swimmers without a swimming background. In today’s interview we start with an in-depth discussion of swim technique, before diving into specifics for open water swimming, training structure, and more. This episode is packed with information, and you’ll have a great chance of finding some advice applicable to your own situation that can help you improve your swimming.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to That Trafflon show, the podcast presented by scientific traflon and hosted by me, Michael Erikson.
0:14.3	With me today is somebody that most listeners are probably very familiar with, Brenton Ford from Effortless Swimming.
0:20.6	Brenton, welcome back to the show after a long time. How are you doing? Yeah, good. Thank you. And thanks to have me back on. I had to look back at our last episode, which was, I think it was three years ago now, three, maybe four. So yeah, long time, no chat, but I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, me too.
0:38.1	Four listeners that might not know you or be familiar with you, can you give a brief
0:41.7	introduction to yourself and what you do?
0:44.5	Yeah, I'm a swimming coach based in Australia, and I work primarily with triathletes who want
0:51.0	to get faster and more efficient with their technique.
0:54.0	We run a lot of swimming clinics
0:55.4	in Australia, some camps overseas, but we also work with a lot of people online. And for the last
1:01.3	probably 15, 16 years, I've really dedicated myself to learning as much as I can about
1:08.0	freestyle technique and how people can improve in the simplest
1:12.6	way possible and trying to make something that can feel very complex, hopefully become very
1:17.1	simple for them. And over that time, I've worked with beginners all the way up to many, many
1:23.5	different pro triathletes. And I love working with all different abilities because those that are new have so much potential to get faster. And then those pro triathletes. And I love working with all different abilities because those that
1:28.3	are new have so much potential to get faster. And then those pro triathletes, it's those little 1%
1:33.3	is that can really make a big difference whether they make the front pack or not. So I love working
1:37.9	with a wide range of swimmers and triathletes. And it's what I've really dedicated my coaching to
1:43.8	is helping those types of
1:45.4	athletes yeah excellent and we're going off the script right from the get-go here because I when
1:51.6	you said that you've been dedicating the last 15 years to learning everything you can about
1:55.4	freestyle swimming one question that popped into my head is what is is there something that
2:00.1	you've really changed
	...

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