Torpedo Swimtalk Podcast with Award Winning Masters Swim Coach Tony Corben

 Award winning Masters Swim Coach Tony Corben joins us on Torpedo Swimtalk Podcast this week.

As coach and founder of the South Downs Trojans Masters Swimming Club near Portsmouth, he shares his unique philosophy on coaching that centres on pushing the limits and connecting with each and every swimmer.  And it is certainly working, as he has an ever increasing squad of swimmers lining up on pool deck to do his sessions.  He is knowledgeable and passionate about Masters swimming and wait till you hear some of the sets his squad does! 

Being a swimmer himself helps in his delivery and understanding of when to push his swimmers and when to back off.  Tony also shares with us the strength training program he developed, which is research and evidence based and is working wonders for his squad.

Dont miss listening to this episode now!

Find more info about the South Downs Trojans Masters Swim Club here

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Transcript

Danielle Spurling: 0:06

Hello Swimmers and welcome to Topedo Swim Talk. I'm your host, Danielle Spurling, and each week we chat to a master swimmer from around the world about their swimming journey. I'm joined today on the podcast by award-winning British master swimming coach Tony Corben. Tony not only coaches his own wife, world record holder Joe, but as coach and founder of the South Down's Trojans Master Swimming Club, he has an ever-increasing squad of Swimmers lining up on pool deck to do his sessions. What makes him so special? Well, we learn all about that today. He's so knowledgeable and passionate about master swimming, and wait till you hear some of the sets his squad does. Let's hear from Tony now. Hi, tony, welcome to the podcast. Hi, how are you? You're going really well. Where are you joining us from in England?

Tony Corben: 1:07

I live in a little village called Stubbinton, which is near Portsmouth. It's a tiny little place, about a mile from the beach, so we get all the benefits during the summer. It's a place we'd always wanted to live in. It's very quiet and peaceful.

Danielle Spurling: 1:22

Sounds really nice. I know you just mentioned off air that you had a bit of a funny story about swimming this morning. Do you want to share with us what happened?

Tony Corben: 1:31

Yeah, I had a really tough day training yesterday and then coaching last night, went to bed extremely tired, left my trunks on the radiator about thinking about it, drove over to the pool at half past five this morning, walked in through the door and then had to turn around and walk out, go home and get my trunks again. So things happened so, but it gave me an easy session this morning. I left Joe working hard.

Danielle Spurling: 1:55

That's really good. And just for all our listeners out there, Tony actually coaches the Trojans Master Swimming Club. You swim for them as well as coach them. So when you structure your week, how many coaching sessions do you do and how many swims do you get in yourself?

Tony Corben: 2:12

Okay, well, I don't train with Trojans at all. I actually prefer to be on the pool side with all the swimmers. I don't like being in the water town and what to do. So I train privately with Joe and one of our other swimmers, mark, at David Lloyd. I train Sunday morning, monday morning, wednesday morning, for about three and a half, four hours, depending on the set Joe sets us and also those sessions which I swim in. I Joe sets the sessions because if I do, I'll be pooling up and down at a very slow pace, not doing anything. So I let her do it, so she makes me work it.

Tony Corben: 2:50

As for Trojans, we have five sessions a week which I coach. All of them Monday night is a weird one because it's only in an 18 meter pool. There's very short, four lanes, old style school pool, so it's a bit more difficult to do decent sessions in there. But we've come up with some really innovative ideas for training there. We then have a session Tuesday night, eight till nine. Four, because we've got two, two squads in Trojan Masters.

Tony Corben: 3:19

We have the competitive training squad and then we have the skills squad who are people rejoining the sport or they've learned to swim, taught themselves to swim public lanes, swim as you want to improve their strokes.

Tony Corben: 3:31

So we have the two squads and, apart from Friday night, where the skills people we haven't got room for them or the other four sessions, we have at least a lane for the skills people to train in. So Tuesday night we have two competitive lanes, one skills and the next one Thursday night, we're over at a brand new pool in Port River, the Port River University pool, which is beautiful. We have four lanes in that pool, so we have one for skills, three for the competitive. Friday's back to Gosport, but we're in a 25 meter pool there and that's three lanes, all for competitive. And then Sunday we're over Raven Centre again, which is three competitive and one skills. But we also have the benefit we have an extra half hour on that one, with two lanes where we purely do start turns the minute, little detail, stuff that we want to do with smaller groups, which is really helpful because a lot of the swimmers have said the dives have been absolutely awful at competitions and now we start doing it. They've all improved.

Danielle Spurling: 4:33

So that's really good that you found time to do that, because I find with my own training we never get a chance to do that, even though we've got blocks with kickers on them, and we really only use them just maybe a week before the competition. But you should be doing it, as you say, all year round.

Tony Corben: 4:51

Before competition. Before we got the Raven Pool which we've only had for about a year now, the type of training, the pool time we have here, literally three hours a week, we didn't really have time to stop and say, right, let's go and do some starts and turns. And we could only do it at Gosport Leisure Centre because they're the only ones that have blocks, couldn't do it at the Brunpart School Pool because it's really old, no blocks or anything. So we used to do the Friday before a competition. We'd have 10 minutes at the end for everybody to have a couple of dives. But now we're literally it's every Sunday half an hour. We've got all turns, all starts and we've just invested in our own Backstreet Start wedge as well. Unfortunately it doesn't fit the blocks at Raven, but it does fit the blocks at Gosport.

Tony Corben: 5:40

I've got to modify them slightly. Once they've modified, we can use them over at Raven every Sunday night then, which would be good for the likes of Joe and some of the other Backstreet guys we've got. And to be honest, since we've got that time as well, it's the only time I get a chance to practice starts and turns, because for the starts and turns session every three or four weeks. I'll try if I can get in, if I'm feeling up to it, and just do the starts and turns for them, because at David Lloyd they don't like diving there. It's too shallow and too many people about.

Danielle Spurling: 6:10

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. How many members have you got at the Trojans?

Tony Corben: 6:15

If I give you a brief history of Trojans, we only start three years ago. Just after the first COVID lockdown, we as masters, when we were at our port, there was six or seven of us at our former club, Fair and Nomads, and our head coach was retiring. The intention was that I wanted to take over as coach, which never happened. They decided that they wanted some of someone more experienced. I'm not sure why they didn't want me. And then COVID struck and five or six of us sort of stuck together going down the beach to swim in the sea. We went down to the Hamble River and swam up and down the Hamble River for an hour or so and then a guy called Clive, who had started Trojan Swimming Club as an affiliated club, said why don't you come and join us? It aren't that interesting because there was a mess about the pool time as well. They kept changing the sessions we had. He said affiliate to us. We'll find pool time and we'll see when you get started as a club. So that was three years ago and we started in another school pool which was 18 metres and the deepest part of it was 1.1 metres and it was very hot it was something like 34 degrees that we started. It was so hot and ridiculous. But we started with six women three years ago. Within four months we moved to the other brewing part school with another 18 metre pool and had that for another couple of months before we got into Gospel Leisure Centre.

Tony Corben: 7:46

As the pool time grew the members started to come on board. But we basically went out and recruited all our old friends. People from our old club contacted people we knew, said we want to be purely masters no kids, no parents, no people in the background telling us what we can and can't do other than swim England, of course. So we started and we started pushing it. And when we got to Gospel Leisure Centre we have three lanes alongside the public and a couple of members from the public got interested and they joined us and it just grew word of mouth and virtually everybody in the club knows somebody when they joined.

Tony Corben: 8:26

So it's all friends word of mouth. And now we've got 58 members. Two are affiliated, they train elsewhere but 56 actually train with us all the time, which is a bit of a nightmare some sessions when you get there and you've got three lanes and 20 odd swimmers turn up and I've set a big 200 metre endurance set and I'm looking at the pool going. People are going to get a lap all over the place here, so you have to do a fast switch around and change the session quickly on the pool side before, but other days you can get only 10 there and it works brilliant.

Danielle Spurling: 8:59

Yeah, fantastic. I mean, that's a great story of foundation that you've come so far and got so many members in such a short time. You must be a really vibrant club and offering something to all those people coming along.

Tony Corben: 9:14

But the six of us who started it all would ultra keen to do it, and then a couple of the new people who came in who were old friends or old swimmers we used to swim with, it helped that we had our chairman. Mike came on board. I think initially he came in as a chairman, but he came in and started training with us. Mike used to be chairman of Gosport Dolphin Swimming Club, which is my very first Masters club that I started with. So I knew him and then I used to train as a master in the same things as him when he was a kid.

Tony Corben: 9:43

So it's like all goes round and round all the time and we're just all good friends and our ethos is we're a club run for swimmers by swimmers. We nobody actually gets on the committee, not more by default, but all of the committee, the chair and everybody else are swimmers who swim in the pool. So everything we decide to do is for the benefit of the swimmers and we don't do anything that's going to be detrimental to the club or the swimmers. We don't have arguments. We don't have parents in the background nagging about their kids not doing this, that and the other. Anybody who's got a problem can come to me or Mike and just talk about what their training is, what their injuries are, and we just keep it all open and make sure we accommodate anybody who wants to join us.

Danielle Spurling: 10:26

Yeah, I love that. I think more clubs should be run like that.

Tony Corben: 10:31

It's great because when I walk out on poolside with the swimmers for a training session or a competition, we're all good friends. Everybody gets off of everybody. There's no bickering, well, apart from occasionally Mark and Joe have a bicker about who's going to lead the lane because neither one wants to go first, but that's the nearest it gets to an argument on poolside at any one time. We just all love each other. It's fantastic club and God help us if we ever lose our poolside again.

Danielle Spurling: 10:59

I know. Well, hopefully that won't happen. I mean, obviously you're bringing so many people to the pool, they wouldn't want to take your lanes away now.

Tony Corben: 11:07

No, it's as I say. Sometimes we're absolutely packed out and it's hard work trying to get the set to work, but other times we can have some really good constructive sessions.

Danielle Spurling: 11:17

Yeah, how did you first get into coaching?

Tony Corben: 11:21

Well, I've been in the sport for 30, 33 years as a master. I came back when I was 29. I started with gospel dolphins and master. I got talked into coming back to it by an old swimmer which I knew from when I was a kid is swimming. I thought I'm a little bit far. I play football but I don't really play it. Well, I'll go along for a laugh. And before I knew it, we were all hooked as a club and the masters there at Gospels grew and, as I say, for 33 years I was in and out of gospel dolphins. I left there, went to Birmingham as I was part of the North Sea, the biggest club in the area and I've been trained by I think it's eight or nine different coaches and over the years I've sort of picked up the good aspects of what they've done, the bad aspects, the good sets, the bad sets and everything else.

Tony Corben: 12:14

And then in about 2017, 2016, I had a massive neck injury which basically put me out at the pool for six months. I had a huge operation on my neck, where they fuse all my vertebrae together. I was part. I was part paralyzed on one side. I'd lost all my strength on the other side of the body. I still to this day have problems with the strength on my right side of my body and I've got no sensory feeling on my left hand side of the body. You can stick pins in me and I can't feel it and that put me out of the sport for a while. And I started to think about coaching them, starting to think do I really want, if I can get back in the water? Because the surgeon said to me as well, you do know that once we operate on you, where you are now, how your body is, that's the best it's ever going to be. You'll never be able to train again, You'll never be able to swim again. You might be able to swim up and down and remain fair, fit-ish, but you'll never be able to swim properly again. You won't compete at any sort of decent level. And I then started to think about coaching and thinking well, I want to give something back. I've always enjoyed helping people. I've always enjoyed giving people advice on poolside for competitions and stuff like that, because of years of experience. So I just wanted to give something back. And then I carried on training.

Tony Corben: 13:35

I got back into the pool a year, year and a half after the operation Started swimming a little bit, thinking, well, I still haven't felt that bad. And then pushing myself harder and harder and you know what it's like when you start training. You think, oh, I might just do a competition because I'm going to the pool with Joe for competitions. And your mind starts thinking I'm not moving too bad, I can swim. I won't win anything, I can swim. And then I started winning 50 fly races. Then I started winning the county championships, six or seven events, and I was thinking, well, the surgeons are wrong, I can do this. So I pushed myself pretty hard all the way through to 2021.

Tony Corben: 14:14

When I went to the Nationals and I got bronze medal on the 200 butterfly because I'm 200. I've always been a 200 butterfly and I got bronze medal. I thought this is brilliant, I'm back, I can do it, I can do it for the next couple of years and I'll be back winning the Nationals. And then I went to. I started to get pain in my neck again, Went to see a physio friend and the immediate advice was stop training for butterfly. You can swim normally. The butterfly training is killing you. You carry on, You're going to be paralyzed for life.

Danielle Spurling: 14:43

Oh, wow.

Tony Corben: 14:44

Yeah, because the problem with the neck injury was it I had an undiagnosed slip disc for over 15 years which only found when they operated on the neck and it had gone, gone into the spinal cord and crashed the spinal cord. So I've got half of my neck is, or the spinal cord nerves are damaged or crashed or whatever, and the movement of my neck fly training was basically going to cause the same damage again if it carried on. So he said stop fly training, you can do the other sort of training, but because it's not so intense, stop fly training and just swim. And I thought, if I can't do fly, I can't win. It's as simple as that. I'm not a backstroke, even though I'm retraining now to be a backstroke. I'm bloody awful, to be honest, on breaststroke and my front core is okay, but the stroke is a bit wayward and I can't do the stroke properly because my arm doesn't move in the way it's meant to, et cetera. So that's when I thought well, if I can't compete and win, I want to make people win. And that's how I basically got into training.

Tony Corben: 15:51

And our old coach at Bayam. She said well, come on, pull us over with me once a week and I'll sort of mentor you through for a year and that's when COVID struck and it all fell apart. So that's a. Once we started Jodans, everybody said do you want to be the coach? I went, yeah, give us a go, I'll have a laugh, see what I can do. You'll be nervous, tentative at first, talking to people in a group, trying to make sure I didn't talk like an idiot all the time, and it just took off and for some reason they actually liked me and I don't know why, because the sessions we get my whole awful.

Danielle Spurling: 16:25

We have to get into that With master swimming in Britain. Do you have to have qualifications as a coach? Because I know in Australia master swimming Australia have just brought in that all coaches before this they didn't need to, but now have to have a recognised qualification for insurance purposes. So you're not like that in Britain.

Tony Corben: 16:49

Yeah, when I first started I quickly, when we knew that we were setting up choices, I quickly got my assistant coaches certificate, which is a very quick one particularly being a competitive swimmer you breeze for it doesn't take very long at all. It's all done. On Zoom. That didn't take long to do because at the time Swimmingland they just wanted a coach as difficult on poolside for masters. But to be honest, it went further than that because when you start looking into affiliating the club properly as a masters club with Swimmingland, they insist that you have a qualified coach on poolside and it's got to be a level two coach. You can't have just an assistant coach, because level two coach has got to be the one who's overseeing it all etc. So the rules said we basically had to have a level two coach. So the club said you got to do your level two coaching. You're happy to do it. I said yeah, give it a go, and I did it.

Tony Corben: 17:44

Luckily I enrolled with an old swimming friend of mine called Steve Greenfield who's a coach tutor absolutely brilliant guy. He swims for a basin. So we tried to poach him to swim for us because we needed for the counties. But he won't do it. He's too, linked to basins. So swimming club and he's taught me a lot and I still see him on poolside now. We have great chats about different things, normally about Joe's very poor starts and turns, but he taught me a lot and I've learned a lot, and so Swimmingland insisted on the coach. It's difficult, so I've got it now. Hopefully they won't turn around and say I've got to take the head coaches because there's no point for a Masters club.

Tony Corben: 18:24

No okay, we've got one squad. We haven't got a structure as such, so it would seem pointless to be going through nine months of training just to teach a load of Masters out of the plough up and down a pool. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Danielle Spurling: 18:39

Well, I mean, you certainly put in lots of effort behind the scenes with all your Masters swimmers because, happily, you were just recently awarded a special trophy. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Tony Corben: 18:50

As I say, I've been in the sport for 33 years and when I was at Crossport Dolphins, it didn't take long after I joined them that I became the Masters secretary. So I was running all the paperwork and everything beyond the Masters coach. I then took over as the county Masters secretary for Hampshire County because the guy was standing down and I thought, well, I've done club, I might as well do the county. So I ran the county Masters, going to committee meetings, pushing for funding for us and everything else For three years. I also during that time I ran three county Masters championships as meat manager and also a separate meat manager for Crossport Dolphins own Masters competition and we made big profit on all of the competitions. They were great fun and everybody loved it.

Tony Corben: 19:43

I took a step back just after that because I moved from Crossport to Fair and Nomads, met Joe and we sort of hooked up together and you spoke to Joe. You know how intense her training is, how hard she pushes herself. When I was training with Joe it was a case of I either train or I don't train and stay on the background doing all the county stuff etc. Because the training was so intense and she just pushed me and pushed me and pushed me all the time. So I was literally working worn out, training worn out, working worn out all the time. So the county stuff went, but I stayed involved in Masters swimming. I stayed competing for donkey's years and when I took a couple of years break back in 2009, I still went through every competition with Joe. I still talk to everybody on the poolside. Then I got involved with Ferrum on their Masters side more when I came back to swimming. So I've known most of the top Masters in the country. I can talk to them on poolside, I've known them all the time.

Tony Corben: 20:53

And then, of course, we set up Trojans and that spiraled out of control and ended up with this huge club that we've now got. And it was recognised by the Great Britain Masters Committee because they do a trophy called the Chairman Trophy which is awarded to somebody for services to Masters swimming over the years, giving something back to the sport etc. And last year I was at the GBs. It was a funny story really, because we walked up in the seats minding our own business and I heard over the thing that we're now going to announce a Cherryman Award for the year and I was looking at a friend of mine and she was looking at me and they read out like the first statement was this is a person who's been involved in Masters years for over 30 years.

Tony Corben: 21:36

I went oh, that's really jokingly. And then they made another statement and said, oh, I've done that. And another statement oh, I've done that and, with our partner, helped set up Trojans Masters. I went oh, absolutely no. And everybody else knew it was going to be me, except for me. So they were all kidding themselves, laughing, and I had to go down and stand in front of 1500 people on poolside but on the top balcony at Sheffield to receive the trophy. It's like so embarrassing.

Danielle Spurling: 22:07

Did you have to make a speech?

Tony Corben: 22:10

Luckily not too big a one. They did give me a microphone. I just sort of said thank you. Yeah, I'm going to kill somebody in a minute when I get back up. That's not big, but it was nice to be awarded it. But I just thought that I'm the sort of person who is not worried about the awards. I'm more worried about what my swimmers can achieve and what I can do for them. So yes, to recognize, and it's set up on the side in the lounge at the moment.

Danielle Spurling: 22:35

Well, that's why you awarded it. That's why you got it, because you are one of those people that likes to volunteer your time and your effort and stay in the background. But that's appreciated by all those masters, swimmers out there.

Tony Corben: 22:50

Well, I mean, even running a masters club, there's a lot of stuff goes on the background and even with the coaching side is working out what to do next, going through the coaching cycles planning, or Joe and I sit there. I don't just sit on the poolside for five and a half hours a week, it's when we're at home. Me and Joe are always talking swimming, always talking about competitions we want to do and the clubs to do. We talked about what sort of session we should have planned for the week, when we're going to have the easy ones, when we're going to have the hard ones, etc. So it's ongoing all the time and we do a lot of research. I'm forever watching YouTube and all the different. I tried to avoid some of the like the triathlon.

Danielle Spurling: 23:30

Yes.

Tony Corben: 23:32

Because they're not what they're teaching doesn't apply to people from. But I watched loads and loads of the US and the Aussie Masters websites and a lot of the swim coaches just to pick up tips and ideas, training sessions, things that we can do different, and so you can see me sat there, sometimes for an hour and a half, watching tips on how to do flip turns, that sort of thing, just as taking back a drain. So just to enhance what I'm teaching, what I'm coaching.

Danielle Spurling: 24:01

Yeah, I love that and I mean I think you're passionate about swimming and that absolutely shines through. I'm interested in finding out what your coaching philosophy is with your swimmers.

Tony Corben: 24:12

One of the biggest pet hates I've had all my years as a coach as my swimmer was being ignored by coach really bugged the hell out of me that you could turn up to training, and particularly when you're training with the kids. And it's fair enough, because a lot of the time the likes of me, joe and some others we and all the clubs have been with we trained with the youngsters normally would like the top score or whatever, but the coaches focus is always going to be on the kids. The Masters are sort of in the corner, unless you're super elite like Joe and a couple of others we've had in the past. And when I was up at the top of my game winning nationals and things then I was, I could be seeing, I was giving things to do, but I still never as a master, probably because there was a master. I got stroke correction or anything like that. And so one of the things I said was when I start, if I coach, every single person in the pool will be looked after, they will have stroke correction and they will be spoken to every single session, every single one.

Tony Corben: 25:18

I make a point During the warm up of asking everyone how are you, how are you feeling? How's your body feeling during the session? When it's hard? Those I know want to be pushed, I'll give them a couple of pep talk to push them a bit harder. Those you don't want to be pushed, I know to leave them alone, but just ask them how they're doing. Are they enjoying the set? So I try to communicate with every single swimmer every single session, at least once, sometimes more than once through the session, and it doesn't matter whether they're a skill swimmer learning to swim, whether they are a master swimmer who's just got going, but not really fast, not not going to win anything, or all the way through to Joe. Marco will still ask Joe and my even though that's quite scary sometimes asking them how they feel, because the response you get can be horrendous. Sometimes you don't even get a response, you just get a look. So the main thing is I always wanted everybody on poolside and I make a point of doing it to feel like they're there and they're enjoying it. I like to make the sessions fun. I want to make everybody come out on poolside like they want to be there, not because their parents said get out, you're doing it. So everybody comes to training, comes to training because they're happy, they're looking forward to doing it we want.

Tony Corben: 26:41

We've buried the sets all the time. You cannot say. If you look back at our program for the last year, you could not say that one set is an exact replica of a previous set. There may be little bits of it that different and we try to bury the sessions all the time so nobody knows what's coming. So, for instance, we have a sort of philosophy, structure of which days we're going to have half set, half sets, fast sets, enduring sets, that sort of thing, and a sort of philosophy when one of the days might be easy, I'll flip that on its head some days and you'll, joe, or flip on it on the head, because half the time our sessions are dictated to you by how Joe's feeling. If Joe's feeling great, then the likelihood that she's training in that session everybody else has got no choice is going to be a tough one because but Joe's feeling really tired. It's a good guide as to how the rest of them are doing training the same sessions. So it'll be an aerobic recovery session. So I always vary it, we put it on its head, we change things around and we make sure that no sessions are saying and we try to do new things. That's another philosophy, is there's nothing worse than keeps trying to bang out loads and loads of 200 which boring loads of those are 400 which are boring, which is why I go on the internet, which why Joe goes on the internet. And when we started and have the 18 meter pool, it was a question of what can we do in an 18 meter pool when we can't swim lots of distance because all they're doing is turning constantly. So we we tried the Dave's solo program, which worked brilliant because it's a short, sharp hit really fast, really slow, really fast, really fast all the time. It's amazing how quickly the fitness came up with Dave's solo program. Joe loves Brett Hawks, sunny Trigg, those sort of people, and so she's signed signed up to all their podcasts and everything else and all the things that they broadcast and she's forever stealing all their sets that they put posting a rope. That one was brilliant. We're going to have one of those. Will give it a go.

Tony Corben: 28:51

And swim coach Mike I don't know where you've heard of him. He's another one that Joe follows, and but the other big one was when I had my neck injury. I got into spin cycling and turbo cycling, and so I signed up for Wahoo, suffolandia, whatever it's called, and the GCN Cycling Network and some of the programs that you can do on a bike I realized you can actually do in the pool. We transferred some of the hard cycling, sprinty sets and endurance sets that you can do on a bike, on a spin bike or whatever. We transferred that into the pool and adapted it so we can use the pool and that through a lot of people traditional trainers, through them completely when they're having to do some of the things I was asking. But the fitness levels went through the roof, particularly in an 18 meter pool, was amazing. So we we tried to change all that.

Tony Corben: 29:49

The other thing about my philosophy of coaching is skills. There's no point just leaving people plowing up and down with absolutely awful strokes. Make the hard work of doing tumble turns. I mean, the old philosophy always used to be was coach. Can you teach me how to do tumble turns while you're doing them every session? So you should be good at it. No, I'm doing it badly every session. What's the point of me continuing to do it back? So every swimmer in the pool when I'm coaching or the skills group, I will be watching their stroke or session and anybody stroke that sort of goes off slightly or they're swimming badly. I'll correct it. I'll work hard on it.

Tony Corben: 30:28

The people who joined the club and want good skills we do what we call stroke master classes. We traditionally do them at the 18 meter pool because it's ideal for that, where we do a whole session of breaking down a stroke right back to the basics at the beginning and starting again from the kick, from the floatation points all the way through to doing the full stroke at the end. So I'm heavy on skills. I've won swimmers this from a good stroke, so I don't want to just plow up and down doing absolutely nothing. The other thing about it is always be positive. There's nothing worse than not just that competition. But on poolside the coach said you're doing that badly.

Tony Corben: 31:11

I would never go up to a swimmer and say your stroke is bloody awful. Why are you swimming like that? I'll just look at it and go right. I want to try and change something on your stroke today. I want you to try and angle your hand into this position, that position or whatever. I want you to try and think about almost trying to touch your knee with your hand to get the stroke longer. So it'll always be a positive can do type of comment. It's never a negative.

Tony Corben: 31:36

I don't agree with ever telling people they're swimming badly. I'll tell them how they can swim better. It's the same with competition they have a bad swim. I'll try and give them something positive about the swim instead of saying that with bloody awful, what the hell did you do there. I'm not a negative person, particularly since my neck injury has made me even more positive that if I can come back from someone like that, then anybody can come back. It's the same with any swimmer's got injuries. I keep an eye on swimmers. We're masters. It's like how easily and quickly you get shoulder cuff injury. People got bad backs and everything else, which is why I talk to the swimmers, ask them how are you feeling? Have you got any niggles? Because I'd rather pick up a niggle and tell them to do something slightly different than I will. Let them keep on bombing away and then get shoulder cuff injury.

Tony Corben: 32:30

I try to avoid and anybody who's feeling tired during the session, anybody who comes back to swimming. They're obviously going to get tired. I've set a set. If they're not going to achieve it, don't keep trying to achieve it and kill yourself and dammage something or wear yourself out. Put yourself off and not come back. I would say to all swimmers you can stop whenever you want to stop during the set.

Tony Corben: 32:51

If you're blown out and you've worked your backside off and you physically can't make the swim rest time for the next time, miss two lengths and then join back in. Have a little bit of recovery. I never kill anybody. It's at their level that they train to. They're the ones who want to push themselves. But if they're telling me they can't make that swim rest time anymore, they've had it then what's the point in trying to force them into it? So it's. My philosophy is have a two minute break, have a sit on the full side when you're ready to get back in, get back in and then carry on enjoying. I want people to enjoy this. Actually, I don't want them to be hanging there and then crying at the end of it, saying I hate you, corbyn, sort of thing.

Danielle Spurling: 33:32

Well, I think you've got a fully formed philosophy and I can tell that the photos that I see of your team on Three Joes social media you all look so happy and so connected and so passionate. So, whatever you're doing with them, and you're getting lots of great results as well, so it's working.

Tony Corben: 33:53

Yeah the training is working. The philosophy my philosophy seems to be working. But the happy atmosphere comes from the fact that when we first started we wanted everybody to be our best friends. We want everybody to get on. I know some people won't get on that well, but on Pulse I'd be one to people to have a good atmosphere. So first thing we always did was the County Masters Championships. For us and for the other counties it's a big weekend, it's a big day and it's a great laugh because all of our skills from us can enter, because it's a level for me, you don't have to be a competitive swimmer to enter it, and there's a team trophy. And the team trophy is super important because I've never, ever won it. In all of the 33 years and I've been in some big teams We've never actually won the team trophy. I've come second so many times. It's ridiculous.

Tony Corben: 34:49

Basersdoke have been County Championships now for about the last nine years, I think it is, and we, every year, we are determined we want to be Basersdoke. We haven't yet We've got close, we're getting closer. But every time we sort of think we're getting closer. Spencer or Oli, two of the big names in their teams seem to go out and find somebody else or they bring somebody up through. That just literally destroys us again. But we will. We're going to beat them one day. But that team spirit comes through at the County Championships and we encourage everybody to go, and so all the novice swimmers, the skills swimmers, see how much fun we have on pool side and how much fun that sort of competition is. It breeds enthusiasm. So then let me come back to the pool. And because the skills swimmers train in the same session with the competition swimmers, when we're waiting to go in they're all chatting so that it's not two groups. They're not sort of not talking to them, they're really they won't talk to us, sort of thing. So everybody gets on.

Tony Corben: 35:49

And then when we do go to normal Masters competitions other than the counties it's often being said by the commentators we can hear Trojans are in the house today, the loudest team on the pool side. You know we are mega mouth free. We cheer everybody on. We cheer swimmers from other teams If we know them and we like them. We cheer on other swimmers. You've recently interviewed Michelle Ware, and Michele is a great friend of ours.

Tony Corben: 36:14

If Michelle Swimmer, I'll always cheer her. I'll always shout out before a race, go, michelle. But every single swimmer who goes down for a race, we will shout go, go for whatever. Just as they're about to get on the blocks. No one gets missed out. We always make sure everything when the race. When they announced to swim over the swim team Southbound Trojans, we all stand up and cheer like hell. So, yeah, we're well known for being the the gobiest noisiest team on poolside, and when we went to the AP meet, the second noisiest team on the poolside was Basesturg, alongside us, and it was a case of who can outshout each other all the way through the competition. It was brilliant fun and it's just the way we are, with just a bunch of kids on poolside, really.

Danielle Spurling: 37:00

Yeah Well, that's great. I mean, that's what Master Swing is about. That's bringing that joy that you had when you're a kid swimming. You know, when you sort of get into your teenage years sometimes you lose that because you're so focused on the results and the competition. But I think, coming back to Masters after you know, when you're in your sort of old years, you can really enjoy it again, because it's really about racing yourself, isn't it?

Tony Corben: 37:24

It is about fun and I say to every new swimmer who's come back when they go to their first competition you are here for you. You're not here because your mum's there anymore, your dad's there or you've got a coach barking at you Only entered the events you want to enter. We've got a couple of 18-year-olds started back with us. They came out, started last year, they did their first competition last weekend and both of them I said what's your favourite event? Oh, I don't know why. Not, because she always used to tell me enter everything at the county championships or go into an open meet, enter everything. So I don't really know what's my best, because I've always swum everything and Tom's the same as we've got with Dolphin.

Tony Corben: 38:05

What's your best event? Oh, I don't know. Don't know really. Well, what do you really want to do? Oh, I don't know. So we'll just enter some of the South East regions there. Enter what you like the sound of and fits into the programme, and then see if you like it. If you don't, then next meet, enter something else. So it's all about swim a race that you enjoy doing. If your coach says you're a brilliant 200-butterfly and you absolutely hate it, don't do it. Don't do it.

Danielle Spurling: 38:32

Don't do 200-butterfly.

Tony Corben: 38:36

With all the kids who come back. I say to them just enjoy the sport. It's not like kids meet. You're not swimming for the coach, you're not swimming against everybody else in your heat, don't worry about them. You're swimming against you and your time. If your time is good enough for you to pick up a medal, it's a bonus. If you don't pick up a medal, it doesn't matter, I'll buy you one, of you that desperate for a medal. So everybody goes and they thoroughly enjoy it. Once they get over the first race nerves, they just enjoy it. We enjoy it and we have a great laugh whenever we go out.

Danielle Spurling: 39:05

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I want to just dive a bit deeper into the coaching. When you are looking at your programme for the year. Do you do it in three-month cycles, six-month cycles? How do you sort of set that up? Can you give us a bit of an insight?

Tony Corben: 39:21

Maybe it's almost a six-month cycle because in the UK you have the GB long-course championships predominantly in June and the short-course national championships at the end of October. That's pretty much the same, unless you get a world's gets in the way, so the GBs may come forward a little bit. So we work on a long-course format for the first half of the year. As soon as the long-course GBs are done or this year we've got Belgrade Europeans as well as soon as the last big long-course meet of the year is done, we'll then turn towards what do people want to do on the short-course season, and then we enter more and more short-course competitions. So there's two cycles and I would say that it starts early November after the short-course championships. So we'll go into winter training mode A couple of weeks after the nationals. We'll do a lot of skills sessions, a lot of aerobic sessions, not a huge amount of distance, just working on technique, loads and loads of technique work, getting people to get their stroke back in the way it was. We'll do the masterclasses, even for the elite swimmers, the top swimmers, the whole competitive squad. We'll do the butterfly masterclass, because some of them can't do fly and you do a masterclass over something I like that, I'll do it. You do a breaststroke masterclass and the non-breastroakers learn a lot and it gives them more options going into next year. So we have three or four weeks of aerobic skills and quite often a lot more kick goes in at that point in time in the year because kick gets ignored. Everybody hates doing kicks. If you're not killing them in the pool with big endurance sets, then we'll do some kick sets just to keep them going. After that we go heading towards Christmas. We traditionally as a club train right through Christmas If the pool's open. If they let us have the pool open, everybody wants to get down the pool. So we have quite full groups over Christmas whenever the pool's open.

Tony Corben: 41:34

So we will then go into heavy endurance training work with a lot of fresh old sessions. So we'll mix it up two fresh old sessions or a speed endurance and a fresh old session and then an aerobic recovery and then we'll go back and do it again. So we go all the way through, right the way through to this sort of period. Southeast regions have just gone first long course meet of the year. We've now not got anything big until the Welsh Masters in March. So we're now back into the heavy.

Tony Corben: 42:07

Lots of 200 sessions, that sort of thing and lots of endurance, lots of fresh old short rest just pushing people getting the fitness levels up, the stamina levels up and everything else. And even the 50 sprinters, which we don't have many of, we all do the same session. They may not push the fresh old stuff, they'll go into a lane where they've got more time to doing so they don't have to swim too fast. But the 50 sprinters will pick. I'll tell them which bits is more suited to them and so on. You plot along at this one doing the 200s but going that lane with the slowest room rest time so you're not killing yourself. And then near the end we'll do a couple of 50s max for you or whatever. And so they enjoy that sort of thing During this period as well.

Tony Corben: 42:59

When everybody thinks that they've had a really hard, fresh old session, all of a sudden they're all stopped with seven minutes to go. They look over and watch their coach swim down and go. Nope, everybody out. 50 max from a dive on the watch. But it's not just 50 max, it's. I want them to hit race pace and they have to go for it. And I'd sort of say do not be scared of this. This is part of your training philosophy. If you can do 2,800 meters of a fresh old session, you're totally worn out and you get in and can push towards your 50 meter sprint best. At the end of the session. What's it going to tell you when you're on poolside you're feeling tired, but you've got competition, you've got your 53 coming up or your 50 meter sprint. Just say to yourself I did it after 2,800 meters, I can do it now. So it builds a mindset and I'm all about building a speed mindset for competitions. So I chuck in these things and if I've been a really evil, I'll chuck in a max 100 from a dive, which is even worse. So from now and through till March is the endurance side.

Tony Corben: 44:09

We'll pretty much swim through the Welsh nationals in March and then we'll change towards speed, pace sets, lots and lots of pace sets, lots and lots of single-limb speed, 50-speed, 100-speed paces. For the 200 swimmers they'll get 200 pace sets. The 800 swimmers will do the same sessions as everybody else, but I will give them target times per length, per for 200, based on what their 800 time will be, what their 400 times will be. So they get lots and lots of pace sets, working on 50 splits, and the couple of 800 swimmers, helen one in particular. She trains with us, but she also goes public sessions to get more distance in for herself. And she'll say to me we've just done this, what should I do at the session tomorrow, when I go on my own and I'll say right, I want you to do 2050s of short turnaround, five, 10 seconds rest to swim off, 50 seconds or 55 seconds. But I want you to hit your target, your 800 target time of 46 every single one, or 44 if she's going for a 400 target time. And I want you to learn, teach your body to swim to that sort of pace. So when you get into a race, you know what 44 feels like, you know what 46 feels like there's nothing worse for an 800 swimmer to dive in. And they get an outfit, they're going I haven't got clue where I am.

Tony Corben: 45:40

So all the way from March through to the GBs, which are earlier this year, it's we're building the speed, we're building the pace, and then, two weeks out from the GBs, we start the taper Again. That's a minefield, particularly with masters swimmers. Everybody has got their own idea of what their taper is. So I normally some people I know now new people I get out of chat room and say find out how their body's feeling, try and get the body to rest with Joe. Joe's taper is almost full on training if she wanted it up to two days before the competition. My taper is two weeks out. I'm going to ease right back off and my distance will drop massively. And I always used to stop training, not actually getting the water, for five days before a competition continued. That's what made me feel brilliant. When I got to a competition I was desperate to swim. My body was completely relaxed.

Tony Corben: 46:38

The warm up at the competition for the first one will loosen me off and I swam brilliantly but said that to Joe she'd be stiff as a board, she'd be moody as hell or weak because she hasn't swam and she'll be an absolute nightmare to live with. So it's different for every single person and all of our masters' rooms are different. Helen the 800-roomer she likes to keep going right up to almost the day. Other people, the sprinters for instance sprinters love it because they're getting less and less meters. They're probably only doing about 800 meters, to be honest, and 600, that's a warm up and they will stop early, apart from maybe doing a little bit more gym work.

Tony Corben: 47:13

So the taper varies for every single swimmer and I'll say, but the standard is that in the last week, my last session that I will coach them properly will be like a Wednesday if the competition starts on a Friday. But the Wednesday will be very, very easy A couple of single-dose sprints at speed and maybe no more than 1500 meters, and then we go off to the competition and then, as soon as the competition's over, a couple of weeks, easy, and then, from June onwards, we get to the short-course season with all the short-course competitions coming up and we start it all over again and we'll train through most of the competitions right the way through to early October, with all the endurance sets Again, pushing people hard, getting the fitness levels even higher, and then we go back into the same speed sessions, building up towards the nationals.

Danielle Spurling: 48:03

I love the way that you've described the differentiation that you've used for each of your swimmers, from sprint and middle distance and distance swimmers so it just shows that you are really taking into account everyone's likes and dislikes.

Tony Corben: 48:16

When we first started and set the club up, clive is a young man, he's about 25. I think he might have just become a full master. Before he was at the 18 to 24 age group, clive was an out and out sprinter. He's a 50 freestyler. Double's in the 50 club he was a 50 freestyler. He's a 23.3 freestyler. To him he's like the old Mark Foster's type swimming training 8.50 per session and that's the session done. Doesn't want to swim anymore than that. It's all done in the gym. It's all big muscles and everything else.

Tony Corben: 48:56

When we first started, clive and I had a vision that we wanted to try and have a lane for sprinters at least once a week, a lane for the middle distance swimmers, the hundreds and 200s, and then a lane for the others, the triathletes, the 800 swimmers, et cetera. Let them plod on. Never, ever, has worked out like that, because you never know who's going to turn up on a training session. You cannot tell. The club structure doesn't help in it works brilliantly, but it doesn't help in trying to set a session specifically for a different group of swimmers. We've got three lanes and the club constitution says that, apart from Tuesdays, which is mega packed, so there's a waiting list of people that there's designated people who are allowed to train on Tuesday. Anybody else is by invite. Only if somebody drops out on the day the first person on the invite list can do it. Everybody seems to want to train Tuesdays so it's always mega packed All the other sessions where we've only got three or four lanes. If somebody signs up for four sessions a week they've basically got 16 to 18 sessions a month and they can go to any session they want to get their 18 sessions in. So somebody, if they're on shift work, could do five sessions one week and then the next week maybe they'll only do a couple and then the next week they go back to five. We have a lot of swimmers sign up for three sessions a week so they can come any of the five sessions if they're down as a Tuesday swimmer as well. So I can't tell when they're going to turn up and that could be based around their work, their kids, how they're feeling. If I've given them a really hard session one day, they may not come the next day or they may come the next day. So I can't ever plan specifics for any one type of swimmer so I have to do more as a generic, with a little bit of something built in for everyone.

Tony Corben: 50:56

The ones who probably lose out the most is the 800, 1500 distance swimmers. We don't have the pool time to give them lots and lots of 400s. And if you gave them 400s and made everybody else in their lanes win 400s because we've got such a diverse amount of age and speed if you gave somebody a lane 400, five of them could get that by the person the fastest person and is jumping in that way. And there's nothing more frustrating than swimming along and having to keep pulling out the way because someone's coming past it. Which is why we struggle with 200s as well. If we have six people turn up, we can just about get by with doing a 200 session if the lane structure is right and they're all the right speeds. So the slowest person can push off and just about turn on their six length before the first person's coming in. So it gets really difficult. So the structure never has.

Tony Corben: 51:53

We've never been able to do a dedicated sprint lane. So we try to structure every single session that at some point I can turn around to the sprints to go this bit. I want you to go balls out max, kill yourself on it. You're only doing three of these and then you can back off and set the back of the lane. But they know what I mean. This is your bit. This is the 200s room is a bit. This is the 800s room is a bit. So we try to structure it somewhere.

Tony Corben: 52:21

And also we will every now and then just chuck in a full on sprint session, a fast pace session and just before nationals.

Tony Corben: 52:31

We've done it twice now and we're going to continue to do it, even though we've got a lot of people who have been on the sprints for a long time.

Tony Corben: 52:38

We've done it twice now and we're going to continue to do it, even though everybody hates it. One of my favorite ones is to chuck in the 850s on four and a half minutes, which are every single one has to be at their PV pace, climb out, sit on the poolside After five. If you need to throw up, there's a bucket over in the corner, but you're still going to finish all eight. They're all on the watch and I will be making a note of the times that every single one of you do. And I love taking that session because I am a sadist. I do like to see swimmers falling down on poolside screen, I'm sure, and it does go down about. And then the sprinters then have got that one and a couple of the other sessions where it's not quite as intense, but the sprinters then get that chance to go pools out and do some really fast stuff. So that's a good plan.

Danielle Spurling: 53:32

Absolutely Well. Afterwards it's on reflection it's good that they've done it, but I'm sure at the time they're not happy with you. Oh yeah, they're not happy I mean every first time we did.

Tony Corben: 53:45

It was probably about before last year's, not last year's the national was before that and Joe decided that she wanted to. And she's a 200 swimmer, let's face it, it's not her thing. Joe decided it would be good if we do it. It might have been swim code mine. So one of those has said that before you go it's good for building up your lactate tolerance and all that sort of stuff. So she decided we're going to do it. Every single person at the end of that session hated me for making them do it and hated Joe even more and Joe hated herself. In fact, there was Joe I think it was Joe and somebody else had to be helped off the poolside back to the changing rooms. Somebody else was in the toilet for a short while afterwards feeling extremely ill, and there was a couple of people sat on poolside holding their heads, not knowing whether they could stand up for the next 10 minutes afterwards. So for me it was great.

Danielle Spurling: 54:43

For me it was great, but Joe was the one who said I want to do this.

Tony Corben: 54:46

I reckon we could do this. It'd be great fun. We can do it, and then afterwards go never again, never. But then we did it again, so it was worth it.

Danielle Spurling: 54:55

And with your swimmer's strength training? Do you have much of an input there, or they all go off and do their own thing?

Tony Corben: 55:02

A lot of people do their own thing. To be honest, a lot of my swimming swimmers don't do enough strength training. Most of my swimmers don't do enough strength training. Two years ago when I started to take my swimming seriously again because when I was doing the coaching stuff I was just going to David Lloyd training on my own twice a week, just poogling up and down, minding my own business Then when I got back in and started training properly because I got the bug back, so I got in with Mark and Joe I wanted to do I had to rebuild all my muscles in my body because all the muscles down my right side had faded, disappeared with the neck injury and nothing worked properly. So I had no muscles. I couldn't do 50 fly properly without dying near the end of it. So I thought I'm going to rebuild, I'm going to write a program, a strength training program for myself that I can work on over six months to 12 months to try and get all my muscles back to where they used to be.

Tony Corben: 56:02

And I researched a lot of the US master's websites and there's a lot of good information on there. Then I spent weeks just reading detailed reports from different master's groups. What's good for a master, what's bad, what exercises do, what muscle groups For what stroke, et cetera. And I come out with a big spreadsheet of all the different exercises, which muscle groups they were, which stroke they work, what you shouldn't do and what's not even worth bobbin about doing, because it's a professional master's one. And it's not just weights, free weights, it was also the plyometric stuff, the med, ball slams and everything else. And Joe was also doing some stuff for herself because with the menopause coming on, she was heavy into the side of effects of the menopause and some master swimmers, and so we took that into account as well, looking at what it does for master swimmers and the muscle loss that female master swimmers have when they go perimenopause. So we took it all into account. I wrote a program for myself. Joe took some of that off to do her menopausal weightlifting program, as she calls it, so she could try and get over the effects.

Tony Corben: 57:17

And before I knew a couple of the younger female swimmers. They said they wanted to do a weight program. So I showed them what I've done. I said I'm not a weight coach. You have to make sure you're doing this correctly. It's always stress. Don't try and do it. Make sure you lift it properly. Go to the gym, get something to show you how to do it properly we're not sure. Watch the internet, get this positioning properly. And for now, but for a couple of Sundays in the summer we had everybody around in our garden and we went through all the weights that were on the program and made sure everybody was safe and doing it.

Tony Corben: 57:51

And the type of program we did was it's a 12-week cycle broken down into three-week cycles, so you do your maximum one lift weight, whatever that is. So if it was overhead lifts with dumbbells and you can lift 10 kilos on each dumbbell you then for the first two weeks, three times a week, do four reps three times with only 80% of that weight. Then the second week you do four reps four times. Then when you got to the third week, you double the number of reps but you reduce the quantity to 65%. Then at the end of the three weeks you re-measure your weight what can I lift? And you move on. If it barely changes, you just stay where you are until you get further down. You do that for 12 weeks and then you start the whole cycle again, see how you build and rebuild. But you also have to fit that in with your training cycle. If you got competition coming up, I said to him try and start the 12-week cycle at least 14 weeks before competition. It works. You can do it all the way through.

Tony Corben: 59:01

Guff of the Swimmers do it. Joes takes her bits from it and she adds her own other bits into it. So whenever I go to the gym with Jo because we ve got Jim out in the garden, I never know what she s doing any day because she changes it so much, because she gets bored of it. She gets bored of doing the same thing.

Tony Corben: 59:18

Whereas I like the systematic routine of the three-week cycle, the three-week cycle, and I ve said to a lot of the Swimmers as well when you get to a certain point where you think your muscles are big enough, don t carry on building muscle, because you re just going to look like a monster and you re not going to be able to swim properly.

Tony Corben: 59:34

You re going to get stiff, unless you re a 50 sprinter. Then I ve written a more of endurance program which is based on between 12 and 15 reps but 60% of your maximum weight, and then you just work through that endurance program for 12 weeks and you work on instead of three weeks and then test yourself, move up. It s more a case of start off on 12 reps three times and then, when you can lift 13 reps each time, do 13, 40,. When you get to 15 or 16 reps on that way, then add a little bit more on a start again back at 12 and then build it back up and then go back to the beginning. So that s what I m doing and I pass that on to a couple of other Swimmers as well. So that s what they re doing. So we have a sort of structure, but most masters don t like doing it.

Danielle Spurling: 1:00:26

No, no, and I think masters are time poor as well. So it is, and the priority is to get in the water. So I find myself. I aim for three strength sessions a week, but sometimes I only get one, depending on what s happening with my life at the time.

Tony Corben: 1:00:43

If you re working, if you ve got family around, you ve got you know even down to when it s people s birthdays. If you ve got a couple of your family members, three birthdays in two weeks completely messes up the training.

Danielle Spurling: 1:00:54

Yeah, it doesn t it you?

Tony Corben: 1:00:55

ve got all the meals to go out with, so it s easy to get to missed sessions.

Danielle Spurling: 1:01:01

Yes.

Tony Corben: 1:01:03

For me and Jo. Jo runs a swim school so she can actually plan around when she s on pool side. So Jo s what s the word? Bestidious? She is fixated in. I have to train today. I don t care how I m going to do it, I ve got to find space. This is my weight training day. This is my swim training day. I have to train and she will find it some way to make sure to train. She very, very rarely misses anything, but that s probably what she s up there superstar, backstroke or whatever I quite happily can go. I have to train today. Oh no, I ve got to go and do so and so on the car. Damn, I missed the training sessions. I have to force myself more For a lot of swimmers, if you re working, you come home from work, you re tired, you really want to go out to the cold gym, out in the garden, all the way back to the leisure centre 30 minutes away, queued to get on all the machines.

Tony Corben: 1:01:58

So sometimes it s easy not to get it done and I totally understand that. I m lucky in that I retired from full-time work 18 months ago and now live off Jo all the time. She just paced my wedding. I do a little swim teaching for her and I do the coaching, and that s my life. So I really don t have a lot of excuse not to go out in the gym or to turn up to training three times a week, but if I m not feeling it I ll find an excuse.

Danielle Spurling: 1:02:24

Look, everyone that comes on the podcast. I love to ask them the deep dive five, which is a bit of a snapshot of your swimming, but I ve made yours very focused on the coaching side of things, so I wanted you to give us your best freestyle drill.

Tony Corben: 1:02:39

Right. Best freestyle drill, which is the one that I want all my swimmers to do all the time, is to work on the EVF. Evf works. Before I started coaching I never even been told by a single coach in 30 odd years about EVF. I was old school swimming in Hamlin and it went through some sort of cycle underneath the body and came out the other end and that was all I ever taught and that s how I first found front core. I was even taught the swimming front core so it came down the center of the body line and pronounced. When I then started learning about coaching, I suddenly found out what the EVF was and all that lot.

Tony Corben: 1:03:15

So my favorite drill and nearly every single one of our sessions that we write has drilling, the warm up or drill. I m going through the session. We always have a drill section and I always say to all the front crawlers if you do a front core drill, I want you to do what I call the EVF drills, which is, if it s 100 meters, one length with this. One length with just the finger sticking out, thinking about turning the wrist down. One length with two fingers turn the wrist down. One length with two fingers and a thumb, turn the wrist down before you start the drill.

Tony Corben: 1:03:48

That s my favorite one and I love watching it, that whenever they start the drills I can look in the water and nearly everyone who s a front crawler is doing the EVF drills that I like. So they listen and they actually say it. I also say to them whenever they go to a competition, once in the warm up pool, get the first 400 or 300 out of the way and then do a couple of 100 meters of drills and if you re a freestyler, do your EVF drill, because it really puts the mind in the right place and when you swim in your race you ve got your arm in the right position, your hand in the right position. So that s my favorite one.

Danielle Spurling: 1:04:22

Yeah, I like that, I like that and it works it works.

Tony Corben: 1:04:26

I mean it s up drills and all that. They all work, but to get the stroke in the right position. For the rest of the session I prefer the EVF drill.

Danielle Spurling: 1:04:35

And how about your favorite backstroke? Set for a backstroker.

Tony Corben: 1:04:40

Three 200s backstroke at fresh old level, really pushing her, and then chucking maybe three 100s at fresh old level again to work hard, and then maybe eight, 50s backstroke at speed right at the very end of it. So try and just to make her get that mindset going.

Danielle Spurling: 1:05:00

And how about your favorite breaststroke drill?

Tony Corben: 1:05:04

The big thing that I, like, I want to emphasize on breaststroke is at the end of every cycle, finishing as flat as possible the water, arms and legs fully outstretched front and back. So the drills I like to do and it s a traditional one anyways, like two kicks or three kicks, one pull, but at the end of every kick I want people to glide for two or three seconds in the head with their arms and legs fully stretched flat on the surface so they're not sinking before they go into the next cycle. So it s full kick glide, kick glide, kick glide and then back to the pull again. That's the one that I, like, I want to try and emphasize using the power of the kick and the glide at the end of the kick, because so many swimmers will start pulling and they've lost what they've done. They start pulling too soon, they've lost what they've done on the kick and it s pointless.

Danielle Spurling: 1:05:58

And how about a butterfly training set?

Tony Corben: 1:06:00

My favorite set is really simple on butterfly is 1250s on 115 or 1 minute. When I was younger I used to be able to do 1250s on 1 minute as a 200 flyer, so I'd be going about 45 seconds, 15 seconds to rest and go again. Just keep on going. And it s more about repetition, short repetition without the stroke breaking down.

Tony Corben: 1:06:23

The problem with butterfly is the stroke breaks down once you get past 50 in training. If you do a load of hundreds you're just from a poor butterfly and wearing the shoulders up. So you're better off doing 1250s off a minute or a minute and a quarter with perfect stroke. And the whole thing is emphasis on do it perfect stroke. And even now when we do flying training or part of the medley, I'll say to the weaker fly swimmers push off the wall, do your underwater phase, break into your stroke, swim as many strokes perfectly. When you can't do it perfectly and you'll go into a hanging out position or whatever, do single arm or do front wall Next up, do it, try and go an extra stroke and keep on pushing yourself till you can do a whole length with perfect stroke. But to be a 200 butterfly you have to be able to swim it with perfect stroke. You can't let your stroke fall apart, so the only way you can do it is to train perfect stroke, and so everything is shorted distance on butterfly, not killing yourself.

Danielle Spurling: 1:07:21

Which British Olympian should we be watching Paris Olympics this year?

Tony Corben: 1:07:25

I love Tom Dean. I really enjoy watching Tom Dean because you never know which way he's going to go. I mean the amount of times he's been not the favourite behind Duncan Scott and whatever and he's come through and he's murdered him out of the pool or whatever. You're just not sure what you're going to get. Plus, he's a southern lad, so he has to support the sub-ladders, not the Scots. He's ginger like me, so he has to support the ginger lad. So it's alright like that. After meeting Mr Pety at the Adam Pety meet, I really wanted to get back and achieve it again this year. Whether he will or not, whether he can get back up to the top level, that's up to him and his mindset. I hope he does. It would be nice if he can at least push him at the top end.

Danielle Spurling: 1:08:12

Well, tony. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It's been delightful talking to you and hearing all about what you're doing over there with the Trojans. It's great, lovely. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay, then Take care. Cheers, bye, bye, take care, pa. Thanks to Tony for joining us on the podcast today. He's kindly sent through two of his sessions to try out. If you want to get your hands on those, just drop us an email at torpedoswimtalk at gmailcom and we'll send it through to you and pop you on our newsletter list. Until next time, happy swimming and bye for now.