Torpedo Swimtalk Podcast
Looking for a quick dip into the world of Masters Swimming? Join us for TST Quick Splash, a bite-sized podcast that keeps you up-to-date with the latest developments and trends in the sport. Whether it's highlights from global masters swim meets or insights into open water swims, your host or special guests will deliver a concise and informative report. You'll also get valuable training tips, dry-land ideas, and product reviews to help you improve your performance in and out of the water.
Torpedo Swimtalk Podcast
Torpedo Swimtalk Podcast with Strength Coach Jack Brown - How to lift more and swim faster
Ready to rethink how strength work fits into your swim life? We welcome strength coach Jack Brown of Aqua Strength Performance to Torpedo Swimtalk Podcast and unpack a smarter approach to dryland that actually shows up on the clock. Jack blends a swimmer’s background with strength and conditioning chops to build programs that scale across youth, college, and masters athletes—without trashing shoulders, legs, or motivation.
We walk through his full-body training model built around movement patterns rather than body parts, and why that matters for swimmers. Jack explains how he doses sessions across the week, why two to three lifts is a strong baseline, and how five-day training can work when volume and intensity are managed. He breaks down meet-week adjustments—cut reps, keep intensity, boost power—so you feel primed instead of flat. We also dive into isometrics as a low-fatigue lever for tendon health, range of motion, and recovery, and how to weave one to two ISO movements into any session to feel better fast.
Chasing that first pull-up? Jack lays out a step-by-step path from lat pulldowns to band-assisted reps to slow eccentrics and finally a clean neutral or chin-up. For masters swimmers, he shares a measured blueprint: purposeful warmups, four primary lifts, simple accessories, and a seven-out-of-ten effort that respects real life while moving strength and mobility forward. Throughout, Jack’s mantra holds steady—keep the goal the goal—so the weight room builds speed, power, and durability where it counts most: in the water.
If this conversation fired you up, tap follow, share it with a lane mate, and leave a quick review. Your support helps more swimmers find training that feels good, works with busy schedules, and pays off on race day.
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Hello, swimmers, and welcome back to Torpedo Swim Talk, the podcast celebrating swimmers at every stage, from Masters Legends to Olympic champions. I'm your host, Danielle Sperling, and each week we dive into inspiring conversations from around the world about performance, resilience, and the pure love of swimming. It's been a little while between episodes. Life took me out of the pool for a bit, but I'm really happy to be back with fresh energy, new stories, and a season full of inspiring swimmers. Kicking off this new season, I'm chatting today with Jack Brown, a US base strength coach and the force behind aqua strength performance. His fresh approach to dry land training is changing how swimmers think about power, posture, and performance in the water. Let's hear from Jack now. Hi Jack, welcome to Torpedo Swim Talk.
Jack Brown:Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.
Danielle Spurling:I'm really excited to have you on the pod too. I've been following your social media account for some time and I'm really impressed by everything you post, and it just makes a lot of sense to me. It's really resounding. I just wondered for listeners who haven't come across your work, you're a strength and conditioning coach based in the US and you founded AquaStrength Performance and you specialize in helping swimmers get faster outside of the pool. Can you give us a bit of a quick version of how you got into it and why you specialize in swimming?
Jack Brown:Yeah, absolutely. Uh I grew up a swimmer and a water polo player, started swimming at the age of five. And in our area in the East Bay of California, so Northern California, there's a very competitive um recreational swim league. So, like there's like over 50 teams in the county, and it gets super competitive, but it's just a really fun environment. Um, so most of the kids in this area do it at some point. So that was kind of my first introduction to the pool. I had an older brother who swam. Um, I started at yeah, four or five. And then by the time I got to middle school, like all I wanted to do was play water polo. It was kind of the talk of the town. There were a few new clubs that had popped up in our area and it was becoming more and more popular. And the second I played water polo, like that was it. It's like what I fell in love with. So I continued to swim and play polo throughout high school. Uh, and then I went to Cow Poly San Luis Obispo, which is only about three and a half, four hours from where I grew up. Um, and I played club water polo there. And that's really where I got into the strength side. So I studied kinesiology, um, exercise science track. And that's where I got my first exposure to uh strength coaching. So I got to work with men's tennis uh as an intern. It was part of my senior project. And the coach that I worked under was just fantastic. Um, Chris Borgard, he was like the first mentor for me in terms of strength and conditioning. And I really got to see the other side of sport. Like it's the work, the training, the building up the physical side, building the actual human so that they could go and compete at a higher level. And I thought that was just so fascinating. Uh, then I graduated, I was kind of kind of clueless on where I wanted to go. I thought maybe physical therapy school, so I could help people with injuries and uh surgeries and stuff like that. And I spent about two and a half years working as just an aide, just to get some exposure. Um, didn't quite love it and wasn't really interested in going back to school. And I actually ended up, funny enough, a friend asked uh if I could train him. I trained him and I was just like, oh my gosh, I forgot how fun this is. Like, this is exactly what I did at Cal Poly. This is so cool. And then I ended up training his friend, and then I ended up training their little sisters, and then I ended up training all these kids, and like I was coaching water polo at the time and actually swim a little bit. So I was at the pool with hundreds of kids of all ages, between five and you know, 18. And they found out that like I was also doing this on the side, and it kind of just it was a really, really uh, I will say lucky slash like it just it happened at the right time. It happened at the right time, and it was super fun. And then COVID happened and everything shut down here, but we have so many athletes in this area that want to constantly be working, and of course, their parents don't want them at home all day. And so we were kind of running like a little underground strength clinic. I mean, they were like, oh wait, well, well, we can go to I had access to a pool at the time. So I could like bring, you know, eight kids to a pool and we could do swim workouts, and then we could do some strength training. And then we were in backyards doing more strength training, and it was very niche. And I was like, oh, this is just fun for now. We'll see how long it lasts. Um, but but COVID lasted a long time and keep people kept training. And then when COVID kind of came, um, when when things settled down, people wanted to keep training. And I had a lot of a lot of athletes I was working with at the time. And so I was like, okay, this is really what I want to do. I love it, it's super fun, and it's an opportunity that I can't pass up. But I didn't feel like I was quite ready to uh run a business and really be in charge of so many people's performance, right? Like getting them better. So I decided to uh reach out to a few different universities. Um I heard back from University of Southern California, so USC down south, uh, fairly quickly. And I was able to move down there and work for just over five months with basically every single team except for football. And that was like one of the coolest opportunities of my life. And, you know, I think I've used this comparison before. I think a lot of people like when you talk about learning a foreign language, they say you can't just take the class. Like if you go and you really dive into a culture and you live there and you become submersed in it, that's how you're gonna learn. And I feel like that was my experience at University of Southern California. I was surrounded by five of the smartest, uh, most highly trained coaches I had ever met in my life with hundreds of high-level athletes. And I fell in love with it. So when I when I wrapped up there, I thought I might stay in the college world, but I wanted to come see about this opportunity back home. Came home, and uh the rest is history. We're we're working with tons of middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college athletes here at our facility, and it's it's the coolest thing ever. So sorry, that was a little bit longer than you're probably looking for.
Danielle Spurling:No, no, that was fantastic. I'm fascinated by by everyone's journey. So I love hearing all about that. And I'm I'm thrilled that you've got your own facility. And that's with your brother, is that correct?
Jack Brown:Correct. Yeah. So my brother actually also he's he's five years younger, and he ended up going to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as well. And he competed on the swim team for a year. Um, then the whole COVID thing happened. So I was back home trying to start a business. He was trying to figure out what he was doing. Uh, he ended up uh leaving the swim team. He kind of just grew apart from swimming a little bit, but he was also obsessed with the strength side. So when he finished up school, it was like a no-brainer for him. He immediately came and started working with the kids. And he has he has a lot of experience. He worked in the college uh space actually longer than I did, working with the Cal Poly teams. So yeah, we, it's just the two of us in our space.
Danielle Spurling:And so you mentioned that you've you've got um a lot of youth athletes and high schoolers. Um, and then the kids that you work with that go off to college, do they tend to come and work with you again when they're home for their breaks and that kind of thing?
Jack Brown:Yeah, absolutely. Uh it's super cool. And now more so than ever because we've been in business for about five years. So we really have a lot of kids in all uh years of college that'll come back. And if they're home for the summer, most of them try to find time to come in. Now they have internships or some of them stay at school and train. But um if they're home, I'd say they come in. And even like Thanksgiving break is coming up. I'm sure we'll have an influx of kids. Uh winter break, we always have somewhere between three to four weeks of them at home. And so I'm glad like they feel comfortable enough as soon as they come home. I feel like we're we're one of their first texts. So, like, hey, Coach Jack, I'm coming in this afternoon. I'm like, cool, can't wait to see you. Yeah, it's the college kids make it special.
Danielle Spurling:And and how do you structure the sessions throughout the day? Are they sort of they come in and they do their own session, or do you work mainly with groups that come in and do all the same thing? How do you structure that?
Jack Brown:Yeah, so we only do group training now. Um, so we actually, it's kind of unique. Uh, we have contracts with three different high schools that we go to and use their facilities. So my brother Cal does one high school out in San Ramon. Um, he works with their women's polo team. And then I go to two of the schools kind of down the road a little bit, uh, Aquaman's and Campolindo. When we're using their space, it's really a team training session. So whether there's 10 kids there or 30 kids there, we warm up together, we go through all the prep work together, the power work. So jumping, sprinting, all of that. Um, and all that stuff, the warm-up and the power work usually takes a good 15, 20 minutes sometimes. And then we'll go into about 30 minutes of strength training where, you know, yeah, there's a day one and a day two, and uh sometimes a day three lift that they will work through for anywhere between four to six weeks. We're really sticking with a lot of the same stuff and they're kind of keeping track of their progress as we go. And in that setting, it's it's super um, it's easier, I should say, to throw in progressions or regressions as needed because you know, while the freshmen are really new and and most of them are kind of being exposed to strength training for the first time, I can have them doing something while the athletes who have been with me for a little bit while uh a little bit longer, the juniors and seniors, might be doing something more advanced. But the grand scheme, like they're hitting primarily the same movements. Maybe some kids are goblet squatting while others have progressed to a back squat. At our facility, it's it's a little bit different, similar in the sense that we have a day one, a day two, a day three lift. Um, I guess I'll kind of back up a little bit, actually. When we first started, I had a lift card for every single kid. So everyone was always doing their own stuff. And I don't think anything's wrong with that. But I will say, as business kind of grew and we were seeing more athletes and trying to help more athletes throughout the day, it just got to a point where I could tell it wasn't efficient and it wasn't helping them like I thought it was. And what I found was when we kind of did way with the lifting cards and like having their phones out and tracking everything, like I can't stand the phone stuff. Um, that's a total different topic. We have the lifts up on the board. And basically we just scale everything. And Cal and I work together so closely that like we know exactly what the other it's funny. I'll pop in when he's coaching and I'm like, oh, he just did everything I would have done with those four kids and everything I would have done with those five. Like we're very in sync. And so if we have a sixth grader who we've never worked with before, they're not doing the typical day one lift that might be on the board, but we have a regressed version that is going to meet that athlete where they're at. Then we have two eighth graders who have been with us for three months, and maybe they're doing like a step above that. And then we have those high school kids who have a huge tournament this weekend. Well, then we have another variation for moving into a tournament and making sure they're prepped. Again, maybe it's the same structure, like we're hitting the same basic movement patterns, but at a much different volume, at a different intensity, or maybe a different loading pattern. Um, so that's kind of how we break it up. So even though we might it, you might walk in here and see, oh, they have three lifts, it's like probably closer to maybe five or six lifts within a lift that could be presented to that athlete. And then as they progress, uh, we continue to meet them where they're at, if that makes sense.
Danielle Spurling:Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great way of doing it when you've got such a a big group of diverse sort of strengths using the Pung across across your day. How many sessions do you recommend they do per week? Strength training.
Jack Brown:That's funny. I was actually just I was just talking about that on my last YouTube video. Um I used to think that two to three was the sweet spot, and I still think that is absolutely amazing. If you can get two to three strength training sessions in per week, um, and if you if you space them out, I usually say about 48 hours. Like if we have a kid go Tuesday, Thursday, or maybe Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that is ideal. However, we're not really in a world where everything is ideal. And so I've come to find that uh, you know, if you have to do back-to-back sessions, so be it. I'm pretty firm on the stance now that if you're doing it once a week, it's not enough. You're never really going to see benefit. You're always gonna be sore and you're kind of just spinning your wheels. Now, if if the situation is that their schedule literally can't fit anything else, like they can only do one day a week. Yeah, I think it could be beneficial just to get them exposed to something besides only swimming, right? Like they're showing up. But I really do try to get them to the point where it's like, okay, could we find a second day? Like, even if it's 45 minutes, could we find a second day? Um, and then, you know, on the other side, I used to think like, well, don't come here more than three times. Like, you don't, you don't need to be in here more than three times a week. And I've completely changed my mind on that. We have a lot of kids who train with us for sometimes even five days a week. And the big and the big thing is that we just it's it's up to Cal and I to manage their workload, right? Like any sport coach. It's like if you can be at the pool six days a week, you can be in the gym just as much. It's just it's really up to us to make sure that the way we dose our training sessions, yeah, you're not going to be in here five days a week going super heavy, super hard, high volume every day. But we can absolutely disperse things and make sure that we're filling all the buckets we need to fill. And it's pretty easy to tell, especially in the weight room, if a kid's making progress, if they're looking stronger, if they're moving better. And if the feedback they're giving you is, oh, this is great, awesome. Keep things up the way you're doing them. And then as a coach, you just have to really get to know your athletes. And if you look at them and they're they look tired every day and their squats are off, or they're holding their back and you're like, what happened? And you you kind of talk through it. It's like, okay, well, this was my plan for the day, but you got to be ready to adapt. That's a huge, huge piece of it is okay. Well, this was the plan. What's the new plan? You know?
Danielle Spurling:Yes. Yeah, exactly. And do you do you work quite closely with their swim coach or their water polo coach to do that, or is it a completely separate entity when they're coming in and seeing you in your own facility?
Jack Brown:So it really depends on the coach and the team. Um a lot of coaches uh love chatting with us and catching up and seeing where their kids are at and okay, where have they made progress? Oh, what could they work on? And that is by far my favorite situation. I absolutely love those moments. That being said, that's not the case around uh every team. And you know, unfortunately, the sad truth is that some kids have to either hide the fact that they train with us from their coach, because their coach has said, no strength training, it's so bad for you, it's gonna ruin everything. And I'm like, oh, can we just talk to them? Can we have a conversation? Because gotten significantly faster this year, or like you used to talk about injuries and now you're completely healthy. Like, can we talk? And and not everyone's open to that conversation, but that's okay. I've I've come to come to believe that, you know, we the reason I operate my own business is that I want the kids to decide and the families to decide what's best for them. And while, you know, every coach can have their opinion, and that's great. I think it's it's ultimately up to the athletes and their families um how they're gonna pursue their athletic career. And if they think that strength training is a piece of that puzzle for them, then they should be able to choose to come train with me. And that's one thing that uh I really took that from the collegiate world because in the college space, you could very much tell who wanted to be training and who didn't want to be training. And it's really hard to deliver high quality training or see any benefit from training when a kid doesn't want to be there. So, like if their coach is saying, Hey, you're doing strength and we're doing three lifts a week and this is what we're doing, go to your strength coach. It's like when it's being forced, you just don't get the same results. And and being separate from the team, it's like, oh, well, you chose to come here, you're choosing to work with us, and you're already a step ahead. Like you're already so bought in, let's let's go. You know what I mean? Yes.
Danielle Spurling:Yeah.
Jack Brown:So so we have very, yeah, it's tough.
Danielle Spurling:Yeah. And I I think that sort of um leads into another question I was going to ask that, you know, strength training for swimmers has a still has a reputation for being misunderstood or even risky, particularly for younger athletes. I know when I was an age group swimmer, it was like, oh, you know, you can't you can't be lifting weights when you're 14 or 15. So we didn't sort of start that kind of thing till later in my age group career. But now I see a lot of younger kids doing it. What's your sort of stance on that?
Jack Brown:Well, gosh, the way I see it, and and really like my first um exposure to strength training when I was 17, I really like hurt my shoulder and I couldn't even get through swim sets. It was so painful. And so I went to see the doctor that was recommended by everyone. And he's I was on the phone with him yesterday, actually. He ended up being my boss for a long time. Uh, an amazing guy named Kirk Jensen, who is a shoulder doctor in this area, and he sees all the swimmers and polo players when they're injured. And he was like, Okay, here's here's what's going on, and here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna go see a physical therapist for a while, and then you need to start strength training because your shoulders are just not strong enough to support the amount of work you're doing in the water between swim and polo practice. And I was like, Oh, okay. So I went to a few months of physical therapy, and then I went to the trainer that he recommended recommended I go to. And within months, I was back to competing. I was competing better than I ever had before. I was swimming faster than I ever swam before. I had my best meet ever that summer. And then I went and and played club college polo and never really dealt with like huge shoulder issues again. And I was like, okay, something's off here. Like we're missing something. And what I came to like also kind of realize is if if your exposure to strength training is that you got injured and then you had to go get fixed and then strength train, is there a better way? Is there a more efficient way to go about this? What if we start exposing you to proper movement mechanics and loading your muscle tissue and getting into ranges of motion that you should be able to access at a younger age and just building that foundation for years so that by the time you're 17, instead of breaking and then going and getting fixed, maybe we just reduce the likelihood of you having that injury. Maybe we don't have that laboral tear, maybe we don't have that hip problem. And that's, I mean, that's really what we found. Now you can't prevent injuries 100%. There's no way. But when we have a 12-year-old start working with us, by the time they're 15, 16, which is what we're seeing now, even 17, their movement is incredible. Like the way that they can get into their hips and access ranges of motion that most high school kids can't if they've never trained, and the way that they can get through workouts and their muscles can actually tolerate thousands of yards and hundreds of passes and whatever it may be, they're prepared. And it makes sense when you zoom out and look at it. Like if your body can't handle what you're asking it to handle, of course, at some point you're going to face injury. But if we can prep and truly be ready for the sport, well, then at least you're more equipped and hopefully less likely to get injured. So we have 12-year-olds. In fact, we've had younger, I've worked with uh nine, 10, 11-year-olds. We we start now at our gym at 12 because just in terms of focus and being able to hang with the group, like we really are in that group setting. When we had 10 and 11-year-olds in here all the time, they are so far um mature, so far apart in in maturity with the 18-year-olds that, like, yes, the older kids are getting upset, the younger kids are bouncing off the walls, and it's like, okay, we can't do this. But 12, if they want to be here and they're not being forced by their parents, 12-year-olds are some of our hardest, most dedicated workers, and they are sponges. Like they look up at these older kids and they're like, I want to be that. Like, I'm gonna be that. And it's it's just so incredible to watch. And then, like, I'm I'm thinking of like five of them right now. The progress they've made in a year, when you're 12, you make so much progress so fast. They're so healthy, it's crazy. Like their shoulders have the ability to do things that I we look at the other end of the room and like our older kids are all doing this bandwork and stretching to try to regain what they've lost over the years. And now you're working backwards as opposed to these kids just building up from the ground up. Healthy habits.
Danielle Spurling:Yes, yes. And look at the other end of the scale, when you when you work with masters athletes, masters swimmers, what do you what do you see with that? Some of them might come to you without having done any strength training at all. And you're in a very different spot with um less flexibility, less time, all those kind of things. How do you approach those masters athletes?
Jack Brown:Yeah, so I work with a ton of masters athletes. We actually just finished up a master's group here with our adults, and then a lot of our uh masters athletes are online. I did not give masters athletes enough credit in the gym when I first started working with them. I just assumed that like every adult never really did serious strength training and I have to introduce them. And they're very impressive, honestly. Most times when an adult comes to work with us, whether they have training experience or not, they're able to watch and process and then implement just really quick, honestly. And I guess the big thing too here is that their attention spans are much better. Like we were joking in the group this morning. I'm talking to these moms and they're like fully like looking at me, listening, watching my demonstration, and then going, okay, got it. Whereas when I talk to a group of 12, 13, 15, 16-year-olds, we're repeating block one 10 times, and then I'm going around giving them a pop quiz to see if they were even listening. Like attention spans are non-existent. So that's a challenge in itself. But parents pay such close attention that they're locked in, they're ready to go. And then when it comes to the actual workout, the most important thing is just dosing. Like they can't, you can't have a master's athlete who hasn't trained ever, or maybe in in months or years, come in and hit the same style of training that I'm hitting myself right now. So we start, we almost start so light that when they finish, they're like, I'm done. Like, was that it? And I'm like, yeah, like that's where we really want it to be. I always tell them, we want the first like week or two. In fact, most sessions across the board to feel like a seven out of 10 because it means you got good work in. It means you're more likely to come back in two days. You're not gonna be crippling sore for days. And also, like, you have to go be an adult the rest of the day. You have to go pick your kids up from school, you have to help with dinner, you have to grocery shop, you have to go back to work probably. You want to go to swim practice. Like, there's so many things you have to do that the way you handle stress is gonna be a lot different than your high schooler. And so maybe we're doing two or three sets and we keep our rep ranges to five to 10. And we do four primary movements and some accessory work, and we really focus on mobility and you know, some some foam rolling at the beginning just to make sure they're feeling good. And we do a lot of mobility work, 10 minutes of mobility dedicated so that they're feeling good and they're ready to go and their blood's flowing and their hips are firing and everything's good. And then we hit those four primary movements, some accessory stuff, finish by getting their heart rate up. Maybe we're on the assault bike and they're out the door. And it's like a 50-minute session, 50 minute to maybe an hour session. But but I found with like master's athletes, you really want to keep things at a level that they can manage. Like they feel like they could have done more when they leave, which honestly is a pretty similar approach to how we kind of work with athletes now as well.
Danielle Spurling:So are you still hitting about the 50-minute mark with the younger groups too?
Jack Brown:Depends how much they're talking. I uh if I had to break it down by time, so we spend, I would say uh if they show up on time, we let them foam roll on their own for two to three minutes, whether it's, you know, using a lacrosse ball or a foam roller. Now, I'm not like super passionate about foam rollers or lacrosse balls. I think soft tissue work can be beneficial, absolutely. But I think they have such a positive association with it, like it feels like a massage and they're like, oh my gosh, my legs are so sore from that kick set today. And they start rolling, and then they're like, it's their time to kind of catch up with each other. So that's really what we do with the soft tissue work. Then they have a mobility routine that they flow through on their own and that we tell them to like really prioritize the movements that are the toughest for them. So, for example, if they're doing the adductor stretch that we have in our warm-up and the inside of their legs feels really tight, one kid might spend more time on that, while another kid's spending more time on their pigeon stretch trying to hit the back of their hip. And another kid is spending more time on T-spine rotation because their shoulders feel tight. So they know the routine, they put the time they need to in each movement. And then we go into a group warmup that's much more dynamic, getting them excited, getting them moving, maybe jumping around. We're doing some extensive jumps, some more intensive jumps, some med ball throws. And that whole process from foam roll to mobility to kind of getting them fired up is a good 15 to 20 minutes, right? And like that's a lot of the session. Then uh we chat and we go over block one, they get to work, and then there's like an in-between little filler exercise for health, then block two, another little filler at the end, and then they're out the door. So the strength portion is closer to like 20 to 30 minutes of dedicated strength work. Now, some kids are out of here in 50, 55 minutes. Um, if they're really locked in, and also like their training age is lower. The 12 and 13-year-olds, they don't really need to spend tons of time like loading up and going super heavy. That's not really the intent. Whereas the older athletes, the juniors, seniors, kids returning from college, they just need more rest in between sets. And we really try to let them know this is not swim practice. This is not your cardio for the day. Like you're gonna get your training in. We're building strength here. And if you go from exercise to exercise and you're flying through it and you're breathing hard, your form's gonna go. You're not gonna be getting what you need out of it. And we're not really training strength in the way that you should be training strength. So if we slow them down, sometimes kids are in here for an hour and 10 minutes, maybe an hour and 15. But we try to kind of keep them moving.
Danielle Spurling:Hey, swim talkers. Just a quick break to say thank you for supporting the show. If you'd like to become a Torpedo Swim Talk supporter, you'll get early episode updates. Master swim workouts are delivered to your inbox every month, access to our private WhatsApp group and a personal shout-out on the podcast. Your support helps us keep sharing the stories of swimmers from masters to Olympic champions. You can find the link to become a supporter in the show notes for as little as $3. And I'd love to welcome you to the swim talkers community. And within the two blocks that you just mentioned, and obviously you mentioned with the Masters athletes you might do four or four sort of types of lifts. Are you covering sort of pull push in those lifts every time? Or do you spread that over the week? Do you do you sort of what I suppose I'm asking is do you cover all parts of the body in that block, or do you do a lower body day, an upper body day?
Jack Brown:Yeah. So we always go full body training. Um I'm a pretty big proponent of that because I just think that it manages uh their level of soreness and stress the best. That's that's what I've found, especially with swimmers, because when you're in the pool swimming, you're using every muscle in your body. And so if we do a full leg day and we give them three, four, five leg exercises, your legs are just inevitably gonna be so sore and drained that you're just not gonna be able to give the same effort at practice that day. Like if you do a kick set after a leg day in the gym, it's gonna be really challenging, right? And if we go full body, a lot of people think full body as in like they're crushing their full body. For us, that's you know, we're hitting two different movement patterns. So let's say we're doing a knee-based uh split squat, maybe. So it's getting their lower body, and then we do an upper body push, so push-ups, and then the second block, we're focusing, focusing more on the post-chain. So we're going an RDL for their hamstrings and the backside, their glutes, and then a pull, maybe chin-ups. We just did, you know, back, a little bit of shoulders and chest, the front of their legs, the back of their legs. But we look at it more instead of a muscle by muscle approach, like a movement approach, a push, a pull, lower body hinge, lower body, knee dominant, some core and some other uh maybe shoulder health stuff, and they're out the door. That way, when you go to practice, um, hopefully your shoulders don't feel so heavy that you can actually do a set or your legs don't feel so drained that you can actually do your kick set, whatever it may be. So just trying to limit the amount of soreness and total fatigue.
Danielle Spurling:And when you when you are working with your athletes and if you had the ideal sort of program for the week, would you rather that they did their strength training after they'd been in the water or on the day that they're not in the water? What's sort of the ideal?
Jack Brown:That's a great question. Um, my answer changes quite a bit on this. So looking, looking back a few months from now, I might have a different answer. But what I will say is most of the kids we see are in the pool six or seven days a week, which it blows my it blows my mind. And uh I think it's a lot. But if they're gonna be in the water six or seven days a week, you know, then we just need to, whenever we see them, make sure it's something that works with them. So if I if we had full rain to like determine all of it, I would probably, at least for me personally, lift before I swim. I find that I can still do better in in a swim practice. And a lot of kids say they kind of feel warmed up when they hop in the pool. That being said, everybody's so different and it's not there's no one size fits all. And you know, if if swim, if giving your all in swim practice is like truly the focus, well then maybe you should swim first and go to the weight room afterwards because you're gonna be able to give you know a better effort in the water if that's the first thing you do in the day. Uh when I was working in the college world, they would it would it would flip around, you know, some teams would go before practice, some teams would come in after practice, and a huge determining factor with most athletes is their schedule. So, like if for the fall season their swim practice is 7 to 9 p.m. at night and they're in school until three, their only option is to come see me before you got to deal with it. It is what it is. And then, you know, summer comes around and their practices shift to early in the day, and then they're going to practice and coming to see us after. So it's really like they don't even have a choice, it's just when can you fit it in? So it's it's really it's like the choice is made for them and they kind of just have to learn to work with it. But that's also such a big piece of the programming puzzle. It's like, well, this needs to be a conversation between us so that we can know how do you feel? How is practice today? Especially with our higher level athletes. They go through training blocks at the pool where it's like, we Thought we had an idea of what we wanted to do in the weight room and they show up here and they are crushed. Maybe they just came from practice. They just did 7,000 yards. And we're like, okay, we need to work around this so that you still get benefit from coming to see us today, but we don't, we don't have your cup overflowing. Like it's gonna serve you terribly. If I just like throw a crazy workout at you, you leave, and now swim and workout knocked you out, and you're out for the next three days. What benefit was that?
Danielle Spurling:Yeah, because I mean the priority is what they're doing in the water. Obviously, what you what you're doing is is helping so that they can get stronger in that prime thing that they're doing.
Jack Brown:Yeah. I always say keep the keep the goal the goal. So it's like if your goal is to swim faster, you probably need to feel good a lot at the pool, not 100%, like you're not always going to feel 100%. But if you're floating at like that, always tired, always fatigued, feeling like 60% all the time, we're doing something wrong. We need to make a change because you can't get faster feeling crummy all the time.
Danielle Spurling:And I wanted to really get into the nitty-gritty of what you actually give these athletes. And I've noticed online you you're a big fan of ISO exercises. How do they fit into your sort of your blocks that you were talking about? So you're doing your lifts, you're doing some mobility, you're doing the stretching beforehand and some plio, some strength work, I mean some speed work. Where do the ISOs fit into all that?
Jack Brown:Yeah, so they they move around, but uh for the most part, we'll fit one to two isometric movements in per day. And I consider those like our health movements. And so if we do our first block of exercises, it's usually three exercises, again, just in terms of structure, the size of the groups, the space, that's just how it works for us uh best. They'll finish that first block and then they'll go into an ISO. And maybe we'll start with a lower body ISO that day. Our entire goal with the ISOs is to make them feel better, right? And to improve range of motion, mobility, and just take a look at like joint by joint, how can we make sure that we're driving blood flow and recovery to the body? Because ultimately, like you're gonna recover when blood is sent to a muscle or a joint, whatever, it aids in recovery. And you do an iso lunge for a minute, minute 30 each leg, and you stand up, you're gonna feel the blood flowing through your legs. Like it's it's pretty crazy. So, in terms of tendon health and the contraction and just holding throughout, um, the health benefits are just incredible. And it also helps a lot of them who have maybe restrictions in their hip extension, maybe their hips are tight. If you hold that iso lunge, it is an active stretch. So, as opposed to just like sitting down and like reaching forward into a passive stretch, actively holding and contracting is going to create that lasting change. So we'll do, you know, maybe our lower body ISO first, then they'll go block two, and then they'll finish up with an upper body ISO. And again, really our goal with the ISOs is to figure out what each kid needs and then give them the ISOs that we believe will be the most helpful. And one of my favorite things about ISOs is that once once you kind of build a base with them, like after a week or two, honestly, they are minimally fatiguing, but you can have an extremely high output. So, what I mean by that is if we dead hang and we have a kid go for, you know, as long as possible and they hang for three minutes, it's gonna be extremely challenging. And when they finish and they come down, they're gonna be like, that was so tough. And five minutes from then, they're gonna feel fine. And the next day, they're not gonna be sore because that isometric contraction doesn't have the same type of fatigue and soreness, um, repercussions, I guess, as you know, doing a regular movement where you're going through the eccentric and concentric portion of a movement, right? Like you're not really tearing the muscle in that way. And so you can push them really hard, you can get a lot out of them, super high stimulus with minimal fatigue. It's like a win-win-win, in my opinion. It's just they're so amazing. So they'll fit in like that typically. Now, if we have a kid who comes in and maybe they're dealing with an injury or they're, you know, rehabbing, whatever it may be, they might do more ISOs. We might actually pull some of the primary strength movements out and make a lot of their program ISO-focused. And I will tell you, if you've ever spent any time doing ISOs, um, they're not fun. And a lot of people would not do them on their own. And so, like when they're here and they hear that, like I call them the vegetables of training, they're so good for you. And like none of them want them. So you kind of kind of find a way to like gamify them. Like if we have them ISO next to each other or we have them hang together as a group, or we do little things to make them um a little bit more fun. I don't know if anyone would really say they're fun, but they're just super beneficial. So you have to kind of find ways to spice them up.
Danielle Spurling:Yeah, no, I'm really interested in that. I've been exploring that myself a little bit lately. Um, but it's it is always hard to fit everything that I want to fit in. And I've taken a lot of your philosophy in organizing my own program and um tried to pair it back so it's simple not overdoing it. So I'm very interested in that sort of side of things as well.
Jack Brown:Yeah. And I think uh I catch myself in the same thing that you're just talking about, where like I'm trying to fit so many things in. And so I really I do I do my best to honestly not program for myself too much anymore. Of course, I need phases where I'm I'm testing and trying my own stuff, absolutely. But when another coach just tells me what to do, or I just open up their program, I just it's it's less. I'm gonna add this, I'm gonna pull this back, I'm gonna change this. It's like, oh, okay. Coach says I'm doing these three things today. Just three. Yeah, he said three, those three. Like I'm doing that. I don't need to add in this, this, this, and this. It's these three, and I'm out the door. And I feel so much better when that's like less is more. Less is truly more.
Danielle Spurling:I agree. And I I sort of um, you know, I used to lift quite light, I think, and do, you know, quite a lot of reps. And I've really changed the way I've been doing that. And I think it's really helped my swimming. Is that what you're sort of advocating for your athletes? Like lifting a lot heavier.
Jack Brown:Absolutely. No, not not in the reckless sense where you think like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna max out every day. Like, definitely not like that. But I do think that there's there's this uh idea that, you know, well, we're swimmers, we need muscular endurance, and muscular endurance is is 12 to 15 reps, maybe even 20 reps, because we have to be able to do all these laps, and it's like, okay, we're missing the mark. You have plenty of muscular endurance. If you hop in and swim five, six, seven days a week, like you're gonna build the muscular endurance through swimming. If we want to touch on strength here, we do need to hang out towards the lower, lower end of the spectrum with reps, and we do need to move the weight up, and you can get stronger at any rep range. So it's like, hey, maybe for a week we're doing six reps on our back squats. And then next week we move to four reps. Well, reps go down, weight goes up, and then the week after that, we're doing sets of three. Okay, it goes up a little bit more, and then we kind of restart that cycle and maybe we switch primary movements and now we're back to eight reps. Like it does move around. Um, but for for bigger compound movements, oftentimes I would say we're between probably three to eight reps in that range. Um, for other movements, probably closer to six to ten reps, oftentimes. But we very rarely go into like super, super high rep um compound or big movements. It would have to be something like, you know, we're doing face pulls, we're doing hip cars, we're doing just like a more of a health thing would be high rep, but nothing like a squat, a lunge, a bench, like things like that. We're not sets of 15. It's like, what are we doing here? Kind of, in my opinion. Like, let's get stronger.
Danielle Spurling:And when you're working with these athletes and and they probably have a lot of competitions, do you how do you sort of program what they're doing in the gym? Do you pull back when they're they're racing on the weekend or when they've got their big, their big meet of the season? How do you sort of structure in the strength then?
Jack Brown:There's so much to unpack there because it's so different athlete to athlete. So in the beginning, it's trying it my my belief is that you know, if I can get them to continue strength training and just like shatter that belief that they need to stop a week or two before a meet, maybe a week if they want to stop, I'm I'm kind of on board with if that's if that's cool with them. But if they're like, hey, I got that meet coming up, I'm I'm gonna be done lifting this date. And it's like I look and it's like two or three weeks before, and I'm like, okay, wait, all the strength and power you worked for is gonna be gone too. Like that's the residuals. That's that that's not how that works. So, first it's getting them comfortable with the fact that it's okay to be in the weight room. You're not gonna be sore. If you're lifting consistently, like this is what your body needs, you're giving it what it needs. And then as we approach the meat, it's dosing on our end. So it's it's less volume, not necessarily that much less intensity, which is something that we're always we're always trying to teach as well. It's like, no, you're getting closer to the meat. It doesn't mean you're going lighter necessarily. You might still be moving some pretty good weight. But maybe instead of three sets of six, we did two sets of three today, two sets of two, and like the total your body was exposed to strength, but what makes you sore is the volume, the number of reps, the total workload you're doing. So it's like, yeah, if you go do a three by ten squat and you haven't squatted in a while, you're gonna be sore. If you go do three sets of two and you tell me you're sore tomorrow, I just don't even, it's it's not, it's not happening, right? And so it's like if we can pull that back. Now we do need to push um on the power stuff a little bit, like the jumping, the sprinting, the med ball work, I want them twitchy. I want them ready to go. Their central nervous system is firing before a meet, like they're ready to just light it up, but we do not remove the strength stimulus, it's just gonna be far less. We might spend 10 to 15 minutes on strength, and we're still gonna hit those primary movements, but just do way less reps, right? That's kind of where we're at. Now, once athletes are fully on board with that, um, things change and it's awesome. Like, I'm thinking of two swimmers specifically who I've I've trained for years now, they're both competing um at the collegiate level, and they were the swimmers who can't oh, two weeks before we're stopping. And that quickly changed. And like I remember it was like one meet, they weren't soaked on their performance. And I was like, Hey, what do you guys say say? Like, we just try it. Like, next meet, let's train all the way up until like two or three days before, maybe two or three days, and let me like kind of handle, like, let me adjust the knobs on my end and just see how it goes. And thankfully they had incredible meets, and they're like, Oh, yeah, we're never, we're never pulling that out again. Like, I remember one of them looked at me and was like, I felt so weak at the meet. And I'm like, Okay, in my mind, I didn't want to tell them, like, okay, you didn't lose that much strength. But it's true. Like, when you stop doing a thing, you stop feeling and noticing the benefits of that thing. And if you're strength training, you're trying to get stronger, you're trying to be more powerful. So if you remove that completely and you show up to meet day, it's like part of it might be a little bit in your head, but part of it is true. You haven't been exposed to strength or power in a little while, besides just swimming. And so your body is going to be a little bit off. So it's just like get them bought in, and then once they're doing that, it's to the races. And when you look at college, it's like they're training all the way up until you you got people lifting day before meets, the day of meets sometimes. Like it's that's how it goes, you know.
Danielle Spurling:Yeah, it always really surprised me when I saw a vision of, say, um, LeBron James or something. They would have their match and then they'd be in the gym afterwards, straight after their match, and they'd be doing it on game day. And that was just that was such an eye-opening thing for me to see because I thought that you had to pull back before meets and things like that. So it is, it's really changed the whole idea behind strength training. And I think we're we're seeing a lot of benefits from that.
Jack Brown:Yeah, yeah. And again, I just it's so important that you make sure whether it's it's you controlling it or a coach controlling it, like the most important piece is always going to be the volume, the intensity of what you're doing. Like, look at it. Because I don't want someone to hear this and be like, oh, I should go lift after my meet, and then go to the gym and hit 10 sets of bench press and do a bunch of pull-ups and be like, well, I don't think what what Jack said worked. It's like, okay, well, it wasn't applied correctly. Like you, you know, may maybe they show up to the meet, the the gym a day before a meet and they're they're here for 20 minutes. We roll out, we stretch, we do some power work, they hit a couple sets, they're out the door, they're like excited, they leave here, like, oh my god, I feel amazing. That was so good. And they go do some starts and and have a little like last taper practice, and then the next day they race. That is so different than oh that sometimes people hear the word workout and their association is like an hour to an hour and a half of pain where I'm breathing hard and sweating. And like training is so different. Some days training is that, some days training's a lot easier or less exerting than that. Like it's there's this huge spectrum, and it's just making sure that you're getting what you need for your schedule, your biggest meets. And that is one other thing that I will touch on. Every meet can't be your meet. Like, it's important to race. You need to race a lot. The skill of racing is a huge skill, but if you treat every meet as your taper meet, or you're like, hey, we gotta go late, I gotta meet this weekend. It's a tough conversation to have with kids when I'm like, okay, we've gone light before the last eight meets in the last three months. We're never gonna get stronger or more powerful if we do a week of training, a week of going light, a week of training, a week of going light. Like, there's some you have to learn to train through meets and still be able to perform. And it's really uncomfortable because you're gonna have a few meets where it's like it's tough. You're racing and you feel it, and your body's tired and you're like, whoa, like this is a challenge. But you have to remember the ultimate goal is when it's time to race, it's time to race. And so if your two meets this year are, you know, separated by four or five months, it's like, okay, all the other meets are exposing me to racing and pieces of my race, my turns, my starts, my my pace, whatever that may be. But I can't be so locked in on the result. Oh, I want a worse time. I didn't swim. Like, that's okay. Did we work on did something get better? Because don't worry, you're gonna have your meat where we really build up and we taper things off correctly, and you're feeling good in the water and your numbers are great in the weight room, and then you race and boom, like that was awesome. But you can't make every meet your big meat.
Danielle Spurling:No, absolutely agree. And I mean, they they, you know, they they are racing a lot, but then they need to probably pick out the one big meat that they're aiming for and train through the other ones.
Jack Brown:Yeah, and and not to say, like, training, you can still have amazing meets that you train through. In fact, it catches a lot of kids by surprise when they like have those meets and they're like, oh my gosh, we didn't change like that much at all in the weight room. And I went like best times, and I'm like, that means we're trending in the right direction. Things are going well. Like, it doesn't always need to be work hard for a little bit, pull back, work hard, pull back. It's you went right through and you pushed, and then you had a meet that you thought you weren't gonna do great at and you were a little sore, and you went two best times in your five events, like that's happened so many times. It literally shifts their entire perspective. And it's moments like that where they're like, Oh, okay, like this training thing is cool. I'm gonna keep doing it. And the second that happens, game changer. Yes, total game changer. Yeah.
Danielle Spurling:I wanted to ask you when you get someone that comes into the gym and they've never done a pull-up before. This is something that a lot of our listeners would be really interested in. Um what's the sort of progression that you would go through to get them into that? And also in that, the different grips that you can use. So you can use the front, obviously, pull up the traditional one, the neutral grip or the chin up. What's sort of the easiest for a swimmer that's coming into you first of all to do?
Jack Brown:Yeah, there's like a few things more exciting in the gym than watching someone get their first pull up or chin up. So I I love this question. And I was actually just talking to the group of moms that I had in here. We went over this exact progression. So if you can't do one at all, um on my scale, the first place I would start and I love is a lat pull down if you have access to the machine, which obviously not everyone has, like it's a huge, hefty machine. But if you have a lat pull down, using that to just to build lat strength is fantastic. Um, and you can do any grip. Personally, I love uh alternating between the three. So just a regular grip, a supinated grip where your palms are towards you, and a neutral grip. And we have bars that accommodate all three of those. Oftentimes, um, if you're a little bit older and maybe you have a shoulder issue or some limited range of motion, a neutral grip is going to feel the best on your shoulder because it just puts your shoulder at a really good angle. If your shoulders are totally healthy and you can get overhead just fine, um, palms away from you, so normal grip, and then palms towards you, supinated grip are both great as well. And then when you move to a bar and you're actually trying to get your first chin up. I personally find that neutral grip or a chin-up grip, which is supinated, palms towards you, are the easiest ways to get your first rep because you're just using uh more muscles. Like a chin up, you're getting your biceps, your back, so your lats, your biceps, a little bit of everything. When your palms turn away from you and you go a little bit wider, it's it's very just like your back. So it's it's really challenging. And oftentimes, um, especially masters athletes, we all have some sort of shoulder issues. So I really don't do a lot of pull-ups, palms facing away with older athletes unless they like really want to and ask to, because I'm just not a fan of the angle at the shoulder. So that being said, we go from lap pull down to banded pull-ups. And the way that I use the band is different than most. So instead of tying it from the bar and stepping one foot into it or putting your knee in it, I attach it going across using the hooks. And you probably have seen it in my videos. And so there's just so many ways that you can progress or regress that. So you find a height, right? That's like it's hard to explain, but once you step on it, you'll know based on how much help it gives you. And then we have three different bands that we tend to use. So, like one of our resistance bands gives somewhere between 20 to 30 pounds of help. Then one step down from that is like 15 to maybe 20 pounds of help. And then the last one is like five to 10 pounds of help. It's like kind of nothing. And then you can scale it based on if both feet are on the band, you're gonna get the most help. If you take one foot off the band, you're only gonna get a little bit of help. And we just build from there. So if someone's starting with our blue band here, which is gonna give them the most help, uh, maybe we're doing sets of three or four, and I tell them it's gonna give you help on the way up, but you need to control it on the way down. Never just dropping from the top of your pull-up or chin up. Okay, controlling it is gonna help build those lats on the way down. And then once they get good, we remove a foot. So now it's one foot with that blue band. Then when we're good with the band, we'll pull the blue band off, we'll put the red band on, and then they'll spend a few weeks doing that. Then the orange band. And then usually by the time they're at the orange band, maybe I just like won't bring the band out one day or be like, hey, let's just see where we're at. Like, I want you to try one, and they'll do it. And it's so cool. It's it's it's electric. Like, I almost I almost try to film like every time it happens because I'm like, okay, I know they're gonna get it today. And then they do it, and you're just like, let's go! And they're freaking out because if you can, if you can do a bodyweight chin-up, it's so exciting. Another thing that I love, if you don't have a band or you don't have like a squat rack setup where you can pull a band across, uh eccentric only chin-ups, where you can use a bench to jump up to the top, right? So you're not pulling yourself up, but you do like a two or three second hold with your chin above the bar and you and you stay there. And then you do a slow and controlled lower. And I usually go like four, maybe five seconds on the way down every rep, then until your arms are completely straight, then you step back to the bench, shake your arms out for a second, do another one. I do caution that if you're gonna do those, like slow eccentrics are the number one thing that are gonna make you sore. And so tread lightly or go into it with very low volume. Maybe you do two sets of two, your first time ever doing them. And you jump up to the top, three second hold, five second lower, shake your arms out, do it one more time, and then come back to it and do your second set. Like you did four total reps, but you got to remember like you did 20 seconds of lowering if you did a true five second lower. And that's a lot on your lats, and you can build that up so that next week maybe you do three sets of two, and then the next week you do three sets of three, and then three sets of four. Like it's a process, it can take weeks, it can take months. And you just have to. That's another huge thing with kids, adults, whoever's training. You're not doing the same thing every week, you're doing the same movements, the same exercise, but progress can be like the smallest little thing. Like I was just doing right there, two sets of two to three sets of two to three sets of three to three sets of four to four sets of four. Okay, that was that right there could have been five or six weeks of progress, maybe, maybe longer, but it was progress every week. And before you know it, you're doing a chin up. And then when you finish up and you and you do your first one, neutral grip, so palms towards each other or palms towards you, my favorite, and that's the ladder I would climb. Lat pull down, banded band going across, eccentric only. If you're if you're ready for the challenge, and then just go for it.
Danielle Spurling:Yeah, yeah. There's nothing, there's nothing as exciting as when you get that very first body weight pole off.
Jack Brown:Yeah, there's nothing, and it ranges like from adults to 12-year-olds, they get their first one, they turn around, and the look on their face is like it's priceless if you're watching someone do that. Like I get chills thinking about it because it happens so often in here where like a kid, a kid will turn around, like, did you see that? And I'm like, Yeah, I saw that. And everyone starts high-fiving them, and like the kids are getting excited, and it's just it's like one of my favorite moments at work.
Danielle Spurling:Yeah, yeah. It makes it all worthwhile.
Jack Brown:Oh, 100%. 100%.
Danielle Spurling:Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jack, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been wonderful hearing all about your perspective with strength training and what you're doing in your in your sort of base in the US. And um, can where can people find you online if they want to follow you and and see what you're doing?
Jack Brown:Yeah, so I post uh quite a bit on Instagram. That's AquaStrength Performance, uh, is my handle. Um, I post a little bit on TikTok and I'm trying to build up my YouTube. But then we also have uh my brother and I have a podcast ourselves, the Aquastrength Podcast, that you can get at uh Spotify or Apple Podcasts. So yeah, Instagram or podcasts are probably the best ways. And thank you so much. That was so fun. I've only really done, I think this is the second time I've been on someone else's podcast. And yep, it's it's so fun. You're really, really good at what you do, and it was so much fun sitting down and talking. So I really appreciate you uh asking to have me on and chatting with me. I love talking. I could talk swim and training all day long. So me too.
Danielle Spurling:Me too. Well, thank you so much, and uh, we'll catch you soon.
Jack Brown:Thank you.
Danielle Spurling:Okay, bye. Thanks for tuning in to Torpedo Swim Talk, the podcast celebrating swimmers at every stage from Masters Legends to Olympic champions. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review to help other swimmers find the show. You can also catch past episodes, guest highlights, and swimming stories from around the world at torpedo swimtalk.com. Until next time, happy swimming and bye for now.