Hello and welcome to the Swim Brief. I am Chris DeSantis. Tonight, you can see if you're watching the video version of this, I'm recording this at night, not a usual thing for me, but it is a bit of a random podcast. It has been a crazy week for me. I am one night away from flying up to Maine. I'm going to be doing some work with Bates College. And somebody remind me, somebody that listens to this, remind me at a later date to uh do a little talking about why I'm doing an engagement at the rival uh of my alma mater. But today I've got some other things on my mind. And one such thing is the recent direction of the most popular podcast in the sport of swimming, the Brett Hawk podcast. Um and before I even get into it, I will confess that I do not listen to full podcasts. I actually like Brett. Um if Brett actually ends up listening to this or somebody ends up telling him about this. Um I've had nice interactions with him every time that I have met him in real life. I have a positive uh view of him on a personal level, but uh I, as a podcast host, he's not for me. And I get too frustrated listening to him. Um recently that I was uh frustrated listening to was he brought on Lindsay Mentenko from USA Swimming, and I was pretty curious about that one. Uh I confess it did get me hooked in to listen because you don't often get somebody uh sort of that high up in USA swimming on a podcast. And um also I was pretty interested because Brett has had some pretty pointed criticisms of USA swimming, in particular, okay, over the last year, he has criticized them directly for qualification procedures at both World Short Course and World Long Course. And so I listened to the podcast, and I think I listened to about 30 minutes, and they there was like a golden opportunity to actually talk. He he got Lindsay to talk about the qualification procedures and just nothing. Now listen, I I also in fairness to him, um I can bet that you know USA Swimming uh or Lindsay doesn't agree to come on a podcast without pre-screening all the questions ahead of time. But at the same time, you know, if you've had that criticism, it's just very unsatisfying to listen to uh that just like a podcast where it just you wouldn't even know if you were listening for the first time that he has any of those criticisms. And um, I don't think it makes for a particularly interesting podcast. Um and I I don't understand the choice to not voice those criticisms. But honestly, that's that's really a minor quibble in comparison to the theme that I have seen emerging on recent clips. Um I actually commented on an Instagram post um that Brett made. He was uh mocking, you know, I think as far as I could tell, this was like uh something that um was sent out in Australia for, you know, the equivalent of what we would call in the US like a national age group select camp or something. And the coaches that were uh gonna have athletes come to this thing, they were asked to time swimmers in a 2K or a 2,000 meter swim. And he was mocking this post, like, what a stupid idea for people to do a timed 2000 for swim. We're talking about 12 to 18 swimmers, 12 to 18-year-old swimmers in this instance. And in my mind, he's he's more than implying, but he's implying strongly that it's just dumb to do a 2K swim. And if I follow the logic as far as I can understand it from clips and from listening to him in other contexts, some of the swimmers that may get invited to these camps are, quote, sprinters. And a 2K swim is so somehow forcing them to be someone else or somehow destructive to them because of what type of swimmer they're they are. Um, I've talked about this before on the podcast, but having been on quite a journey myself with regards to training philosophy, I want to weigh in on this topic because what I see as the difference between this podcast and Brett's is something pretty fundamental, and it will influence how I'm going to weigh in on it. I I think Brett's podcast is very entertaining. I can tell that a lot of people listen to it because, you know, it's it's definitely more fun than this one. The the entertainment value is higher. The the guests are people that you really want to hear from in the sport of swimming. I mean, as far as I can tell, he sort of seems to be aiming to be the Joe Rogan of swimming podcasts. Hat tip to uh to my friend Paul for uh for for that uh for that idea. And I think that's a great idea from a business perspective because that's the most lucrative model in podcasting period. However, I do think that he is not really educating his audience in any meaningful way. Um the style of entertainment uh will surely make his podcast way more popular than this, but there is a pretty significant difference. Um, I think that this podcast adds value to the listener instead of extracting value from them. Um if you listen frequently, you know, I'm giving away uh free positive psychology content, the kind of uh content that people um are paying me money for, at least some segments of that. And Joel and I have real substantive conversations on coaching topics that are aimed to actually help the listener get better. Um and sometimes that's way less entertaining, but in my mind, I think uh a lot of what Brett's doing is lowering the collective bar on discussions around the sport. So let's use this. You know, I I point I called out the 2K test. Let's let's use it as an example. I find it actually a little bit curious that there's any real criticism of one 2000 for time for, again, we said 12 to 18 year olds. We're talking about some developmental athletes by pretty much anybody's definition. Um I'll be the first one to say that beyond a certain age, swimming a long distance, and 2000 is a long distance, especially for me, was not my cup of tea. Okay. Um, I also tell you that uh I don't always know what's good for me. And uh I'm actually in the process right now of building back my capacity in training for the first time in nearly 20 years. Um, and that's through my experience both coaching and continuing to be an athlete myself. And no, I don't, you know, have the Olympic credentials um that Brett has in either respect. Uh, but I actually think I bring a lot more to the table. Um my experience in the sport has taught me that something about the intense and often intensely stupid debate we have about training volumes and event specialization is we've organized into tribal camps where one side says that lower volume and higher intensity is what works, and another says the opposite, right? That that higher volume, lower intensity, essentially. If one of these religions, in my mind, were the real true religion, that they were wildly a better training system, or even marginally a better training system than the other, um I would be, I I I I think you would see it. Honestly, I think you would see it dominating the other. But we actually don't see that in evidence basically anywhere. And I can tell you as someone who has trained people at both ends of the spectrum, both like I I have done a uh a I've done a sprint revolution and I have done let's get in as many yards as we possibly can in this amount of time. Okay. Both ways of training have their upsides and their downsides. And if you're um going to be having an intelligent conversation about them, you want to know what those distinct limitations are, especially in a group environment where 99.9% of us are actually coaching. Okay. We are not like um, as far as I can tell, Brett's expertise is we are not designing training programs for singular, 50-meter freestyle athletes. Okay. But beyond that, I'm struck at the incoherence that I see with him posting all sorts of clips of all these, you know, uh dry land sort of cross-training, like cross-training is the way stuff. And it's very common that you'll have somebody say, argue out one side of their mouth that cross-training is so important and you don't want to be too specific, you know, training in the sport of swimming. But then when it comes to the actual swimming part, they go, yeah, but then you should be like very specialized and and not general at all. Train, you know, especially on the sprint end, right? Specialized those, those, those sprinters. Um and I think there's a there's a total incoherence for for that. I mean, I think basically what he's advocating for when he's advocating against this 2K test, we're talking about one 2000 for time, just one, not every day 2000 for time, not multiple 2000s per practice, one 2000 for time is early specialization. Okay. Because if you're gonna argue that a 12-year-old, you know, somehow has like a phenotype as a sprinter and a 2K for time, then is stupid for them to do, well, you're you're specializing them. And I don't buy it. I don't think that early sports specialization is particularly beneficial, nor do I think that early specialization within the sport is particularly beneficial. And there's actually situations where even with the most advanced elite athletes, it is not, is not, let me repeat that, beneficial to specialize. And I didn't always think this was true. So let me take you on a bit of a journey of how I got there. What I have come to understand about the limitations of volume and intensity is the following. In the short term, and you can define short term a number of different ways. I'll use an example in a second, but in the short term, specialization, higher intensity in work is actually the best predictor of performance. However, the longer you make the time period, the more generality you have in training, the more volume you have in training, the better the outcomes. So let me try and explain that in a different way. Say that I was actually designing a training program for just one athlete. And that athlete came and told me, I would like to be as fast as possible, and just to be a troll, I'm gonna say in a 200-meter, um, so I don't pick an obvious sprint distance, but I want to be as fast as possible in a 200-meter swim. And uh it's in six weeks from now. And I do not care what happens after that. I just want to swim as fast as possible in six weeks. If I was in that situation, again, we're talking about single athlete, single variable, I would absolutely train as specifically and intensively as possible around 200 meter swim. I would dial it right in. And I would hardly focus on anything else in training for that time period, if at all. Now, let's say a second athlete comes to me and they say, I want to reach my lifetime potential in the 200 meter, and I have an indefinite amount of time to continue training. Several years maybe. Or you're like me, you're gonna keep swimming, you know, into your 40s, hopefully into your 50s, beyond that. What would I design for them? Yes, I would give them some high intensity, some specificity, but given nearly unlimited time, I would design something where the bulk of the work was general. This is why I'm actually working on my capacity at age 40. Because I know I've ignored it for a long time, because I fell in love with high-intensity training. High intensity training is easy for your brain to understand. So you make this easy link with what you're doing, how you swim, right? Because it's right there, it's short term. Okay, it matches up. And the first time, this is the real reason people get hooked, the first time you do it is always the best time. Okay, when you transition from a real generalized training program and you put some specificity in there for the first time, first off, it feels awesome, and you almost always see a nice performance bump off of it. But it has diminishing returns in the long term. Okay. After a while, you have less capacity to sharpen into a fine point, or to take that analogy to its completion. You have almost no blade at all. And I think I said I would cover some other stuff at the beginning of this, but I've gone on the deep end in the topic, so here we are. Let me make one more point. Something that I have been thinking about for over a decade, and this I'm not going to finish. Um, I really want to hear from some people about this because um, again, it's something I've been thinking about for a long time. And the way my mind works is when I start thinking about something like this, I cannot stop thinking about it until I progress uh in terms of my knowledge of what is going on, or at least have a new hypothesis to test out. And I've gotten there, okay? I have a new hypothesis to test out. Um, people who have followed me for the long period, there's a nice payoff here. I think we've I finally understand why we have relatively few older distance swimmers in the sport of swimming. So, like, we just had the New York City Marathon, and I always think about this when I'm watching a marathon, or I'm watching cross-country skiing in the Olympics, or I'm watching rowing, or all sorts of other like human-powered sports where there are elite 30-plus year old athletes, and it's an endurance event. And I'm thinking, why is this actually an elite athlete age in a sport like that and it's not in swimming? And I I will suggest this. I think it has to do with volume. I think right now the average progression for an athlete is to actually peak in the sport of swimming, to actually peak training frequency right around their transition to college. This is when they will train the most frequently and the most volume. And I think that's wrong. I think that older athletes, especially ones that are gonna continue on for the long term, okay, and especially ones that are gonna at that point maybe specialize at least come competitively in some longer races, okay, should actually train more frequently, more volume, at lower intensities. This is something that I think is uh actively being studied outside of the sport of swimming in um you know sport physiology departments. And uh the person I'm really interested in on this topic, and I I can say has influenced me on this, and um I think he's a good follow on Twitter. I'm not actually on Twitter. I mean, I have an account on Twitter, but I I don't actually go on there and look at any discussions. I just have people that I want to see the feeds of. There's a guy named Alan Cousins, and uh he's got a book I'm planning on checking out. It's called The Science of Maximal Athletic Development. But basically the idea that I just suggested that that actually older athletes benefit from higher volume, lower intensity training, I think is really, really interesting. And um, I think flies in the face of a lot of what we have seen in the sport of swimming, where I think a lot of our distance athletes are getting to a stage where actually the intensity has been dialed up. Um, and maybe people are trying to uh maintain a certain level of training frequency, right? But their intensity is much higher, and then they just start feeling totally broken down at the end when they would really benefit from even training more frequently at a lower intensity. Um we know that as we age, our ability to recover diminishes. In many cases, people have interpreted this to mean that we should space out training more and then reduce volume of training. But what if, again, what if we've been doing it all wrong? What if it was really the intensity that we were peaking athletes in, particularly at the college level, that was basically over-training distance. We're both over and under-training distance swimmers, out of the sport in a lot of cases, when they could be having long careers, training more volume in smaller, more frequent workouts. Um, I'll get more into that, I'm sure, at a future date. I just wanted to uh start that discussion, comment on some of the stuff that I've been seeing. And Brett, uh, I know you won't listen to this, but I would love to have you on, or I'll come on to your podcast and um let's have let's have a little back and forth or an intelligent, fair conversation on this. Um, that's all for this week, and I'll see you guys soon.