Masters Program

I am an international coach, 9x British Masters Record Holder, Masters World Record holder and massive swimming nerd. At the start of 2023, I decided to start offering online training plans to make a difference in the swim community and guide masters swimmers to being better, without doing more! In just the first 6 months I have seen swimmers set multiple nationals records across the globe, win medals at perhaps the hardest masters meet in the world (US Masters Nationals) and the biggest achievement in my eyes, swim personal bests for the first time in 20 years. 

All your life you have probably been told that the only way to get faster was to do more. More volume. More sessions. More hours. More effort. This is completely WRONG.

If we looked at the human body purely as a perfect organism, then these thoughts may be true but when you add in life, they become very misled.

Spending the majority of 2021 and 2022 working with athletes such as Ben Proud, Dylan Carter and Sarah Sjoestrom, I was initially surprised to learn what their training programs looked like. Instead of massive volume they chose quality over quantity and this led them to be faster but perhaps even more importantly happier. A regular session for them will be 2000m or less and a regular week may not exceed 10,000m.

Once you have entered adulthood and have to juggle a full time job, family and social life, it is easy for swimming to take a back seat and with it, any ambition and goals. The whole purpose of this program is to tell you that you can still swim lifetime bests, win medals, set records while maintaining that healthy balance in your life. On top of that the sessions will be a massive breath of fresh air compared to your locals masters teams boring slug up and down the black line.

To get the most out of a quality session, one where you need to swim FAST, it is important you feel fresh and rested going into it. That would not be the case if you had swam 6000m the night before, gotten up early for another 5000m before a long day of work and then were staring down some fast 25s.

To resolve this, sessions are carefully planned so that after quality training where you have high physiological demand, you will have a softer session, where the focus will turn to technique. In these lower-intensity sessions, aerobic capacity can be developed with the use of hypoxic work.

While bad coaches may label this lazy, when you take into account everything you are doing in life it makes sense. Adaption only happens when you rest. If you never get a chance to catch your breath you will perpetually be tired and consequently, slow...

This balance will not only have dramatic effects on your swimming performance but in all areas of life. You will find yourself more productive and having more fun. Old training methods are draining and you may have even forgotten how good you could feel without endless hours of slogging up and down.

It is also important that you simply get FASTER!

Every single event in competitive swimming is bottlenecked by your speed. That may be pretty obvious for the 50m Freestyle but it is just as critical for the 400m IM and even the 1500m! These plans will make you faster than ever and set you up with confidence in whatever races you take on.

Increasing your terminal velocity in the pool is the most difficult thing to achieve and takes a lot of time and care. There are still numerous types of sessions that can help you get faster. You will use a range of resistance tools such as parachutes, fins, paddles and even DIY yourself a shower loofah on some rope. By completing short repeats (10-25m) with maximum power and ample rest, you will be increasing the strength of the muscle that directly contributes to your swim speed. It will also increase your sensory feel of the water and can help stimulate you to make organice technical changes.

It is also important to break down the portions of the race to really hone in and develop your strengths and weaknesses. By isolating just the start, underwater kicking or your surface speed, you can increase the competence of all the elements. If you train in a 25m pool, you may find yourself going 15 meters underwater on a regular basis, this means you would only be swimming 10m per 25m. By doing work from a surface push you can practice swimming for longer even with pool limitations while having a massive focus on not deccelerating,

You will also be improving your technical prowess in the water.

Sprinters on this program will practice drills often performed by World Champion swimmers such as Ben Proud, Florent Manadou and Dylan Carter. By improving your stroke mechanics, you will be able to move through the water faster with less effort.

Middle-distance swimmers  on the program will find a different set of carefully curated drills. You will also tackle a lot of stroke efficiency work that will have you discovering the sweet spot your speeds at different stroke rates and stroke counts. Increasing this efficiency and distance per stroke will have you be able to hold faster speeds for longer! It will also help you tactically in races.

During his time working with Energy Standard, I learnt a lot from highly esteemed swimming coach Tom Rushton. Tom has formulated his own methods of writing training sessions that allow perfect control over physiological balances in training. I have adopted these methods.

Here you can find a more detailed breakdown of the energy zones and colours.

By signing up together we will first set goals, then achieve them. The session plans will be catered towards your goals and the events you swim.

There is a Masters (£150) and Masters Plus (£200) Option. The only difference is the number of sessions you will get on a weekly basis. Masters members will get 4 sessions and Masters Plus will get 6 sessions.

Adam was one of the first swimmers to sign up to my program and now holds multiple national records. Here is his testimonial...

Brandt was the first person to sign up to my online plan. Working full time and training alone have not prevented him from swimmimg lifetime bests! Here is his testimonial....