Cam McEvoy on Not Kicking in Practice, How Feel For the Water is a Frequency Thing, and Dopamine PB Hits

Cam McEvoy - fastest man in the world - lays out his most complete explanation yet of how he’s rebuilt his 50 Free around maximal strength, neural output, and highly specific technique, rather than traditional high-volume swimming. It’s over an hour and definitely worth a listen if you like swimming really really fast.

Here are 3 things that peaked my interest from the interview with Sean Kao of Aquatic Sports Performance who has been working with the likes of Caeleb Dressel and Michael Andrew recently.

Kicking in Practice

Sean: “How much kick training are you doing?”

Cam: “None. I the only kick exposure I do is like within the the swimming technique. I don't do any isolated kick work.

The kick, at least for the 50, isn't really to do with forward propulsion. But I think it's much more to do with balance, timing and, and the linking the upper body to generate the force it needs to convert into speed.”

Feel For The Water is a Frequency Thing

Cam: “There's a lot of talk in the swimming world about needing to keep feel for the water, needing to expose yourself in the water for a very frequent amount of time.

And if you leave the water for a day, two days, all things fall apart. If you're in the water nine, 10 times a week for two hours and then you have 36 hours off like your Saturday morning to even 48 hours off Saturday morning to Monday morning, which everyone normally does you go from so much frequency to not doing it, your body's going to, yeah, feel off and not have that connection to the water.

But if you are used to swimming. Four times a week, five times a week, three times a week, and then you have you, your, every session's, at least the 24 hours in between or more. If you have 48 hours off on the weekend, you come in and you'll feel fine. You'll feel fine, but there's no, yeah there, there's no loss of feel because you're, you are adapted to a certain amount of frequency.”

PB’s Bring Excitement & Dopamine

Cam: “I get very bored in for most of the exercises, except for except for pullups. Yeah. Like I've been pull up maxing every session. And yeah, I've just been, I've so much dopamine in terms of 'cause it's so untrained, especially the high rep ranges. Almost every session, or at least week to week I'd do a PB.

And so I'd look forward to that. Having that type of like incremental improvement on such a short timeframe as well goes so far in terms of excitement for training, buy-in, excitement for what you like, what I'm going to go into the future. And that was very similar to what was happening when I first started this type of training.

Like we started working in five meter segments. We started we needed to get PB’s for 15, 20, 25, all the way out to 35, 40. And then also you start when you're not that good and then you taper into it, you get a bit better, and then the next season you get better at doing it. And so for such a long time.

I had almost weekly PB’s that I'd get really excited about attacking. Maybe I got 'em, maybe I didn't. And that freshness was so revitalizing. Especially coming off the back of, I probably had almost a good decade where I would barely do a PB in training anything or in a competition. And so that just sucks the life out of everything you do.

And yeah, that's been awesome.”