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I had a great evening yesterday with @granthamswimclub, talking to, and working with around 150 swimmers! We set the new season up right, with a huge focus on skills in the pool, and ownership of our lives outside. Great work from everybody, I hope to see you all again soon!

New season about to start! @wearecomast 📸 @isabellatimerphotography

This time last week a very up and down season came to end. I’m happy to have pb’d in the 50 fly, ready for another big drop next season! Also very grateful for the unwavering support of these 4 people!

Race day tomorrow! @wearecomast 📸: @isabellatimerphotography

Last week @myvitalmetrics invited me to their new Manchester lab to complete a DEXA scan and have a VO2 max test. I’ve posted screenshots of some of the results which you might find, and I definitely found, interesting and useful. First of all the DEXA scan is the best measure of body composition available. My body fat percentage is 8.1% which is very lean (in the top 1% of people). It also tells me that my lean index (essentially lean bmi) is very high which indicates a healthy amount of muscle to support my body not just in sport but in general life. The composition is also broken down by body part and it’s interesting to see that while my legs are very symmetric only a couple of hundred grams difference, my arms have a bigger muscular disparity of 400g ish, which may be something for me to look at in how I train and my swimming technique. The final important measure from the DEXA scan is the visceral fat which is a measure of how much fat is around the major organs. My level is very much in the healthy range again which is reassuring for general health. The VO2 max test tells me that my VO2 max is 52 mL/kg/minute, which is “Excellent”. Now this is not necessarily massively correlated to the events I race however we know that a higher VO2 max is useful for the backend speed and also recovery between rounds and between days. Again this will be interesting to compare my upcoming performances with this VO2 max versus in the future. The other interesting takeaway for me from this is that my zone one heart rate is anything less than 133 bpm and I find anecdotally that I recover the best but still gain aerobic fitness keeping my heart rate below 130 in training, so it’s nice to have that scientifically corroborated. Thanks a lot to @myvitalmetrics for the opportunity to test my body composition and VO2 Max. I look forward to coming back at some point in the future and seeing what, if anything, has changed.

Productive camp done, nationals in just over 2 weeks!