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Introduces Cameron McEvoy’s comeback, Matt Smith’s role, and the central idea that a radically different training approach rebuilt sprint swimming. Sets up the story and explains the 50-meter freestyle race before jumping back to Rio.
How do you go from 29th to Olympic gold in under 2 years?Cameron McEvoy picked up the nickname The Professor for his background in physics, but after a career-ending Tokyo Olympics, he felt isolated for questioning if the training approach had it wrong.That's when I got a message from Cam.I'm Matt Smith.I don't come from swimming or from any one sport.I get hired by elite athletes to build out their strength, mobility, and periodization in a way their sport doesn't.And for the last 3 years, I've been responsible for integrating all of Cam's training as we turned McEvoy from being seen as a failure into the fastest swimmer in history.
So, how often can you say that you've been doing something for 26 years and you go, "Right, I've never actually experienced this in this way."
What started as a comeback to swimming turned into a revolutionary method that rebuilt what it looks like to train as a sprint swimmer.
This was never about becoming an Olympic champion.It was how do we get from one end of the pool to the other as fast as possible.
There's still a deep misunderstanding of what actually is the full process of this.
Now we're finally opening the lab doors, taking you through the story and science behind how we built the fastest swimmer on Earth.
You can just hold up your gold medal and be like, "Guys, it worked."
Before we can look at Cam's story, we need to understand the race.Cam races the 50-m freestyle.It's the shortest and fastest aquatic event at the Olympics.Athletes get set on the block and wait for the queue.They put massive force into the block as they take off.They streamline as they dive into the water and hold the glide, then dolphin kick to the surface before breaking out into freestyle.The freestyle stroke requires a specific timing of kicking pulling the water.The first to touch the end of the 50-m pool
takes gold, all over and under 22 seconds of racing, all done without taking an extra breath.And in a race this short, tiny inefficiencies become very expensive, very quickly.So, how was Cam able to climb his way to gold?Cam and I have done most of our work together over the past few years online.But with a training camp in Brisbane, Australia, there was a perfect opportunity to introduce you to the entire team and show you not just what happened, but how it happened.Because this isn't just a story of one race, it's the story of how a completely different approach got built.And to understand that, our journey starts back in 2016 at the Rio Olympics.
Covers McEvoy’s rise as Australia’s favorite in Rio, the disappointing result, and the emotional fallout that followed. It then moves into the pandemic period, when time away from the pool revealed that less traditional training might actually make him faster.
Uh yo, welcome to Australia.
Talk us through this one, Rio 2016.
I wish I could just go back and just pass on all that experience and info back to like my younger self here.Then it would have been a pretty different time in my life.I feel about the time.
Back then, Cameron was the golden boy of Australian sprinting.He went to Rio as the overwhelming favorite for Olympic gold.He was 22, right in the window where sprint swimmers are expected to peak.And the story already seemed written.But when the gun went off, something did not add up.The favorite didn't even make it to the final.
You know something's not right, but then it's too close to kind of bring it up and it's not the environment as well to show some form of doubt cuz it was just a the simple understanding of more isbetter.Uh and more will get you there.
And what happened next is important because people did not look at that loss and ask whether the model had failed, they looked at Cam.
Emotionally I was destroyed cuz I I didn't do what I wanted to do in Rio.Uh
I knew things weren't right, but I was also being told, "No, things were perfect.It's just yourself."
The message around him was simple.Cam did not have what it takes.He couldn't perform when it mattered.But when you fail, you don't just walk away.You put your head down, build for the next chance.And Tokyo was supposed to be that chance, but then the world stopped.
When lockdown hit, the pools closed.For the first time since he was a kid, Cam stopped swimming.For months, he stayed out of the water completely.He was in the gym, lifting, doing bro sets, not for performance, just because that was life at the time.He wasn't training for the sport, he was just living.Until an old friend challenged him to a bet.A simple race, but one that would change everything.
I'm going to go to the pool, we're going to film it.I'm going to warm up, I'm just going to my my first lap is going to be a 50 max.Uh and so, yeah, went there, not one stroke in the water for 7 months, and I ended up swimming a time that was faster than any 50 I did in the entire preparation for the Tokyo Olympics that wouldhave been in 2020.Uh and so, that was the first hard evidence of what I just experienced there that went that that went in a counter trend to everything that I'd been taught and believed in.
Cam stumbled upon something that should not have been possible.He was faster than he'd been during a full Olympic prep without doing a single stroke in the water for months.It didn't make sense, unless the traditional approach, the one generations of swimmers had followed before him, wasn't just inefficient, but actually holding him back.
Explains why high-volume sprint training can conflict with true race-speed work and how McEvoy’s experiments exposed the limits of the old system. The chapter ends with his decision to restart, explore life outside swimming, and return with a new hypothesis.
So, how do you actually swim faster while training less?
Well, you talk whilst you drive.
Yeah.So, traditionally, total volume would look something like that.You'd hit 30 km in a week.Uh the training I'm doing now, if you just go strictly total volume, probably about there, if if that at all.
In sprint training, intensity and volume pull against each other.The more total work you do, the further that work has to move away from your top speed.If you're swimming huge distances every week, you fundamentally limit how much true max speed training you can do.And remember, this race is over in less than 22 seconds.
In this model, I wouldn't hit race pace until the last week or two of the entire season, so it would be virtually nothing.Whereas in this one, every week there's there's exposure to race pace.
The body adapts to what you repeatedly ask of it.Traditionally, the emphasis in the global swimming community is on aerobic capacity, even for sprinters.So, if most of your training sits too far away from race pace, you may not only be missing some of the adaptations you need, you might even be training them away from it.Especially for a 22-second race where no one breathes.
I went back, I did those eight weeks of training, I swam really fast, and then I had the coaches come up to me and say, "That's incredible you did those times under that type of training.Imagine what you'd do if you did this type of training, which was the normal stuff."We came to a compromise and kind of met in the middle.So, instead of doing like 40k a week, it was started at around that 25k, but then every two or three weeks it would creep up another 5k and another 5k.And then by the time mid-February came around, I'm back to doing exactly what I was doing before.Um and then off the back of this, I raced once a month after that first initial competition, and every comp was slower and slower and slower.And so, yeah, Tokyo ended up being a very very slow competition.
I think I was 29th in the 53.I don't remember what I was in the 100 free.Um yeah.
It was hard to see him go through those moments of race after race not swimming well and not uh seeing through his potential when he knew he could and he yeah, it it was very frustrating for everyone.
The moment that I thought I was done with swimming was was effectively after my my final race in Tokyo.I was at a point where I had nowhere to go within the sport to do something different.The only way I would continue swimming was to just jump back on the conveyor belt and go through the factory and just do the same old thing again and again.Pretty much that last swim in Tokyo, I was pretty adamant that I I was done with the sport and there was nowhere for me to go and that that was it.
That's when we basically decided to let's get out of here and have a fresh start and lived our life.
We're going to put everything in storage, rent an RV and just drive down the East Coast of Australia.We got no time limit on it.We have no destination.We're just we're just
getting in and going.
Cam started exploring who he was outside of the water.He got back into physics and started exploring new domains like climbing, calisthenics, and life beyond swimming.
It was here he realized something important.There was more to life than swimming.But there was also more to swimming than just swimming.
Being somewhere so new, not knowing your bearings, not knowing where you are, but getting the joy to go out and explore, that then allowed me to I guess unlock that same curiosity of newness and novelty to then naturallyredirect that back to swimming and something that has been so closely held to me and a part of my life.
The specific moment for me that that relit the fire inside of right, I'm going to give this another go was uh Maddie and I were over in Europe in June of 2022 and part of that trip we wentthrough Paris.And so we're 2 years out from the Paris Olympics and it was just a mixture of everything new that I had learned up to that point in time combining with the cultural aura that was going around Paris inthe lead up to the Olympics that just sparked the fire inside.Over the course of a couple of weeks, I sat down and tried to summarize on paper everything I'd come across in every other sport that I that that I'd learned from in the last year and tried to re-contextualizeit to swimming.
The core hypothesis was simple.Swimming faster is not just about swimming more.
We'd talk about the ideas multiple times a day that got him the hypothesis of doing less, doing more detailed, doing more like a holistic approach will produce a faster swim.So it kind of felt natural for us as research and sciencey people to test out the hypothesis so that we got an answer.
It was a it was a win-win.I go back, I try something new, I experience the sport that I've known for 20 plus years in a new way.If it pays off, great.I'll see where it takes me.Maybe I come back to Paris in 2 years time and if it doesn't, I could just kind of sit back, brush my hands off and go, "Right.Maybe that was the only way you could do it."And the closure was there and I could move on a lot more comfortably with my life.
Details how McEvoy broke the race into swim, strength, and mobility, then assembled the right coaches and facilities in Brisbane. It introduces the Queensland Academy of Sport, Matt’s mobility work, and the first signs that the new system could produce faster times.
Cam's first breakdown was to separate the race into its major demands, swim, strength and mobility.He was already an Olympic swimmer so clearly understood a lot of the nuances of the race.On the strength side, he knew he needed a stronger pull and to work with resistance in the water.Also on the mobility side, he was aware of the limited access to the shape needed for streamline and the freestyle itself.But at this stage, these were like separate islands with Cam's language and instinct to where he was at.
I reached out to a handful of Australian coaches that I'd known for over a decade.I sent them a giant document that outlining all of my ideas, what I wanted to do.Um was asking them like, is there any scope where I can have a lane, you kind of guide me through this, look over what I'm doing.But with the actual like Aussie-based coaches, uh I sent it off and then got nothing in return.
He wasn't being viewed as the future anymore.He was being viewed as a failed athlete asking for another shot after his time had already passed, which created a very practical problem.How do you come back if you don't have a coach and you don't even have a place to train?So, Cam stopped looking for permission and started looking for partners.He needed people who wouldn't just buy into the idea, but stress test it, challenge it, and help build it out properly.This wasn't about finding one coach.It was about building the right team.
I had my ideas on what I wanted to do on the water and I needed a place to do it.So, I got put on to Tim.Presented like my ideas to him within 5 minutes.He was on the He was on board.He knew exactly what we wanted to do.He had ideas of his own that he was really excited about.
premise of when we got together wasn't uh at all in the the capacity that it ended up uh with the working relationship.It was really I was just very interested in hearing in depth his ideas and then if possible add a little bit of value to that.
The place that he came from in that meeting wasn't from a here's a three-time Olympian like look like maybe I can do something with this like like we can get XYZ medal or go to this competition.It was purely first and foremost um whatever you want to do whenever you're done, as long as you finish with a better relationship you have with the sport than when you started, then my job's done.And pretty much like when I heard that, it was just like box checked.And so, uh me and Tim partnered up.I moved to Brisbane, which is where Tim is based, and started training out of Somerville.Uh and so that's box checked.I had a place to swim and I had I guess the the first beginnings of this.
I then needed the access to the technology, the science around the approach that that I wanted to do, and also the gym and the the strength uh training that I wanted to do.So that's where the the QAS came in, the Queensland Academy of Sport.This is by far the world-leading place if you want to do this type of training.Their technology that they have uh set up in their pool absolutely out of this world.So in this pool alone, we got a diving block that we've been using weekly, sometimes twice a week for the last 2 and 1/2 years.We've racked up thousands of data points across pretty much anything you can measure.Pretty much you can get access to any type of data measurement that you want.Virtually the access you get to world-renowned tech, plus on top of that, world-renowned experts that know not only how to use the tech, but how to apply it to to within your sport, it's unmatched.
I had that under wraps, uh which for me left only one thing, which was the final pillar of my training, which I'd never had proper access to or even focus upon in the past, and that was mobility.And so I came across uh a 30-odd minute shoulder mobility educational video that Matt and his team has put together.I thought, "Wow, that's actually the best put together, well-thought-out description of this that I've ever seen."And so I was walking concrete at this time.Um I'm less so.I'm actually a lot more flexible now.Um but at the time uh I had all the ideas of the in-the-water swimming, the the developmental on that side of thing, but I needed the help on the shape, the the technique.Um and I had no idea on what to do.I came on board with Matt in I think it was the end of March 2023.
And so at this point in time, I was deeply restricted by my range of motion.I'd done 30, 40, 50 km worth of swimming weekly for years on end beforehand.I raced at a competition, I think it was like maybe a week or two after we first met a line.And then I implemented the first phase, phase one.Uh and I think 3 weeks later, 218.First time we've been under 22 seconds in 4 years.My goal of this whole comeback was I'd love the the privilege to go 21 again.Um and yeah, it was literally just like a like plugging uh something into an electrical socket and just the electricity flowed and things worked and yeah, it was beautiful.He's the most knowledgeable person that I've come across for movement in general.And at the end of the day, the 50 freestyle is just a cyclical movement pattern for 21 seconds.
Yeah, it was a no-brainer to move to that next step to get Matt in on board to work closely with the strength training,
the mobility training as a whole, but also to get the guidance around how to structure the the the weekly training, the blocks as well, and how to move from a very general approach of strength development into general powerdevelopment into swim specific power development under resistance into the swim specific body weight sprinting that then leads into the competition at the end of the season.
Shows how the team reworked race technique, especially the start, streamline, and underwater phase, to reduce drag and preserve speed. It also explains the mobility assessment that revealed shoulder limitations as the key bottleneck.
With the right experts on board, we could rebuild the map of what it takes to swim as fast as possible.Nick and the QAS team relay the data giving insights into the effects of technique changes and how to refine the race segments.My work started with Cam's mobility, then I refined the approach for strength and power development in sprint swimming.While Tim addressed the swim specific issues and overall race strategy.
When Cam and I first started together, he swam a 50 freestyle in this very pool here.Uh Um and it was kind of like the day one moment.Let's see exactly where you are.Let's use this as a baseline to move forward from.I said to Cam, it's like this needs to look different.You This needs to look different.Right now, you look like you're swimming with 200 or 100 technique as fast as you can.
The fundamental flaw, which Tim spotted right at the first training session, was a carryover from the old school.This was about understanding that the demands of pure sprint
were different to the way Cam had been forced to swim for years.His technique had to change.But it goes deeper than that.So, we pulled everyone together poolside at QAS to unpack what the 50 was really asking of him.
One of the things I remember early on was just talking about getting a little bit more width in your stroke, flattening out a little bit, and I think the strength gains that you were able to bring into thatas well contributed a ton to your body position and the way that you're moving through the water at the moment.I remember when we went back to the training pool and started playing around with these things.That was one of the major things we worked on really early in terms of just getting a bit more width into the stroke, getting him out here as opposed to in here.Um and it definitely felt quite foreign for Cam early on.
So, the first practice session, I remember remember the set.It was uh with a red finish parachute, eight 25s on 2 minutes as fast as you can.Like normally, you dive in, you do 2 km for your warm-up, uh you start your main session, that might go for 2 or 3 km, then you go a kilometer warm down, and then you're done.With me, I went into the gym, warmed up a little bit, got in, and within 100 m, I was like, "Right, we're starting."Did that main set, and I remember doing it, and just it was so wildly different to what what I'd ever done in the past, and it just felt weird.It didn't feel like I was at swimming training.It felt like I was in some new sport altogether.
I mean, he's he's always been world class at freestyle.Um Um and you don't go to three Olympics and swim 50s, 100s, and 200s at the level that he has done it without being exceptionally good.
He was always a technically gifted swimmer in and he he swam multiple events like from 50 free all the way up to I saw him do a 400 IM.He did open water.
Um so, he was always good at adapting his stroke to the distance and um he could do multiple strokes.So, his feel for the water was always pretty good.
When you focus in on the idea of needing to swim more and get your aerobic fitness up, uh the technique that you actually do in the aerobic swimming on is way different in terms of the kick and pulltiming.The phase differences are completely out of whack.And so, you you're training effectively a different stroke.So, the 50 freestyle technique is for every two strokes you do, you're doing six kicks.It's what we call a six-beat kick.There's a specific timing of when you do that kick to which part of the stroke of the pull part of your stroke that you're in.And so, for me, I'll enter with my right arm and kick with my right leg.Then halfway through that right arm I'm pulling, I kick with the left.And then at the end, as I'm exiting with my right arm, I'll kick with the right again.
And then similarly on the left-hand side.So, there's a huge nuance to the timing of when to kick in which part of your pull and then holding that throughout the race.
You know, we've obviously got the technical piece and what goes into the 50, but also just little pieces around the strategy of the best way to swim the 50 as well.Um learning exactly how to exert the perfect amount of effort at each stage of the race to get the best outcome.But all of those things are definitely secondary to that that technical and skill point at the front.And then how do we enhance that with all those other um pieces of the puzzle?
When we look more closely at the race, another problem became obvious.Cam was losing too much of the speed he already had.You see, the race begins at the highest velocity as the athlete jumps from the blocks.Then, as the race progresses, everyone gets slower and slower.So, the entire game is to start fast and then hold on to it as much as possible.Cam was actually very good at this once he broke out into freestyle.He could hold on better than most.The problem was that he was too often having to chase the race from behind because he'd lose too much speed during the first 5 to 15 m.The moment Cam hits the water in the dive, glides, and underwater kicks, he was losing way too much speed, speed that he wouldn't be able to gain back later.
Like, if we sit down and rewatch the 50, you know, you're maybe in fourth or fifth position at 15 or 20, starting to pull through I do I don't think you're in the top three at 25.Yeah.From 25 to 35, that's our um sort of second free swimming speed.It is unequivocally a technical breakdown taking place.Yeah.Is where you are going to start dealing with some of the byproducts of that first 35 m of effort.Yeah.At every level, not just international um world and Olympic, but all the way down to junior meets, that's where things change.Um
we talked about one of your strengths is that 25 to 35, that visual illusion of you just being shot out of a cannon everyone else going backwards.Yeah.You're still slowing down as well.It's just you're slowing down less than everybody else.
I've got very good power that I can unload in the water within my freestyle stroke, but my dive, for example, I'm still behind the best in the world to the 15-m mark.
You see, the issue wasn't his power, it was his drag, the resistance from the water.Cam's inability to hit a clean streamline meant that from almost the very start, he was dramatically slowing down as he was unable to slice cleanly into the water, losing precious speed almost immediately.To show this, let's take two objects with the same weight.
One is streamlined, and one is, well, this mess.Drop them at the same time, and the difference is obvious.
That's the power of your shape as you enter the water.That was the key.Caeleb didn't just need more force at the takeoff.He needed to stop giving his speed away to physics through poor streamline.
I remember when I was trying to figure out how to get my dive better, I sent this screenshot to you the entry at the Tokyo Olympics for the 50-m free, focusing on these three guys here.And at the time, you hadn't had pretty much any exposure to elite male 50-m freestyle anything yet.
50 freestyle
Yes.
Swimming in general.
Yeah.And you came back to me virtually ranking these guys in terms of the best time to 15 to worst, and you got it right.You had Caeleb, then you had Flo, then you had Bruno.My mind was blown, and I had no idea how you do it, but run us through the rationale about how you figured that out.
My rationale was looking at the shape they're able to enter in order to basically be as streamlined as possible.And if we take Dressel in the middle, a great example of a really nice streamline, he's basically forming a straight line from his arm all the way through to his hip, and how his spine holds himself in themiddle.If we come over this way, we can see that there's more compensations going on.If we look at the shoulder to the scapula, this is closed off and forming an angle here.And the same thing is happening more at the hip, where it's forcing the ribs to now flare out over here.And so, if I was to join these two, you can see how there's there's this kind of like zigzag pattern happening, where he's compensating at both the shoulder and having to flare out the ribs.
In contrast, we now have a much better line going through the torso region.The ribs aren't flaring out, but this shoulder is still closed off.In terms of number of compensations, basically going from this should be fastest, here should be second, and here should be third.
And that's the difference.Like you have Caleb who is a sub 5-0 time to 15.You have Flo who's a 5-0 time to 15.And you have Bruno who's a 5-2 time to 15.As the number of compensations increase, you add 0.1, 0.2 of a second.
To reduce drag, you need a better streamline as you enter the water.A shape that can only be achieved if you have the mobility to enter it.Cam did not.His mobility meant he was unable to enter the shape he needed for an efficient streamline.So, our goal was to take Cam from this to this.Decades of swimming and no one had addressed the limitation underneath it all.The first link in the chain.
The biggest mistake athletes make with mobility training is that they either don't do it, so it's not recognized as a form of training on the same level as strength training is.Uh and also not understanding that it's on the same spectrum of strength.There is a pre and post meeting maths of dive 15 times where pre-math, I was uh 5-4 and above, 5-4 to 5-6.Post-math, I've been uh moving towards that 5-1.So, let's take that 5-1 to 5-5, the average of the two.That's basically the difference between winning Olympic gold and not making the Australian team for the 50 freestyle.You add in the rest of the lap, so the the technique and uh how that would have been affected, then yeah, you just gets further and further away from that.So, I'd be a lot slower.
Every athlete should start with an initial assessment.The goal is to identify what is good, where the limitations are, and then rank them so we can individualize the training.
I remember doing this and I had much higher hopes for myself.Um especially this one.I looked at the videos that you put together for this one to be like, right, do this, this is the assessment.And your arm is literally like back here.And I was like, oh, I'm pretty good at that.I'm a swimmer, like see how we go.And yeah, I didn't even get it up right.Seeing this was like, right, I have so much more that I can improve on to then get faster.Although it was horrific, it was really exciting.
I was shocked when I first saw it.Like I was not expecting it to be, especially with like a In fact, basically across the board.I was like, wow, okay.
Yeah.
We have a lot more to work on than that.
Yeah.And like with your experience, like you would have seen that and probably felt that excitement on another level than I did.Like I knew that there was room to move, but like you knew exactly how much there was.
For you to be swimming at the level you were so long
Yeah.
and for the mobility to look like this, to me was like
Yep.
kind of mind-blowing that it you'd be this big of a difference.Before we done the assessment, if you had to guess what was your main mobility limitation, what would your guess have been if you forget everything we talked about in the last few years?
I know it.It was lats.
When we lift our arms overhead, we stretch muscles like the lats, but there are other ones as well.Blue is representing pec major, the green yellowy band is representing subscapularis and teres major, and the red one is the lats.Now as we go through the freestyle stroke, the first one to tension is the pec major.Then the subscapularis and teres major comes in, and then the lats, especially when we elevate the shoulder.So this is a sequencing of what gets stretched in this motion.Now for Cam, it was not just his lats, but these other two that were causing him issues.We know this because we can isolate out and test the subscapularis and teres major, for example, by externally rotating the arm.Notice how this motion just stretches subscapularis and teres major.This band is tensioned, whilst these other two bands are loose in this position.
And this was Cam's number one weak link.
Tracks the deeper mobility fixes across shoulders, spine, and hips, and how those changes were integrated into the bridge and dive. The chapter also covers the temporary loss of feel, the recalibration period, and the lead-in to Fukuoka trials.
Cam was in desperate need for improvement.I would have spent a large part of my time trying to get my lats more mobile, which just would have been a dead end.I would have I would have just been going around in circles and I never would have got anywhere.So, running into Matt and and figuring that out early in this process was a massive time changer, time saver.
But, it wasn't just the shoulders.We found issues in his spine, hips, and more.We tested to uncover the root cause and build a training program accordingly.A few months later, Cam could finally get his arm upright, leading to greater overhead range, and a transformed streamline.He could arch his spine and open his hips.
That's actually crazy.
Your hips are like Chad's nuts.A lot.
I remember when you were first doing the assessment and I wasn't wanting you to put your hands on your knees, but you were basically falling forward.
I was in agony here, as well.Like, I I had the thousand-yard stare.I was in a whole lot of pain.Yeah, I like I actually cuz I remember doing this and and sent it off.I didn't really think much about it, but that's insane.
Each of these areas of shoulder flexion, spine extension, and hip extension come together to form the bridge.It's for this reason the bridge became our big-picture mobility goal, as it integrates all of these pieces together.You see, we want mobility that works in movement together when we need it, not just in isolated pieces.So, we target and fix the individual problematic areas, integrate them into the bridge, and then transfer that into the dive, streamline, and freestyle.
And we dove headfirst into this stuff, added added it in concurrently with the gym and the swimming I was doing at that point in time.And what happens with that is as you gain a little bit more mobility, your perception of of your body and where you think you are in space shifts.And so, after swimming for so long and then having this slow, yet intentional change in how my body moved, I lost the temporarily the feel of the water.Um as we were getting kind of to the deepest point of this mobility work.Uh we were 6 weeks out from Fukuoka.We had I remember one particular session.He was out at Summer of Soul so at the um at the pool that he that Tim coaches at.I remember like sitting he would do like a bit of a swim down and I'd sit down with Tim and he'd just he was like we just have to be calm um because you could tell that he was
just like he wasn't talking cuz normally he talks.Like he's he'll give you a uh a summary of how it felt and and he wasn't really saying much.
Initially, the big one was in the lead up to Japan cuz it was really early on.And a big change had happened in lots of different areas at that stage.We've changed a lot.We can see in the ranges that he's now more flexible than he was.And so he was really in this kind of black box of not knowing like what was happening.
This is the uncomfortable part of the process because once the body starts changing, the athlete can temporarily lose the feeling of the very thing they've spent years refining.I remember on one of our video calls, Cam feared that we changed too much too soon.And that fear was real.As he was gaining range, he was also changing his internal map of his body.The feel of the water and the timing of the patterns that he built over years.We now jokingly refer to this stage before peaking as his anxiety phase.Because sometimes to build a new athlete, you first have to disrupt the old one.And we call that recalibration.The key is knowing when to back off at the right time so his nervous system could actually adapt before competition.And with the Fukuoka World Championships getting close, the clock was ticking.
Like with all things, mobility is a strength based thing.You periodize it like strength.You taper off from it like strength.And so that's what we did going into Fukuoka.We tapered down that along with everything else.Um and it was around it was at 6-week mark that was the period of time that it took to I guess recalibrate to that new feeling of sprinting.
Before the World Championships, each country runs its own trials to select which athletes will represent them on the world stage.The Australian trials took place 6 weeks before the 2023 Fukuoka World Championships, marking Cam's first major event since his return to swimming and his chance to qualify for the international stage.Cam went in not really knowing if the new system would perform when it mattered.But that changed when he saw the time on the board, setting a time of 21.2.
Covers the breakthrough 21.2 at Australian trials, the nerves heading into Fukuoka, and the race itself. McEvoy wins decisively, proving the experiment works on the world stage and claiming his first world title.
That didn't just qualify him for the upcoming World Championships, it landed him with the 10th fastest 50 meter freestyle in history.And just like that, the guy the swimming world had written off wasn't just back in the conversation, he just made himself the favorite to win as he was preparing for the 2023 World Championships.
When he dropped 21.2, that was when like the penny dropped that okay, this is this is finally played out the way that it should have.
It made me fully realize the reality of okay, I'm in a position now that's very different to where I thought I would be when I started.Um and yeah, it took a it took a few weeks to process the that that time period between uh the World Championship trials and the World Champs, uh I actually got really nervous cuz it wasn't so it Iwas sideswiped by I wasn't expecting it to be that type of reality.And so I had to really quickly uh accept it, understand it, and then go through the motions, and also fight like a lot of the a lot of the old demons that get planted in your head around yourself-confidence and as an athlete, your ability to perform on the international level.From that point in time leading into that that competition, uh I was nervous.Um not only was I trying to navigate this new approach, uh this double taper, so tapering for the trials and then trying to utilize that to to peak a little bit more at the world championships.
Um I was also going into an international competition as favorite.And the last time that happened was was Rio.There are there are a lot of doubters, and that's natural.You know, you've been to three Olympics.His most recent Olympics, he really had very little impact in individual events.He did get a medal in a relay, but you know, most of the consensus was Cam's well and truly past his prime.He's now going down a road of trying to do things in a completely different way, and the reality is it's probably not going to work out.And I think there are a lot of people just sitting back um expecting to see a fail.
I was so nervous.I I hadn't yet trusted that I could perform on an international stage and put the pieces together.And so basically heat semi-final of the 50 freestyle in Fukuoka, I just imagined that the starter was Nick in the corner and that I was at QAS.
Because I had started him so much for his um his testing trials, he just wanted to picture being in a I guess a a more comfortable environment.So, he pictured me saying take your marks and and pushing the button.
Away in the 50 free final, McEvoy and Alexei in four and five.Defending champion Proud in three has got away well.They're going through in lane four.Cameron McEvoy is looking strong.He's looking powerful.He's after a world record.Surely not.McEvoy on his way home.McEvoy will get the gold.Another gold for Australia.Silver goes to Alexei.Oh, that was a domination.
Executed to perfection.And he claims his first ever individual world title.
This photo perfectly encapsulates the moment in time that this leap of faith paid off and that it was solidified as at least a step in the right direction.Um it was special.
Watching that race would be up there with one of the best things that I have seen.One of the best days of my life.That was one of the moments that I'll never forget.
Fukuoka was the first real test of the experiment on the world stage.And Cam didn't just win, he dominated with the biggest winning margin between first and second in any 50 free world championship final.After all the doubt, after Rio, after the Tokyo Olympics, after years of carrying that weight, Cameron McEvoy touched the wall first.The experiment had worked, and he was officially the world champion.
Explains how the new system changed the weekly schedule, strength work, and race-specific preparation. It then uses Doha to show why competition strategy, reps in reserve, and periodization matter for peaking at the right time.
This was my first world championship gold.Uh the first world championship final I've been in since 2017.Nine months before this, I wasn't in the water, hadn't touched water in over a year, uh 2 years.18 months before this, I didn't even have a thought in my mind that I would be uh in the water doing any form of swimming, let alone being in a world championship final, and doing this.So,
It's pretty incredible.
To watch him walk through the door in Fukuoka and
do what he did in that 50 freestyle, it wasn't just about finding a new way to swim fast.It It represented so much more than that.
There was something bigger than just just winning the medal that actually kind of resonated with me far more than the actual race itself, and it was just a manner in which I did it.I redeveloped an entirely new way of training.Uh I backed myself and kind of jumped off the cliff, and and yeah, just just ran with it and and wanted to see where that would take me, and it took me all the way to a world championshipgold medal, uh the second best textile 50 freestyle in history, and to have done that all, I guess, against what was generally perceived as right from the swimming community and from my peers and and and those who kindof uh in that status quo in the swimming world.
This truly is an entirely different way of training for the sport.To understand just how different, we first need to look at the old schedule.
All right, so this is what a traditional week of training looks like for a 50 and 100 m sprinter that I was doing before.So, we'd come into the pool on a Monday morning.We would hit a little session on the spin bike for a little bit of a an aerobic dose.We'd get into the water, do a 2-hour swim session.And then we'd get out.And then we would do gym.And then we would come back in the afternoon around 3:00.We'd come in Tuesday morning, hit a 2-hour swim, hit a 2-hour swim, hit another 2-hour swim, second gym session of the week.We'd come in for a 2-hour swim here, 2-hour swim there, another 2-hour swim there, a gym, a spin on the Friday beforehand as well.We'd come in for a 2-hour swim.
So, this is your extra aerobic boost in case
Yeah, in case that wasn't enough.For my 21 seconds of swimming.I think this type of training loses the context of the end goal and just gets a little bit too far ahead of itself.
So, when I originally started, I had strength as a pillar, swimming as a pillar, mobility as a pillar, and I thought they were on three separate islands, but they kind of came together as a whole in the raceat the end of the season.But, it was through working with Matt, he allowed me to see they were just different points along one axis of a spectrum.The philosophies of approach that I learned through how we approached the mobility training, how we figured out where was the lowest hanging fruit, the dosages and volume of those exercises, I was able to take them and apply thatto how I structured my resistance training in the water, how I structured my body weight peaking phase in the water, how I structured my where I place my gym sessions within the week of training.
Once you consider how the strength, mobility, and swim training affect each other, it becomes clear how unbalanced the old schedule was and how it was not optimized for the way we view sprint swim training.Let's compare it to a typical week that Cam does now.This example is a phase later in the season as he's peaking for a major competition.Strength and mobility now have a major portion of the total training.Even when swimming is the primary goal, that strength and mobility base remains present.The schedule utilizes rest days before important sprint sessions.The mobility is deliberately incorporated into the schedule and not randomly thrown in as active recovery sessions, which it's not.And we choose the sessions time of day.No more super early morning training.And the Thursday swim session in this phase was deliberately scheduled to match the same time of day as the competition finals.
So, the body is used to sprinting in the evening when it counts.
On paper, it looks like a massive difference and that's because it is.Uh but it's like comparing apples and oranges.Like the the one before this, mostly low
uh really slow intensity, really slow speed type of swimming.Uh so, volume was way up, intensity was way low on average.Uh and then you compare to this, volume is obviously way low, but everything I do here is a dose of close to if not maximum intensity.And that's why it's so different.
I'd spent so long doing so much slow swimming.You'd get out of the water and you just feel like your all your energy stores was drained and you just felt you felt zapped.Like like you're a sponge that's just been fully squeezed out.Whereas, I'd jump in on this session and between the reps, I'd feel like I'm getting a pump.Like you go to the gym and you do bicep curls, you get a bicep pump.You just feel that.You feel kind of the the strength kind of pulsating through your muscles.I'd get out of the pool feeling more capable and and and more and stronger than I was before I started.
This same philosophy was used when I program cam strength training.You see, we view swimming as a strength-based skill, making it fundamental to optimize the strength training, especially earlier in the season, so he actually gets strong.Not enough to fall off being wiped out from a mountain of aerobic training.So, here's three changes that stood out.In freestyle, the hand enters the water with the palm down.So, the common thinking is to do pull-ups with the same grip.However, we need to look at it a bit more closely.The pronated grip forces the arm path a bit wider, yet swimming takes the arm in front of the body.And the reason we train pull-ups is the strength in the pulling of the arm.So, a neutral or supinated grip will actually help us get the arm path that's more effectively going to transfer over.The grip is a distraction to what actually matters.
Another example is how the body moves in water very differently to on land, especially in biarticular muscles, muscles that cross two joints, like the rectus femoris and hamstrings, which are especially powerful when swimming freestyle.Let's look at the rectus femoris.It's one of the four muscles of the quadriceps.Whilst three of the quads only cross the knee, this one crosses both the knee and hip.Yet most of the swimming world uses squat motions as their main lower body strength work, which is useful for the dive.However, that rectus femoris I just mentioned does not get trained in squat motions.As you stand up from a squat, three of the four quads contract and shorten.Whilst that rectus femoris also shortens at the knee, it's lengthening at the hip as well.So, there's no change in length, and therefore it does not get a training effect.
Squats train only three of the four quads, and miss out the one that's arguably the most important for swimmers.
And finally, power.You see, the right exercises are only half of it, as you also have to train them at the right speed.In the gym, you choose the load, whilst in the water, your speed dictates the resistance.So, we ran force velocity profiling on Cam to understand how much force he produced at different speeds.This gives you the number that matters, his power, since power equals force times velocity.Power that we need to peak at the velocity he uses in the competition race.That told me how to program for him as we moved from heavy and slow in the off-season and progressed into more power-based training to peak for competition season.So, the strength training actually transferred to the race.Get this wrong and you can make an athlete stronger in the gym, but no faster in the water.The pulling arm path, bio-ticket muscles and water, and force velocity profiling were just three examples within a series of changes that have been implemented into Cam's strength training.
And after the success in Fukuoka, our next goal was the Doha World Championships.And with the Paralympics just around the corner, we didn't have much time to prepare.
We've got 6 months till Doha World Championships, and then exactly 6 months to the Olympics.What do we need to do at Doha, you know, obviously with one eye on the Olympics, but one eye on Doha, and then what do we learn there that we can take forward through to the Olympics?
We went into Doha with all the momentum from Fukuoka, but Doha mattered for a different reason.It gave us another chance to test the system under pressure.Cam wanted to go max in the heat, semi, and the final.So, that's what he did.
Here is the defending champion, the 29-year-old Cameron McEvoy.He is the man to beat.
On your marks.
Men's 50 free final, McEvoy it is in the yellow cap in four comes up alongside him.Proud, the former champion in the red and Great Britain in lane three.Proud would be in front at this stage.McEvoy's got a bit of work to do.It's Proud in front.Mack Evoy is he's finishing hard now.Mack Evoy just taking over from Proud and also there's Boukhoff.And he's going to be Boukhoff beating Mack Evoy and Proud.
I ended up losing the final by 0.01.You could not lose by a small margin.Well deserving for him, but yeah, I was pretty gutted that I lost by 0.01.
Each race we could see the fatigue set in and the technical breakdown arriving just a little bit earlier each time.Cam's performance was excellent in the heats, holding well into the semi, but the body can only sustain maximum speed for so long, causing the final to drop by just a little too much.If you compare the heat, semi, and final to Vladislav Boukhoff, then something more than the 0.1 second margin becomes clear.The importance of competition strategy.
I wanted to see how my body would pull up if I went max in every swim I did instead of strategically getting through the rounds and having enough energy for the final.
One of the key concepts that we got from Doha when we spent an hour or two with Matt was reps in reserve.
Reps in reserve is the idea of leaving a little in the tank, not quite going all the way to failure.And that matters because fatigue is not linear.The final reps closest to failure create a disproportionate amount of the fatigue.This fatigue can then impact your coordination, motor unit recruitment, and more.And it can stay for days after the fatigue was initially created.For a competition, that matters enormously because when it comes to medals, it's the final that counts.
We got so much out of that heats, semi-finals, finals experience that pretty much became our blueprint for how we needed to prepare.That was where the key to Paris was.
Once you understand the balance between stimulus and fatigue, you run into a hard truth.
You cannot push everything all at once and expect the body to improve everywhere simultaneously.This container is the total amount of training that you can handle and recover from at that point in time.So imagine that these three colors are the areas we're looking to improve.Let's say yellow is mobility, red is strength, and blue is swimming.That's your ceiling, and you can't just keep pouring everything in forever, even if you think you can outwork everyone else.At some point, the body is going to run out of room.You see, the different adaptations that your body can make, each require different types
of training methods and last for different periods of time.Periodization is therefore about stacking them in the order that makes most sense.In an early phase, you might focus on more of that ceiling towards mobility training, whilst in another phase it goes to strength, and as the competition gets closer, more of that space goes towards swimming and race-specific work.The total ceiling doesn't disappear.What changes is how the available space is used.You see, each adaptation has its own cost, timeline, and place in the season.So, the challenge is not trying to program things like mobility, hypertrophy, strength, power, and swim performance all at the same time.It's about sequencing them and creating the space to focus on your individual weak links.And here's the counterintuitive truth.The goal is not to arrive at the competition as the strongest version of yourself, or the most mobile, or even the most technically proficient.
It's to arrive as the best combined version.You see, periodization is the piece that brings everything together, not just what to train, but when to train it.
Follows the emotional buildup to Paris, the calm mindset before the final, and the Olympic gold medal finish. It closes by showing how the system kept evolving after Paris, culminating in a 20.88 world record and the broader lesson of questioning old assumptions.
Build up towards Paris was being pulled in infinite directions at the same time.It was stressful to the point where I had to get off all social media.Um I actually put my iPhone away, and I bought a real old-school kind of brick phone with like a the old-school like QWERTY keyboard, like the BlackBerry.
We almost pretended that like he wasn't that fast going in.
We went from being quite loose and carefree, and like how fast can we go?We got nothing to lose here where you're now the you're the gold medal favorite uh going into your fourth Olympics and you've been in this position before and it didn't go well.
By the time Paris came around, the whole experience had changed.At the start of this comeback, Cam had nothing to lose.But now the difference was the system underneath him was real and we all knew it worked.
So warming up, I went through a massive range of emotions.Um so before getting in, uh again, it was a what's my technique going to feel like, what's the body going to feel like?Uh but once I touched the water, um and did my first bit of swimming, it was like right, I'm on.
Cam just looked at me said, "Hey, I I'm okay with any outcome tonight.I'm I feel as though we've left no stone unturned in this preparation.I wouldn't go back and change anything and I'm I'm content with whatever happens tonight."And I've been, you know, I've had conversations like that with athletes before in important moments a lot.But as a coach to hear that, I was like, "Okay, this is good.I don't really have anything to add to that."One of the most alpha events that there is um in in the sport of swimming for us to be sitting there um having like an I love you man moment.
It was a special experience and um I carried that with me throughout the whole race.
Cam didn't realize I was getting emotional and Cam looks at me he's like, "I'm getting a bit emotional here."I was like, "Me, too."Um so he's like, "Quick, quick, get in there.Go, go, go."
I remember watching Cam walk out.My eyes were completely locked on that yellow cap in lane five.And I thought to myself, "This is it."And I wished Cam luck in a room full of almost 20,000 people.
This is where everything goes quiet.The gun goes.You know exactly what things should feel like and you're not trying to do that.You're just waiting for that feedback to come back to you.You take that last breath, you hit the water and then it's observe how things unfold.
This was never about becoming an Olympic champion.It was how do we get from one end of the pool to the other as fast as possible.
One lap as fast as he can at this particular hour on this particular day.
This is Cam's show.This is Cam's time.
After letting it unfold, you touch the wall, you turn around.You see the number one next to your name and then you go crazy.
I immediately got up on the lane rope.
I threw my arms in the air.I spotted Tim.He was uh down the back right in the coaching area.He was standing up like banging his chest and I was on the lane rope banging my chest back pointing at him and it's pretty cool like there's a crowd of 19,000 people there and like made eye contact withTim straight away and yeah, it was insane.
You know, he's got to get straight out of the pool.He does a little bit of media.
Um he'll come over with a quick embrace on the side of the pool and then he's off.But then all of a sudden you get funneled into a room.
And I was there like maybe 5 minutes before Ben and Flo got there.So I was just there by myself for 5 minutes and it was just the most eerie feeling and it was those 5 minutes that was for me the most memorable.That's when a lot of the emotion hit.Uh I had like tears in my eyes that I was just trying to process.Yeah, I'll never forget the 5 minutes alone in that room post race just before going out.
But Olympic gold did not complete the map.It only proved we were moving in the right direction because the truth is we weren't done.Paris was the consolidation of a year and a half of radical experimentation.Less than half an Olympic cycle.There was still so much more to refine and improve.We were only just getting started.
Uh I would love to be able to get this type of stuff out into the broader swimming community as well.Um I've had overwhelming feedback from many, many people still in the sport or who have retired and seen this type of stuff and come back just to try it out and have and have found like a a newlove for the sport or reignited a love that they fell out of for the sport as well.The door is open to to go 20 something, 22 seconds for a 53.I'd love to see if I can be one of the ones that can that can do that.
You know, there's a lot of examples um not just in my program, but around the world that we're now starting to see.Like there's no doubt in my mind that what Cam's done over the last couple of years is having a massive influence.What we've kind of started moving towards over the last two or three years is still it's still so far from a finished product.
Since the Paris 2024 Olympic gold, we rebuilt the system once again.Tim has continued to refine and bring more detail into the swim technique.Nick has now collected more data on Cam than any other swimmer in the world, and I continue to build the strength, mobility, and overall periodization of Cam's training.Integrating in the training to bring swimming further into that strength structure.Since then we've added to Cam's vertical jump, increased his chin up, and reduced his time to 15 m, which has turned his weakest part of the race to be among the very best in the world.Then on March 20th, 2026, Cam did this at the China Open.
20.88.Cameron McEvoy broke a world record that stood for over 16 years.When we started this video, Cam wanted to reach further than swimming because the lesson was never really about just swimming.Every sport has something it stopped questioning, a way things have always been done.I've seen it in every sport and every elite athlete I've worked with, and it's usually where the biggest gains are hiding, precisely because nobody's allowed to look.And Cam looked, and it took him from quitting to becoming the fastest swimmer in history.