How to Turn like a PRO, Cody Miller VLOG

Swimming enthusiast Cody Miller here. Today, I'm going to show you how to do a perfect world-class open turn. That's a breaststroke turn, a butterfly turn, touch with two hands, get off the wall as quickly as possible. I'm going to show you how the best in the world do it. Three key tips to improve your turns quickly and what to avoid. But first, we're going to get a quick workout in. Just me and Van today. And I don't know if it's because it's legitimately five degrees outside, but the pool feels extra cold today. Best part of the day right here. Yeah. Oh, I'll get it. I forgot we were playing hacky sack for activation. Oh, there's our interval right there. OK, if you watched last week's video, remember I lost a bandaid. I did the same thing I forgot again. This time it didn't quite come off yet. I have crazy blisters on the back of my ankles because I'm doing a row challenge against my friends that work out at my gym and I'm trying to destroy them. So I'm rowing like five, 10K every night before I go to bed. The goal is for everyone to get 100K in a month on the road. And I didn't start until the 15th. So I gave them a half a month head start. They're already at 50K. I'm going to get them. I'm just they don't understand how crazy I am. All right, we're pulling now. And I'm going to alternate paddles. I like alternating small paddles, big paddles, a little different tactile awareness. We're doing five 100s, building intensity on a minute, 30 second interval. And then we're going to do something fun. Now that I'm a retired professional breaststroker, I'd like to see where I'm at. I haven't raced or done fast sprinting breaststroke in about six months. Literally, the last time was at Olympic Trials in June of last year. So today we're going to just see what I can go and see if that's 50s breaststroke. Well, breaststroke doesn't feel great. Maybe it's from the squats yesterday or the rowing last night, but yeah, or just not doing it for six months. Could be that. OK, last one, just for fun. I'm going to put fins on and I'm going to kick halfway, maybe 15 meter off every roll. Nice. It's done a little bit. That's going to hurt so much. Van and I are going to do a broken 200 breaststroke, four 50s, basically 15 seconds rest. See if we can go. Make sure the underwater one isn't too good. OK, we won't do an underwater one. You're a little worried about your down kick? You know, by number three or four, it might get a little loose. It's going to get a little loose. Godspeed, Van. Relaxed, but fast. It's going to be my first fast 50 breaststroke in basically six months. All right. OK, OK. Yeah, it's only four. If you say it like that, it's only four. How bad can it hurt? OK, that's a 29. We can hold that. Oh, yeah. This is where the devil's hand creeps over your shoulder. Start pulling back. I think we're over 30 now. That's not the double zero. Wow. Wasn't that bad? Should have put you in the two breast, dude. Would have been great. We were probably like 202. 202-ish. We're all right. We're decent swimmers. Yeah. I thought number three would be the worst. Number four. We've established the breaststroke is it's the least painful stroke. If we were to do 450s, a 200 broken like that, it would hurt more. It hurt us, but it wasn't the worst thing ever. Freestyle backstroke would have been way worse. Besides the point. Now I am going to take you through my perfect open turn. I'm going to show you the three don'ts, the most common mistakes I see people making when they're doing their open turns. Here we go. There's two goals when doing an open turn. Number one, speed in and out of the wall. And number two, setting yourself up for a perfect push off. The goal is to get in the ball and rotate as fast as possible so that once you push off the wall, there's less rotation for your body to do, aligning your body, hips facing the ground. Like this. Here are the three most common mistakes swimmers make when doing an open turn. Number one, getting too close to the wall. When the hands touch the wall, the dominant arm buckles just slightly. A slight elbow bend and the other arm pulls away from the wall. A little bit of condensing is OK, but too many times I see swimmers come into the wall and come all the way in. This is wasted motion. It's wasted time and it's slowing you down. Mistake number two, coming out of the water too high. Wasted motion also slowing you down. Too many times swimmers come into the wall. They touch and they lift up. They lift their head up instead of staying right above the surface of the water. Think about keeping your chin right on the surface of the water as much as possible. This tends to happen at the end of a race when you're gasping for air. You get to that final wall, you touch and... Don't do that. Mistake number three, going straight in and straight out instead of turning to the side. This tends to be for the higher level swimmers. Younger athletes are taught come straight in, go straight out just to learn the fundamentals of the turn. But once you progress and turn into a higher level swimmer, you want to rotate your body more to the side to align the body in an optimal push off position. If you were to push off the wall perfectly, you would face away from the wall, drop down and push off. The goal in the open turn is to get as close to that position as possible. Just like this. Instead of coming straight in and going straight back with the arm, head moving backwards, think come straight in and roll to the side while moving backwards. It should be a sideways diagonal turn, tucking the knees and the feet up into a small ball and rotating. This is what a perfect turn looks like. Staying low to the water, not getting too close to the wall and turning to the side while moving away from the wall. Work on those three fundamentals, those three main tips, and I promise you your open turn will get faster almost immediately. Got a bundle up. It is insanely cold outside right now. All right. I'm going to tell you about my lumen in a second. Let's get out of here. Good news. The weather is warmed up. It's a solid eight degrees now moving in the right direction. A few days ago, I put up an ask me anything poll because I've had a lot of you viewers asking for me to do some Q&A and it's been a long time. So I'm thinking we're going to get back into doing that fairly regularly. So we're going to head to my house and just have a little fun talking about who knows what. And let me tell you about how I'm tracking my diet and knowing what to eat, when to eat with my lumen. Lumen is the world's first metabolic coach with just one breath in the morning or after a workout. For me, it measures your metabolism. It then gives you instantly tailored, personalized guidance to help your nutrition, sleep, recovery from workouts. All it's it's really cool. I've been using this biofeedback to help fuel my workouts properly and also recover as efficiently as possible. This was my score this morning, immediately after my workout. Obviously, I needed to carb up because I did more cardio than I've done in quite a while. It's also been really cool for me to learn about my metabolic flexibility, which is the body's ability to switch between different fuel sources. The more metabolically flexible you are as a person, the greater your overall health. And that's something that really interests me from a longevity standpoint. As I'm starting to get older, it's what's going to keep me healthier longer. If you want to take your health and fitness to the next level, try lumen. Head to lumen.me slash Cody or just click the link in the description below and you'll get 20% off your lumen. Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this video. And right now, Puff is barking. She spends most of her days outside now because of how how chilly it is. I mean, this is her weather, but don't roast me too hard for still having our Christmas tree up. There's a foot and a half of snow on the ground outside. It's chilly. So we're trying to keep the spirits up for Christmas this year. The boys got like a million of these magnet tile things and we build castles pretty much every day. It's become one of my favorite things, but they do end up all over the house. Anyway, OK, let's let's get into this Q&A. Nick writes, What moment was the moment you knew you have made it as a pro in swimming? I know exactly when this was summer of 2014. I was in Quebec, Canada at the Quebec Cup, and I won like four events. And the prize money for each event was like $800 or something. And I had never won money before. And so I think I left that meet with almost $3,000, which in reality is not very much money. But it was the first time I was able to accept money as like a professional as a postgrad. Nowadays, in college, you can earn money and it's no big deal. But back then, you really weren't allowed to make money as a student athlete. And I like I remember leaving Quebec and I was like, I felt rich. I had more money in my bank account than I'd had maybe ever. John Matthew and a number of people asked this question. How's triathlon training? It's been going really well. I completed a full sprint triathlon distance and I was able to do that. Pretty much no problem. The main thing is just running. I make sure that I run at least once a week. So I'm getting at least five miles of running. Dwayne asks, how is Project 50 Miles shaping up? Would you travel to North Dakota? Great question. Thank you for that. Yeah. In the last video, I announced my next goal, fun goal that I'm calling Project 50 Miles. Long story short, I want to swim one mile in every state in the entire country. And I've done about 30 of them over the course of my lifetime. But this year, 2025, I'd like to maybe try to get all 50 states in a mile in every state. And the best way for me to do that is to come out for a swim clinic, a swimming event, a speaking event. So if you have any interest in booking me for a swim clinic or a speaking event, just send me an email down there to Cody Miller show at Gmail dot com or head to ultimate summer dot com and request a clinic there. Everyone who does a swim clinic with me, you get to wear an Olympic gold medal. You get to race me. I tell some fun stories. Everyone gets photos. I love getting in the pool with all the athletes, young and old, teaching you things, showing you proper mechanics. Anyway, swim, a swim clinic was the first time I ever met an Olympic swimmer. And it's one of my favorite things to do. So wherever you are, if you're interested. Thank you for plugging that for me, Dwayne. Kelly asks, any thoughts on being a broadcaster for the Olympics since Rowdy's last is L.A. 2028? It would be a lot of fun. I would do it completely not up to me. You know, if I get a phone call someday and someone wants me to do some broadcasting. Cool. Yeah, I love talking swimming. Otherwise, who knows? I just can't imagine Rowdy not doing it like he's been doing it literally my entire life. And all we've ever known is like his impact on the sport is just it can't it really can't be overstated. He's also even nicer in person, like truly just like an amazing person. Abby writes, when going into your freshman year of college, were you nervous for swimming? I was not concerned about the swimming part of being in college. I was genuinely concerned about the workload of school. I was not the best student. I, I found it difficult to apply myself to things that I wasn't truly, truly interested in. And that was a lot of school. And I had to work really hard at that. And I'm also not a person that can just read something and then automatically I remember it. So school was a little bit of a challenge for me. But and I was nervous about that freshman year. Joshua asks, are you hoping to race at Masters World Championship soon? I would like to. It's in Singapore in August. I honestly don't really know what the qualification criteria is. It would be a lot of fun. I wish I could go to U.S. Masters Nationals in April, but I can't. I've got a wedding that I'm in. I can't miss that. Jawad, Jawad, I don't know if I'm pronouncing your name right. Sorry, dude. Advice for men heading into marriage. I'm not a person to give marital advice at all. OK, keeping in mind regularly that you are on the same team. With an open line of communication and you're not just trying to win, you know, like you're trying to win together, you're not trying to defeat the other when whenever there's a scuffle or there's a disagreement or there's an argument, that's the main thing is like you're in it together. I'm not a I'm not a marriage counselor. I don't know. I mean, I'm doing OK, lucky, but Scott Robinson asks, how heartbroken were you after not making the Olympic team? Well, this past year, not heartbroken at all. I was a little upset for like a solid 20 minutes that I didn't have a great last race at the meet. But I got over that. Like if you watch the video from the summer, I got over that like immediately in 2020 or 2021, I guess, for not making the team. That was really hard for me that that I was I was hard on myself. You know, I just put too much pressure on myself and I I didn't have the best swim life balance of of like things outside of swimming. And then just swimming, I was a little too consumed with it. And so that was a big, big problem. So that that was difficult. But, you know, you have bad seasons, you have get bad needs to get over. It's just the way the world works, man. What camera do you use when recording at practices because it looks clear and it has a good mic? Honestly, most of the time, it's just a GoPro. The secret is making sure you get all the water out of the little mic ports on the GoPro before you talk into it. And so you try to kind of shake it out. I honestly I just bring two now. I know most people can't afford to. I get it. They're like 300 plus bucks. But I have one for out of the water and one for in the water just so that the audio is always clear. It's very difficult in the pool setting to to get good audio. It's actually something that viewers don't really realize. But like I work really hard to make sure the audio is is recognizable. And sometimes it's difficult. Erica asks, what do you think of the form goggles? Is it worth the price or the holo? I don't know what the holo is. Yeah, I'm not with tear anymore. I had one of my people reach out to form because I would love to try them out and maybe even do like a review of them. We never heard back. So like trying to get a hold of someone at form because, you know, like I want to try them out, they seem really cool, but I don't know. I can't answer that. Mohammed asks, do you plan to make actual and Cato swimmers? They're definitely going to know how to swim. Will they be dedicated swimmers and that be like their primary sport? I don't know. I'm definitely not going to force that on them. You know, I don't know. Thank you all for joining me today. I hope that you had a good time. Hopefully my open turn breaststroke turn tutorial was good. There's not a lot of things that I'm an expert at doing open turns and certain swimming stuff. I am pretty, pretty good. If you've made it this far, you're probably already a subscriber. If not, make sure you hit that subscribe button. Turn the little bell on notifications. Get notified when I drop a new video every single Wednesday. We have merch available at Cody Miller swim dot com. New stuff coming. If you'd like a personalized video from me to you or someone, you know, for whatever reason, I am available on Cameo until my next video. I will see you all later.