This morning after a session with a masters club, I was asked "Why is your IG handle TheSwimsuitGuy?". If you had started following me at my inception back in 2018, that question would have been answered quite quickly, but nowadays not so much. Because of this, I wanted to take you back for a look at my history...
The Present
Right now I am in Hong Kong and I am doing "TheSwimsuitGuy" full-time! In terms of my content style, I am trying to make more evergreen videos, stuff that can be watched at any point in time and give both information and entertainment, especially when it comes to the highest level of swimming. The YouTube video I uploaded yesterday was a perfect embodiment of that, taking a detailed and insightful look at a training session of two world champion swimmers. Please do give it a watch and while you are there, hitting the like button and leaving a comment would mean so much to me (this goes for all the videos I share today).
2018
My channel was born in 2018. After moving to Muscat, Oman to coach the BSM Marlins, I decided I wanted to make YouTube videos in the realm of swimming. Reviews felt natural to me and being a bit of a tech-suit geek everything made perfect sense. After I had wrapped up my last session of the week, I stuck around at the pool and filmed a review of the Mizuno GX Sonic 3 ST. I used no mic so the audio sucked and I edited the video on iMovie. I think the message I am conveying has stood the test of time but the audio quality has not so much. I now use DJI's wireless mics and wish I had made that investment from day 1.
After this video, I spent the following weeks making education regarding tech suits. How they should fit, how to look after them and I talked about their history and how the bodysuits were banned after a crazy year of swimming in 2009.
Maybe I should recreate the history of tech suits with better production at some point.
For the rest of 2018, I continued to review everything I had and everything I could get my hands on. Suits, goggles, caps, training equipment, you name it, I made a video on it. TheSwimsuitGuy reviewed Swimsuits.
2019
While I was in Oman, ervery February, we headed to Dubai for the Middle East Championships. My audience had started to grow and the "age group swimmers" that I coached loved that I would be recognised at these "international" meets. In the week leading up to this meet, they went on and on about how I should make a vlog of the meet. I caved in.
This was completely unknown territory for me. I was pretty comfortable in front of a camera at this point but it was always in complete isolation. I would be poolside on my own, no one watching my every move. I decided my vlog method would be as simple as this. Give my swimmers my phone, and let them record whatever they want at the meet. Here was the first vlog.
In my mind, the vlog was a success. It added an extra faucet to my channel. For some reason I exclusively vlogged meets. I recorded a training session when my Dad and best friend Josh came to Oman to visit but I really didn't touch on the technical side of swim coaching at all during this year. It was just having fun at meets and following the journey of my swimmers. Considering my first vlog of 2019 was in February, through the rest of the calendar year there was a total of 15 vlogs, with 13 of them being swim meets. I also got my swimmers involved in some of the reviews, especially of products I couldn't review like women's tech suits. This was a personal favourite of mine.
2020
Until March, when the pandemic hit, my year started off exactly as 2019 had been. The odd competition vlog and lots of reviews. Then COVID-19 showed its face and I had to adapt. I wasn't getting new gear to review and I wasn't going to meets so I had nothing to vlog. I had tried a few things at the time. The first was a talk show/podcast. I don't think I ever had Brett's touch for pure podcasts but the talk show idea has definetly come back with me and Brett's almost wekly live show.
The second was doing "Race Reviews" and looking back at legendary races such as this 50 free in 1990 where a swimmer swam sub 22 seconds for the first time. I still do race reviews from time to time of great swims both past and present.
In July I was finally able to get back to the UK. This was a "permanent" move as after 3 years I had left my job coaching the BSM Marlins. This marked a huge shift in my content. Reviews almost stopped and I was uploading vlogs almost daily for the next year. I had no day job and I filmed everything I could. Vlogs were no longer reserved for competitions. At first, it was me and my friends competing in the "10 Length Challenge'. This was 10 lengths as fast as you could in my parent's backyard 8.5m pool. Here is a video of Reg setting the World Record. I have a dream that I will fly some swimmers back to the UK after the Paris Olympics to try this challenge and see how fast is possible.
We were also making a lot of training videos at the time in what me and my friends call the "David Lloyd" era. We would meet every day at our local David Lloyd which had an outdoor 25m pool and train. Not only did we make vlogs of our training sessions but we started making skits. The most notable was our "ISL in a nutshell..." series where we mocked some of the events happening at the ISL. Little did we know at the time but these videos circulated through every team at the ISL!
I was making a LOT of content at this point in time but then things scaled up even more when in October 2020, 2 friends (one of whom is here in Hong Kong with me now, 3 years later) and I flew to Mallorca to keep swimming because the pools had shut in the UK again. I spent roughly 8 weeks in the Balearic islands and was uploading vlogs almost daily! This trip only left fond memories and I can also proudly say I am a Baleric swimming champion!
2021
As I am writing this, I actually underestimated how much I filmed this year. I started out in Dubai, where a group of friends and I were training for the British Olympic Trials. We had qualified to swim at them but due to not being based in a national centre, we could not swim in the UK. This was our only option to be able to have any confidence when it came to that meet. Vlogging continued almost daily. It was a mix of training, meets and some fun stuff we got up to like going to water parks. We also bumped into Nile Wilson and made a video with him.
After spending a whopping four months in Dubai, I had to come back to the UK for two reasons.
To swim at the Olympic Trials
To start coaching at Plymouth Leander
But before I could do either of those things I had to travel through Turkey due to quarantine rules. This is where I first met future Energy Standard colleagues Tom Rushton and Can Onsoy and is probably a huge part of my journey over the coming years.
I then race at the 2021 Olympic Trials...
...then moved straight to Plymouth (where I am still currently based) to coach at Plymouth Leander Swimming Club.
Content slowed down quite a bit from daily vlogs but I had probably the healthiest balance ever of reviews, training/race vlogs and skits I made with my swimmers at the club. For the first time since Oman, I felt like I was pretty settled. That was short-lived though because I received a call on the first day of the summer break asking if I wanted to be on the coaching staff for Energy Standard at ISL Season 3. Obviously, I said yes! At the end of August, I flew to Naples. I filmed everything.
Initially, I was just invited to coach for the first half of ISL, the Naples leg. After which I was to return to Plymouth Leander. Right at the end of Naples, I was however asked to do Eindhoven and told that I was an important part of the team. Plymouth Leander gave me an ultimatum, I went with Energy Standard. Because of this, I was free directly after the ISL Finale. This led to me organising the World Short Course staging camp and also began the professional relationship of me and Chad Le Clos whom I would spend the next year coaching.
This was a very special moment I was able to capture wher Siobhan Haughey set a world record. I had been poolside almost every day with her at this point for 4 months. Tom who was and still does coaches her full time handed her a choclate for setting a season best. What a memory and what a moment.
2022
This was my year of being an international swimming coach. I travelled all over the world with a group of athletes including Chad Le Clos and Max Litchfield. I did something that no coach has ever done in history and uploaded training vlogs on an almost daily basis. While these videos were much more raw than the one I uploaded yesterday, they show off world-class swimming and hard work in a way no other swimming YouTuber has ever done. I am extremely proud of these videos. This training session to this day remains one of the most epic things I have ever seen. There was a lot more sessions this epic over the coming months. If you ever want to feel inspired for your own training watch some of these vlogs.
After four months in South Africa, I travelled to Dubai, Istanbul, Barcelona, Monaco and Canet all in the name of coaching before preparing for the Commonwealth games back in Plymouth. Commies were not great, they were an experience I will never forget but not the meet we expected or hoped for. After that, I laid low for a little bit. Content slowed and outside of a little bit of swimming I was doing personally, nothing exciting happened. It did however give me time to do things like build this website (with the help of my girlfriend).
There were so many highlights for this year and I don't want to populate with too many videos. There was a weekend about 5 weeks before the Commonwealth Games where Chad and Max raced a low-level meet in the UK and it was the most awesome, grassroots, wholesome weekend of the year for me.
2023
DDA, the club I had been doing some swimming with, offered me the role of Head Coach. I said yes on a short-term basis. Off the back of international coaching, I LOVED every second of working with the age group squad at DDA. They were truly awesome and we saw some brilliant results.
I guess that brings us back to the present. A big reason I have loved vlogging so much over the last 5 years is that I have all these memories captured, to look back on for the rest of my life, that in itself is quite special.
I am excited to see what the future holds and I hope you enjoy the content I continue to put out. As I said earlier on in this "essay", if you are watching one of my videos, hit the like button and leave a comment, It really does mean a lot to me!
Extras
Over the years I have talked a little more about my channel in the form of podcasts and interviews so I will leave them here.