Cody Miller Feels the ‘Real Power’ of Endless Pools®

The Olympic gold-medal swimmer is training at home for Tokyo 2021

“The power is real,” Cody Miller testifies. In the first of his two videos here, he tours his new backyard training pool, an Endless Pools® Elite model. Having won gold and bronze medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the breaststroker knows what he’s talking about.

In his Elite pool, Cody reports, “You can virtually do all methods of training.” After just one month of swim training, he said of the Elite’s adjustable current, “It can crank! I’m not joking – you can’t outswim this thing.

“You want to do race pace training? You can do it. You want to do a slow aerobic set? You can do that. You want to do a painful distance threshold set? That’s an option,” he enthuses. “With the click of a button: Let there be swimming!”

Swimming at Home … Priceless.

“With Covid and lockdowns, finding a pool to swim at regularly, even for Olympic swimmers like myself, has been very difficult.” Cody laments. Before he set up his Elite backyard pool, he found himself “driving up to three hours a day just to make sure that I get in a pool and swim. Other times, we go weeks where there are no pools in the nearby area.”

Now that he has his own swimming pool in his Indiana backyard, “I’m able to get in the pool every single day. Training has actually been going really, really well.”

As for that three-hour drive, he notes, “One of the perks of having my own pool is it really cuts down on commute time. I woke up seven minutes ago, and I’m already here, ready to go.” That time-savings is a huge help to Cody, who's recently become a dad for the first time!

Cody has called his Endless Pools set-up his “million-dollar pool.” That’s not the actual price, of course. “For someone like me who spends his life in a pool,” he clarifies, “who wakes up every single day looking forward to getting in the pool, finally having a pool that I know will be open for me every single day, in my book, is worth a million bucks.”

Know Your Pool

Cody helped assemble his Elite pool in a matter of days. The experience let him understand that the perimeter benches in our Original Series pools are for more than just sitting and stepping.

“The way that it works,” he now knows, is that “these benches start sucking the water” from the pool’s rear grill and funnel it to the front of the pool. “It creates that vortex that goes into this big unit and spits it out.” (We don’t usually say that our current ‘spits,’ but who are we to question an Olympian?)

As he stands in the pool, he notes, “It is just cool for me to think about how, underneath me, is basically concrete, a little bit of insulation, the liner, and then this awesome super-powered swimming machine!”

The Road to Tokyo

Cody programs his workouts with the Endless Pools Fit@Home app. The app, he says, “seamlessly connects to the unit … so you can design your own workouts – 100 meters at this pace, 200 meters at this pace.” Once he sets up his swim intervals on the app, he can just “swim through the workout” without interruption. “I’ve been doing a whole lot of interval training!”

In this next video, Cody details two breaststroke swimming sets. He also notes how the Endless Pools current helps his swim technique in ways that he can’t get in a traditional pool.

“It really rewards efficiency,” he’s found. “The better line I hold, it rewards me because it doesn’t knock me around as much. I think that’s good race practice because you can feel the drag and the little things that your body does when you start to fatigue and break down that you don’t necessarily feel in a regular pool when you’re swimming.”

That sort of fine-tuning to his stroke could make all the difference as he swims to earn his place on Team USA. The U.S. Olympic swim trials are currently scheduled for June 4-7 (Wave I) and June 13-20 (Wave II). Olympic swimming events in Tokyo will be held from July 24 through August 1, 2021.