Cody Simpson: 'I’ve never worked this hard – this consistently – in my life for anything'

He's gunning for Paris

He has already surpassed expectations since making his swimming comeback in the glare of a white-hot spotlight, but that isn’t enough for the former popstar turned elite athlete. As the countdown to the Paris 2024 Olympics begins, in this Body+Soul exclusive, Cody Simpson shares his mindset practices, tools for recovery and why he doesn’t regret the way his story has unfolded

The next 40 days are critical for Cody Simpson. At the upcoming Australian Open Championships, the popstar turned swimmer will find out if he’s on track to achieving a truly audacious dream – making the Olympics after only returning to the pool four years ago. If he can pull it off, it’ll be a comeback so spectacular, it’ll feel every bit as Hollywood as the town he called home at 13, when he put his sports aspirations on hold following an offer by a Grammy-nominated producer who had stumbled across his YouTube covers. But while Simpson won’t definitively know until the 2024 Australian Swimming Trials in June if he’s secured his spot for the green and gold, one thing is certain: he’s giving it absolutely everything.

“I’ve never worked this hard – this consistently – in my life for anything,” the 27-year-old tells Body+Soul from his base on Queensland’s Gold Coast.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon – his only break during the week in a gruelling training schedule – and he’s sitting in his home office with guitars and a piano behind him. It’s here that he likes to “have a bit of a strum”, but with his focus solely on making the Olympic team, the chance to play only comes up “here and there”.

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Not that Simpson minds. Paris was always the goal when he hit pause on his music career in 2019 to follow in his mum and dad’s footsteps to swim for Australia. Even though he showed great promise as a 12-year-old, winning two gold medals at the 2009 Queensland Age Championships, returning to the pool as an adult to achieve such a feat in a condensed time frame was always going to be a big ask. So he’s surrounded himself with some of the country’s best: training under coach Michael Bohl at Griffith University Swimming Club in a squad that includes world-record holders, Lani Pallister, Kaylee McKeown and girlfriend Emma McKeon. And then there’s his work ethic.

“The schedule is pretty demanding. It’s like 15, 16 workouts a week for an hour to two hours at a time,” reveals Simpson. “Mondays are two swim sessions and a gym session. Tuesdays are a spin-bike session, swim and then swim again. Wednesday morning is swim and gym, and then we get the afternoon off. Thursday is either a circuit or spin-bike session, then a swim session and then we swim again in the afternoon. And those swim sessions are usually about five kilometres each. Then Friday morning is a swim and gym or weights. Saturday morning is the last swim session and then either the bike again or a circuit. Then we get Saturday afternoon and Sunday off, and we do it all again on Monday.”

He has already surpassed expectations since making his swimming comeback in the glare of a red-hot spotlight. Image: Jamie Green

He needs around 6,000 calories a day to fuel his 188-centimetre frame to keep up with the training load (for context, this is around three times the cals an average person needs). Simpson says the only thing that came close to this intensity in his pre-swimming days was when he starred on Broadway in 2018-2019, doing eight shows a week in the lead role of Dmitry in the musical Anastasia. Even touring around the world was “nowhere near as demanding on the body or the mind”. But the entertainment industry prepared him for athlete life in another critical way.

“My prior music career helped me in the sense that I understood what it took to get to where I did at that age in music. I was excited about going through that growth and build again, starting from zero in another field and seeing if the same sort of rules applied: if consistent, daily hard work equalled improvement, growth and success. I’ve since found out I think it’s true,” he says thoughtfully.

“It also prepared me in the sense that I’d become quite immune to the general chatter of people and everybody having an opinion. Having grown up, I suppose, in the public eye, you kind of develop a little bit of an armour against that kind of stuff. I certainly needed that coming into swimming because a lot of people thought I was crazy or that it wasn’t possible. I had to try to not allow that to affect what I was doing. It just gave me a thick skin, I think, to come into the sport and not be deterred by doubters.”

And there was the constant noise, especially in those first couple of years, that could’ve discouraged Simpson from his new path, but the call to swim was louder. “[I wanted to aim for Paris] to see if I could [make it],” he says. “To see if what I thought was possible is possible, because I felt the inherent spark and flame. By the time I actually started to swim, I’d felt the desire to for many years. It was like I couldn’t ignore it anymore and I had to see what it was about. I’m still, I suppose, unfolding that since I made the commitment.”

Visualisation practice has also been integral to his growth as an athlete. Image: Jamie Green

A visualisation practice has also been integral to his growth. “It’s something I’ve cultivated more as I’ve gotten older, but it was always something I used even when I was little. As a young competitive swimmer, I’d visualise my races, the times I wanted to do and the outcomes I desired. And I interestingly would occasionally achieve those [things] as I’d envisioned, even from the age of 10, 11.

“Then I used it in my music career in terms of what I wanted to achieve or by envisioning what I wanted my stage show to look like or sound like. It’s just always been such a huge part of my life, I suppose. This year, I’ve undertaken a daily meditation and it’s allowed me to get even better at that visual imagery.”

Explaining how a visualisation practice works can be tricky, but now Simpson’s fans – of which there are 5.2 million on Instagram and 1.1 million on YouTube – can get a glimpse for themselves via his new Audible Original podcast, Sleep Sound with Cody Simpson. Over four episodes, he offers water-themed guided meditations across Aussie beaches, lakes and waterfalls, designed to help us non-athletes drift off.

“I’ve listened to a lot of things like that in the past to help me sleep or with daytime naps – which are currently a necessity for me with my training schedule. And so, finding those things that adequately wind you down are important. When Audible presented the idea of the meditations, it felt like a very apt topic for me to cover, so I was excited to have an opportunity to do something on a larger scale like this.”

Simpson will hopefully join girlfriend Emma McKeon in Paris this August. Image: Jamie Green

Quality sleep is such a crucial part of Simpson’s recovery that he’s perfected his wind-down routine – he even has a hack for dealing with sleep-stealing blue light. “I find it’s easier said than done to limit screens [before bed], because we like to watch TV at night. So I’ve got these red-lens glasses that are even more intense than blue-light blockers. I look a little bit silly, but I’ll usually wear them after sunset so that any artificial light is completely blocked. When I’m watching TV, everything looks a little bit red, but it’s the sacrifice you make,” he laughs.

Does this mean we’ll find McKeon chilling at home in a matching pair? “I haven’t gotten her to pick up the style yet, but she’s coming around. She sees I’m sleeping really well,” he smiles. Instead, the couple’s usual evening goes like this: “We get home from training at 6pm and try to cook and eat by 6.30pm/7pm. Then I chuck the red lenses on and we watch an episode of a show. I’m usually winding down for bed around 8.30pm, so I’ll either do a meditation, read or do a French lesson on [language app] Duolingo. Then I try to be asleep by 9.15pm. That’s the weekday schedule.”

It’s made those 5.15am wake-ups possible, but it’s paying off in other ways, too. “I find now I’m consistent with it, it makes my daily mental state and energy so much better. It’s something I’ll carry on beyond swimming when I retire,” says Simpson. “I find a goodnight-time routine – that early-to-bed, early-to-rise situation – is so conducive to high performance in any category.”

Simpson will stop at nothing to realise his Paris dream. Image: Jamie Green

If the world was surprised when the singer, who once shared a manager withJustin Bieber, announced he was making a serious go of competitive swimming, it’s been even more amazed by the impressive progress he’s made at an elite level in such a short period.

Within a few months of his return to the pool, Simpson qualified for the Tokyo Olympic trials. Then, only two years into his dream, he scored a spot on the 2022 Commonwealth Games team and picked up a gold and silver medal for his swims in the men’s 4x100m freestyle and 4x100m medley relay heats. Last December, he made big gains again when he took 0.11 seconds off his personal best to win the 100m butterfly at the 2023 Queensland Championships. It makes you wonder, what would have happened if he had dedicated all those years to swimming instead of singing. Does he ever regret the path he chose? 

Simpson reflects for a moment before replying: “No, but I have occasionally thought about what I could have achieved if I stayed a swimmer. I occasionally think about what could have been if I didn't stop. I guess I'll never know. But at the same time, maybe I would've stopped anyway. I might've got to 18, [and thought] ‘I'm done with this. I want to go and do something else’, so I'm not sure.

“On the other hand, I wouldn't change the way it's happened for anything because it’s allowed for some people who may never have cared about swimming to care about it. Fans of mine from the past and a bunch of people over in Hollywood are following swimming now, so that's been cool. I don't have any regrets about the way it has unfolded.” 

If anything, Simpson’s story shows that life doesn’t have to be linear. That it’s possible to do the unexpected. “Yeah, that was part of desire as well, to show that you could do multiple things throughout the course of your lifetime and be able to thrive in all of them and not be boxed into one thing forever.”

Simpson says his training regime over the past few years has been transformative. Image: Jamie Green

No matter what happens in the next few months, Simpson says this experience has been transformative. “Swimming has taught me I have an intensity of discipline that I didn’t have before, and I’m really excited to see how that works in other fields. I’m excited to take it into my music or into other things I want to do in the future.”

But until then, he won’t be content with the remarkable progress he’s made so far until he’s given it his all. “I think as long as you’re in [the process of] something you’ll never be a hundred percent satisfied, so I’m still in that warped perspective of, ‘No, I want more,’ you know what I mean?” he asks. “Whereas I think once you stop, you can look back and go, ‘Oh sh*t, you came pretty far.’”

Get visualising and listen to Sleep Sound with Cody Simpson, an Audible Original podcast, available from 12 March. 

Originally published as Cody Simpson: 'I’ve never worked this hard – this consistently – in my life for anything'