6 Tips Towards A Better Swimming Technique | Why Do I Suck At Swimming?

are you fed up with not improving at swimming have you spent countless hours in the water countless technique sessions and still you're no better off well i can understand you being just a little bit frustrated by that i mean what is the secret how do you crack it well today i'm here to try and help you on that so the most common thing that i see with people that are struggling with swimming is that they almost end up fighting the water they thrash their way up and down the pool but get very little in return for their hard efforts now i can totally understand why this happens if you are struggling with swimming you're struggling to improve and maybe struggling to stay afloat to some degree almost exacerbates things your body kicks in tries to take over and you essentially just end up working harder to try and overcome this and try and help it but unfortunately it's hard work applied inefficiently if you're coming from other sports such as cycling and running where to a degree the harder you work the faster you go i can understand we might think that same methodology might work for swimming but swimming is an incredibly technical sport due to the drag and the resistance of the water a bad technique has a huge impact and huge effect on our swimming so make sure you focus on your technique and try to slow things down which leads me on to our next point [Music] focus on one thing at a time when we're trying to improve our swim it can be very easy to fall into the trap of trying to focus on and improve all the different aspects of the stroke at once we've got the breathing the rotation the catch the pull the leg kick it's endless now honestly nobody even the best multitaskers out there which certainly isn't me can focus on all these different aspects and nail them and quite often to be honest it's just one or two elements of the stroke that are the cause of everything or a handful of things so that is where having a good coach can come in really well as they're able to identify those weaknesses or failing that just really slow down the stroke and try to identify that weakness yourself let's take the catch for example or lack of catch as the case often is now if you're not able to apply that force at the front of the strike this can have a knock-on effect in so many ways it means that you're not able to provide that lift in your stroke so when you want to breathe you then need to lift your head higher that then means that your legs then drop down and then that can affect how much you can rotate or not rotate so you can see how it all starts linking together so make sure that you do focus on one of those elements and really try and nail it before moving on to the next [Music] well following on from this if you are trying to improve your technique then don't set about trying to do crazily long reps as you start to fatigue naturally your technique will start to deteriorate and the last thing you want to be doing is reinforcing bad technique over the course of a long rep so focus on doing shorter rep shorter blocks where you can really focus on that good quality good technique for short periods of time stop recover reset and then offer you again with good technique good quality work equally there's absolutely no shame in stopping part way through a longer rep if you feel like your technique is deteriorating if you're really serious about improving your swimming [Music] okay and are you holding your breath this one is a biggie one that so many people do you basically take a breath and then literally just hold that breath right up until the next breath just try doing that whilst you're sat watching this video take a breath hold it for two or three seconds release it quickly then take an ex breath and keep doing that it's a really unusual and uncomfortable feeling and oddly actually can make you feel more out of breath as you're left exhaling really quickly snapping to take the next breath and doing that over and over again it can also create a lot of tension in your upper body as you're holding that breath which restricts the movement of your arms and that all-important catch that i was talking about just before and also because you're holding that air in your lungs it can make your chest more buoyant and that can affect your body position in the water so rather than holding your breath try trickling it throughout the stroke either through your nose and or your mouth and keep it as smooth as possible [Music] and then contrary to my previous advice some people are actually just too slow and gentle with their stroke now i'm not suggesting that you should be thrashing your way down the pool because the difference here is that they may have a pretty good technique but they're just not being assertive enough with the hand entry their catch and so on and that will mean that they essentially end up almost sinking between pools now if you think about it if you have your arm extended out in front of you in that nice strong position ready to catch the water the other arm recovering over now if that recovering arm is taking too long it's very hard to hold that strong position and what often ends up happening is the arm starts drifting down through the water or the elbow buckles and you basically lose that catch all together and as i've mentioned already it's a very important part of this trick it gives you lift in the water so you have all sorts of knock-on effects to this so of course i'm not suggesting that you should be thrashing or muscling your way down the pool but just try to keep those arms moving and applying pressure on the water throughout okay final couple of points head position now this can have a huge impact on our movement and our body position in the water if we tilt our head just a little bit to the left we will start to move left if we look up and start looking forward our legs will start to sink now these are obviously all things we want to avoid so try to keep your head in a nice neutral and natural position now i normally recommend start by looking directly down at the ground below you and then allowing your head to position itself naturally itself now for me that means looking down at the ground around two to three meters in front of me that allows me to keep this nice natural neutral position without creating too much tension in my shoulders [Music] and then finally something that isn't often talked about and discussed but is probably quite obvious when i start to explain it is the fact that swimming is a full body thing it's all interconnecting you can have fantastic arms fantastic pool you can have a fantastic leg kick but if your core that connects all of that together isn't engaged and working then it can all fall apart or simply just not be as effective now obviously this is something that you can work on in the water trying to engage your core but equally this is something that you can practice and work on on dry land so yeah get stuck into some strength conditioning exercises focus specifically on swimming and trying to get those things working and engaged and if you'd like some help with this we do have a video on it already i'll pop that in the description just down below but that is it hopefully this has helped you today and giving you some pointers to help you try and improve your swimming if you have any more questions please do drop them in the comments section down below if you've enjoyed today's video please do give it a thumbs up give it a like and we've got tons more videos like this if you like to catch them make sure you subscribe to channel to do that just click the icon the logo just down below and yeah thanks for watching

Channel: Global Triathlon Network

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Rating: 4.9694657 out of 5

Keywords: front crawl, how to swim, how to swim front crawl, how to swim freestyle, swimming, swimming technique, front crawl technique, freestyle technique, fitness, swim workout, swimming freestyle, swimming front crawl, learn how to swim, learn to swim, GTN, Global Triathlon Network, triathlon, Triathlon (Sport), tri, ironman, Sports, swimbikerun, triathlon training, triathlon skills, iron man, tri bike, triathlete, cycling, running, training, skills, coaching, Ꮯ, 4378, Ꮵ, Ꮽ, Ᏸ, Մ, Շ, Ꮲ, ꔨ, ཙ, ፕ19

Id: __AH4tJA1H4

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021