How To Swim Freestyle Properly

swimming is an incredibly technical sport and you may have already discovered that you can't simply cheat your way through swimming if your technique is incorrect you literally don't move or worse you feel like you're sinking but even if you can swim there's always something that can be improved to either make your swimming faster or make it feel easier so today we're going to be focusing on the one stroke that everyone wants to master the front call or freestyle we're gonna break it down and get back to basics [Music] [Music] okay so there are a number of things with swimming which make it significantly more intimidating and harder than other sports mostly the water so there's water resistance and the fact that if you stop swimming you just might sink then of course your face is in the water which of course makes breathing significantly more difficult and seeing where you are where you're going what other people are doing a lot more difficult yeah now to be clear this isn't an attempt to scare you off i'll put you off swimming in fact let's do the opposite and more to put you at ease some of these struggles and fears that you have are totally normal and fears and struggles that many people have so don't give up stick with it and hopefully today we're going to be able to help you so first of all i'm going to start by looking at body position [Music] [Applause] now in short swimming is all about being streamlined through the water water creates a lot of resistance so the smaller more streamline we can make ourselves the easier we can pass through the water and one of the keys to this is our body position in relation to the surface of the water and crucially being as close to the surface of the water and as level with the surface of the water see if our hips and our legs are below our head that is going to create a lot of drag as we pass through the water and that's about that one of the biggest the most common technical issues that we see from swimmers but a lot of that can be fixed by our head position in the water now back when i was a kid i was taught to look down the pool ahead of me probably for safety reasons but please don't do this see i had position has a big impact on the rest of our body and its position it's almost like a pivot lift it up look ahead and our feet will sink look down and it will bring our feet up so ideally you want to have your head in a nice neutral and natural position start by looking down at the bottom and allowing your head just to relax and find its natural position for me that's looking around two to three meters in front of me equally though don't go digging your head down into the water so you're going along in a plow like position well that's enough of body position now let's go on to the individual parts of the stroke starting with the catch the catch happens almost immediately after your hand enters the water you momentarily push down with your hand which provides lift in the stroke and helps to prevent you sinking but it also maintains your momentum as you move through the water without a good catch you're going to get a stop start motion in your stroke as you slow down and then have to regain that speed with the next phase the catch is simply a press down with the hand with a high elbow that moves almost immediately and seamlessly into the next phase your stroke which is the pull [Music] so the pull phase is the propulsive phase of the stroke in which the hand and the arm are pulling against the water directly beneath us and there are quite a few different teachings on this but the one that i'd recommend for balance symmetry and efficiency is the direct straight pull underneath us to prevent any snaking or side to side movement to do this effectively you should have a slight bend in the elbow somewhere between 90 to 120 degrees it's important to remember that we're trying to push ourselves down the pool to do that the palm of your hand needs to be facing and pushing the opposite way at the wall behind you now let's finish the pool phase off as your hand passes your elbow you should seamlessly begin extending the arm out while still pushing against the water this is another area that is so often forgotten or neglected but without it can cause a serious dead spot in the stroke as the arm fully extends the hand should be alongside the hip ready to begin the recovery phase of the stroke your elbow should lead the recovery phase around the body keeping your hand below the elbow throughout the forward and outward movement of your elbow should drive your hand forward your hand should enter the water in line with your shoulder or your eyes and then simply drive your hand forward under the water before beginning the catch phase again in terms of timing your recovery from one hand should begin as the catch phase begins with the other hand [Music] also you may be wondering where enough breathing fits into all this and to be fair that's a very valid and important question the odd thing about swimming is that you can't simply breathe as and when you would like as you do with other sports but the key to swimming is not to hold your breath as soon as you take that breath in immediately start trickling and releasing that breath until the next now in terms of the actual technique you should breathe to the side as you're extending one arm out and beginning that catch and extending the other arm out and beginning the recovery make sure that you're not breathing up to the sky or lifting your head out of the water instead you want to imagine it almost as if you're keeping one eye in the water and one eye out in reality what it's going to do is create a bit of a bowel wave and almost a cavity around your head so your mouth is more or less not submerged because of this cavity but in short lift your head up or look up to the sky that's going to affect that all-important body position that we were discussing earlier also don't make life harder for yourself as you're starting out just breathe every two but make sure that you try and breathe to either side and mix it up so you don't create any imbalances in your stroke we've spoken a lot about the arms so far but the legs play just as important in a roll if not for propulsion then at least for balance in the stroke the kick should mostly be a movement starting in the hips with very little leg bend in the knees it's not like kicking a football the movement is going to start in your hips and extend the leg all the way down to a subtle flick of the ankle the movement or propulsion should come from both the up and down phase of the kick as mentioned earlier we want the hips and legs to be as close to the surface of the water as possible but most of your kick should be under the water with only the heels subtly breaking the surface now and again [Applause] and finally we have rotation now this is a very important part of the freestyle stroke but i've actually left it until last partly because it's one of the hardest to master but also because in terms of progression probably the one that i would recommend leaving until last firstly i'd suggest just starting out with the fundamentals the catch the pull the kick the breathing and so on and once you have them nailed then start moving on to the rotation and allow me to explain why the rotation is of such big benefit now if you do swim quite flat in the water you're essentially just distributing that workload across a couple of few muscles the pecs and the biceps as soon as we start rotating you're distributing that workflow not only across those muscles but the big lats and back muscles that's not only going to bring more power into the stroke it's also going to make you more stable and balanced in the water it's also going to give you a little bit more reach in the water and also reducing your surface area in the water i mean what's not to like about it so the best way to explain the rotation is that as your hand enters the water and stretches out you should rotate onto your side facing away from that extended arm you should be roughly somewhere between 40 and 70 degrees then as the arm pulls down under the water start rolling around and back onto your stomach then as the arm extends out of the back of the stroke use the hand passing your hip as a cue to rotate that hip around to the other side this should be a seamless action and crucially the head shoulders and hips should all rotate in sync well we've covered a lot of freestyle tips and tricks and skills in this one video i will say don't try to do it all in one session pick one that you need to work on work on that for the next session and then once you've mastered that move on to the next one it is a bit overwhelming to try and do all of those skills in your next swimming session yeah take things slow well i hope you guys have enjoyed today's video if so please give it a thumbs up give it a like and don't forget to subscribe down below to see more videos like 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Channel: Global Triathlon Network

Views: 197,890

Keywords: crawl, freestyle, resistance, body, position, streamlined, level, technical, head, relax, natural, Stroke, Catch, Speed, pulling, efficiency, breathe rotating, GTN, Global Triathlon Network, triathlon, Triathlon (Sport), tri, ironman, Sports, swimbikerun, triathlon training, triathlon skills, iron man, tri bike, triathlete, swimming, cycling, running, training, skills, coaching, mark, threlfall, james, cunnama, james cunnama, mark threlfallᏞ, 4525, Ꮵ, ӹ, Ᏸ, Մ, Շ, Չ, Ջ, ꔨ, ᠫ, ཙ, ፕ17

Id: lX9LW_Y3jBM

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021