Make Your Freestyle Swimming Technique Smoother In 7 Steps!

do you find swimming a real effort well stay tuned for today's video because i'm going to be giving you some tips on how to make your freestyle stroke more smooth and effortless now i suspect that for many of you your tactic until now has been to simply swim and maybe swim some more and attempt to hopefully improve your freestyle stroke well that's a little bit like heading out for a long ride without stabilizers on your bike when you're learning to ride a bike for the very first time you are literally throwing yourself in the deep end whereas it's much better to break things down and build it up in steps so the first element to get your head around is your resistance through the water in short the larger your frontal area that you're trying to push through the water the greater the resistance you're going to experience and once this isn't directly working on your freestyle stroke and the technicalities of it it's a really important element to simply get your head around and understand and also experience the benefits of reducing that frontal area where possible which in turn is going to reduce that drag and in essence make things more effortless and as silly as that seems what it's doing is actually highlighting efficiency for the same effort you can potentially travel further so take that forward into the rest of your swimming also it's just a great skill to practice and work on for everyday swimming anyway so a great little drill to practice this and experience this is to push off the wall in a streamlined position you want to link your hands above your head with straight arms and really trying to squeeze your head and the aim here is to keep your legs still and simply glide as far as you possibly can you'll find that the more streamlined you make yourself the further you will go [Music] right next up and probably the most common mistake or issue i see people making is with their head position now essentially your head steers you as a swimmer so if you were to tilt your head left you're going to veer left tilt it right you're veer right but also if you lift your head up you probably find that your bum and your legs will start to sink equally bury your head down and you might find that your bum and your legs start to pop up so ideally you want to keep your head as still as possible any side to side movement will have to be counteracted with some funny pull or leg kick to keep you on track which is all wasted energy so i recommend starting by looking directly down at the ground below you whilst swimming and with a relaxed head then just naturally finding your preferred head position now personally for myself that's around two to three meters in front of me on the bottom of the pull now when it comes to breathing you also want to make sure that you're not lifting your head up when you go to breathe you should be just looking to the side wall of the pool now that means actually having half your face in the water and half out but in reality what happens is that the top of your head creates a bit of a cavity around your face which means that your mouth isn't actually in the water at all [Music] talking off breathing this can be another problematic area for many swimmers but once you have it nailed it can make your swimming far more smooth and effortless now obviously when we're on land we can breathe as and when we want but once we get in the water we can certainly only take a breath every number of strokes and for a lot of people that can feel quite uncomfortable now rather than simply taking a breath and then holding on to it until the next breath once you've taken that breath you should immediately start to trickle that breath out and that means that you should have fully exhaled by the time you get around to taking that next breath that will hopefully relieve a lot of tension in your upper body and just make the whole affair a lot more relaxed also whilst we're on breathing don't feel like you need to suddenly start breathing every three strokes as is often talked about make life easy of yourself just breathe every two and also whilst we're talking of breathing don't feel like you need to start breathing every three as is often talked about make life easier yourself just breathe every two initially and just make it a lot more relaxed and what about the leg kick well this is an area that tends to get a little attention particularly amongst distant swimmers and triathletes who are all about saving energy and feel that the leg kick is a waste of energy well actually the leg kick is really important and if you think about this way if you were to have a really efficient leg kick you might be able to produce some good power and propulsion for very little effort from each and every one of your kicks i mean what isn't to like about that so do make sure you still focus on your leg kick and trying to improve that including it into some of your workouts a good way of doing this is actually just using a kickboard isolates the legs allows you to work on that if you like you can even include the use of fins just to work those leg muscles a little bit more or to help propel you through the water but the key here is focus on the leg kick coming from the hips with a soft bend in the knee and really nice loose ankles [Music] now regards to the actual stroke action everything is as important as one another but there's one part of the stroke which does tend to get missed and not talked about that often and that is the extension and exit of the hand at the end of the stroke by that i mean the section just after the pull phase where the hand and arm fully extends before initiating the exit from the water and going into the recovery phase and simply you want to maximize the amount of water being pulled and since your hand is already moving through the water at pace and with power why not just finish the stroke off those final few inches extending that arm out and pushing that water that little bit further and i actually used to exaggerate this a little bit in some of my sessions to work on this by really doing a forceful flick at the end of the stroke now i can't talk about smooth freestyle swimming without discussing rotation no admittedly rotation is relatively advanced skill and not something that i would recommend everyone suddenly jumps into trying to do really try to nail the fundamentals first the catch the pull the recovery and so on before moving on to trying to implement their rotation into your stroke however rotation basically means that you rotate around an axis if you imagine it runs from the top of your head through to the bottom of your feet and when your hand enters the water and you initiate that catch phase you start to rotate onto your side almost leaning into the catch then as you start to move through that pull you begin to level off and as that next hand enters you're rotating back over onto the other side and this helps in a number of ways but some of the main ones are the fact that when you start that catch you're almost putting your body weight into that catch so you're really putting a lot of power and pressure down onto the water also it's then allowing you to utilize some big muscles your lats your back rather than just pummeling your pecs and your biceps and just simply getting a bit more power into the stroke and also in turn by rotating onto your side you're actually reducing your frontal area in the water and in turn that's going to reduce your drag now finally as i mentioned at start this video the best way to improve your stroke and make it more smooth and effortless is to break things down and what better way to do that than with some drills drills will simply focus on certain movements and parts of the stroke but also over exaggerating some of them to a degree so what i tend to do is include some drills just a handful it may be a warm-up or warm down of a session but if you really want you could do a fully focused techniques session where you're doing loads of drills throughout that session if you'd like any tips or ideas for those drills i'll drop a video link in the description just down below so you can follow through and put them into your own workouts there we go hopefully you're all now equipped for some smooth and effortless swimming if you've got any more questions please drop them in the comments section down below if you've enjoyed today's video give it a thumb up give it a like don't forget we're over on social media so you can give us a follow over on there and if you're not doing so ready give a subscribe just down below

Channel: Global Triathlon Network

Views: 234,574

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Id: uFOgb9nQV3Y

Length: 8min 18sec (498 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021