Freestyle breathing technique

Hey guys, and I'm back with more of my posts on swimming. I bring (potentially) sad news about the swimming blog. My dad said I should “focus on one style a week”, which basically meant that I'm going to be rambling on and on through the whole week about freestyle techniques (don't worry though, because even if we're only focusing on one style, I'll try to keep the posts as interesting as possible). I'll focus on other styles next week, but for now, it's just plain old freestyle.

On this post, we're going to focus on the freestyle breathing. Understand that, in swimming, one small fault in your style can decrease your time by seconds (and in swimming, every millisecond makes the difference between victory and defeat), and the breathing is one of the factors that counts toward your final result. So without further ado, let's get straight to it!

In this post, as usual, there will be a video to assist you with my tips. Here's the link. You will need to watch this video if you want to make some sense of the rest of this post starting from the next paragraph (of course, feel free to blindly study this post and its tips without the video, but a word of warning: all these tips revolve around what happens in the video, so it's your funeral).

One of the many fatal errors a lot of people do while breathing is “over-rolling”. This is when the swimmer pulls his hands forward in a too-wide arc, making him/her bend his/her body to the side of the turning hand. This will reduce the speed of your hand's acceleration and obviously, make your final results worse than it could actually be.

Additionally, “over-rolling” also tilts the swimmer's whole body to one side. This also gives a disadvantage to your feet. Usually, your feet is steady on the water, providing power by kicking both feet on the water. When your body is tilted to the side, that also means that your feet are also tilting to the side. This will result in one foot being above the water (therefore kicking nothing and wasting energy), leaving only the other foot propelling you through the water.

To counter this, try only turning your HEAD while your hands move forward. This will keep your arms moving forward steadily while keeping your body straight and moving forward at maximum speed. Swimmers also have to consider their head position while breathing. Most of the time, people (including me, who's still having some difficulty adjusting to the breathing sequence) practically throw their heads up to the sky when they take a breath. This is wrong. Here's how to remedy that hard-to-correct mistake:

When breathing, it's best to only tilt your head to the side approximately 90 degrees to the direction of your moving hand. This will make you conserve your energy longer. Finally, make you sure you get enough breath when swimming freestyle. If you hold your breath for too long, you will end up gasping for breath a few seconds later (trust me, I've been there before).

That's all for today. Next time, I will make more posts about freestyle (the topic is indefinite), but that's another day. For now, goodbye and see you until later!