Do YOU Make These 5 Freestyle Mistakes?

You probably didn't know that you make this mistake. Think less kick, more hip rotation. A lot of top swimmers will do this drill every single day. Stop dropping your arm when you breathe. You probably didn't know that you make this mistake. If you watch any top swimmer, what they're able to do better than most of the swimming population is enter the water with their fingertips, extend, and maintain that arm position as they take the breath. One of the biggest mistakes a lot of swimmers make is dropping this arm when breathing. And it's really easy to do that because your arm is basically stabilizing your entire body as you get your breath. So really focus on maintaining your arm position out into the streamline while you take your breath. You want to keep one eye and one ear underneath the surface of the water, extend, balance, take that next stroke, but do so without letting your arm drop as you take the breath. Another huge mistake swimmers make time and time again is crossing over. You got to imagine your body has a laser that just kind of cuts you in half. If you swim and your hand crosses over, boom, laser cuts off your hand. You got to make sure you have symmetry with your swimming. This is true for freestyle and backstroke. These are long axis strokes. So the reason why it's so important to swim and not cross over that midline with where your hand enters the water is because you're A, not going to have as good of a catch. You're not efficient pulling the water crossing that midline. And B, number two, is it's increasing your risk for injury. Now we don't want to be hurt because that means you can't train and you're in pain, you're out of the water, and that's no good to your swimming performance. So it's really important not to cross over, which is a very common thing, especially on that breathing that I just mentioned. A lot of swimmers, when they breathe, the arm is basically going to compensate and pull underneath, and that's a huge crossover. Even if your arm just falls laterally or in line with your shoulder, you don't want to have that happen as well. So when you're swimming, and if we look at the swimmers here in the pool, you want to maintain that nice catch that happens right in line with your shoulder. If it crosses over, it's going to be slow. Do you know where you should be looking when you swim? It's down at the bottom of the pool, not at the other end of the pool. I know it's really tempting to look at the wall, but guess what? It's not going anywhere. One of the biggest mistakes swimmers make, and myself included, is just lifting your head up. Head position is so important because head position dictates body position, and that's what creates all the drag. Basically, if you lift your head up, what goes up must come down. Your head comes up, your legs go down, and that's why it's so important to make sure you focus on looking down. Now, you don't have to look straight down. It's okay to have a semi-neutral head position where your eyes are actually angled up just a little bit, but if you're a beginner swimmer and you're watching this video, which means you're probably not breaking Caleb Dressel or Michael Phelps' records, you need to make sure you're looking down. That will increase your body position. You're going to be elevated in the water, and it means you're going to go a lot faster. This is one of the most important things in swimming fast. If you notice, when we looked at the video, every single person I was commenting on the way your hand is entering the water because if you mess that part up or you don't have that efficient, it doesn't matter what you do underwater. Where is your hand entering the water? Do you see how your hand is basically flat reaching? It really looks like your whole hand is just placing into the water like this. You need to focus on ring finger enters the water first, finish the stroke, get the elbow high, and then reach. You enter the water with your ring middle finger. It extends underwater just like you would without holding this. Then you're going to grab the water with your forearm. It's going to feel slow, but when you take them off, it's going to feel amazing. Setting up your feel of the water is critical to swimming fast. Sometimes when you train like this, you'll get joint pain and inflammation from these repeated motions. Once upon a time, swimmers were caught in an endless cycle of inflammation, muscle, and joint pain. This is especially true for those who follow the no pain, no gain mantra. I'm guilty myself of saying this, and living in pain should not be considered normal. If you've been stuck in this spiral, Kenyon is about to light up your world and get your body back in the game. The Move Plus Pro is a safe, non-invasive, enhanced light therapy device. It uses the next generation laser light technology to help relieve joint pain, reduce inflammation, and stimulate the healing of damaged tissues. This technology uses photobiomodulation to jumpstart your body's innate healing capabilities. And this is drug-free healing that is scientifically proven with over 12,000 individuals having embraced Kenyon and their Move Plus device to help get them back training and swimming. So make sure you head over to the link in the description below to get the best discount exclusive to our community. Start living pain-free. A lot of swimmers are not adding enough variety into their training. Even if you swim on a team with a coach, you got to make sure you have variety and diversity in your training, not only in terms of distance, 50s versus 200s versus 500s, 25s, but also speed. Are you swimming fast or are you swimming really fast, like above race pace? Also diversity in stroke. Are you swimming butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, the drills that you do? All of these different things engage your body in a different way. And if you don't do that, you're basically going to plateau. Right now we got the crew in the water and we're doing a 200 with fins and paddles. And before that, we were actually training with tennis balls, another way to add variety to the training. Now, if you're not familiar with some of these drills or how to do this for yourself, that's where you can check out the MySwim Pro app available for iPhone and Android. We developed this to give you a personalized training program just for you. So whether you're training on a team or you swim by yourself, you want to add a lot of variety into your training that will maximize your potential. And it's really important that you do that because you have the power to swim faster. And the only person that's in charge of that is you. So make it happen and happy swimming.