How To Swim PERFECT Freestyle in 2026 (Fix These 5 Breathing Mistakes)

Breathing is one of the hardest skills to master in swimming. On land, you breathe in your nose and out your mouth. But in the water, it's completely flipped. You breathe in your mouth and out your nose. But if you don't know how to do this, you'll feel out of breath, exhausted, and confused why everyone is swimming faster than you. I'm going to show you how to swim faster using less energy and five specific skills that you can apply the next time you go swimming. And after you implement these skills, you'll feel like your endurance got a turbo charge, and you'll be swimming faster and smarter than ever before. First of all, stop swimming with bad technique. The reason you're struggling to swim faster is because you're thinking about too many things at the same time. Just remember that water is 800 times more dense than air. So if you want to swim faster, you need to improve your efficiency. And the best way to do that is by reducing drag. If you look at my illustration here, most swimmers swim with their head too high in the water. As a result, your legs are sinking. This is creating a lot of displacement. Look at how much gap there is between the surface of the water and the bottom of the legs. The way that we fix this is by improving our head position. What that means is we need to keep our eyes looking down. Our legs will come up. We're going to have less drag on our legs, and that's going to improve our body position. So before we can focus on our breathing and understand how we should actually rotate our head to the side to really maximize the amount of air we can take in, we first have to improve our head position and our body position. Because if we don't do that, you'll just be wasting your time. Now, when it comes to actually breathing, you need to understand how frequently you should be rotating your head. You can breathe every one stroke, two, three, four, but which is the correct one? Now, I want you guys to let me know what you're doing down below in the comments. Are you breathing every two strokes? Are you breathing every three strokes? You really shouldn't be breathing every single stroke because you're not going to be able to have stability and you probably don't need that much oxygen. There is actually the perfect formula for how often you should breathe, and I'll tell you that at the end of the video. Now, when it comes to your actual swimming mechanics, I need you to stop using your legs. Your legs are the biggest muscles of your body and they suck the most blood and the most oxygen. So as a result, you're going to be left feeling out of breath if you're kicking too much. One of the biggest mistakes swimmers make is they focus too much on their legs. They think, well, my legs are so big, I need to kick if I want to swim faster. In fact, this is actually sucking all the oxygen and it makes it so much harder to breathe. So before we can talk about how you actually rotate your head and the way that you place your fingertips in the water, you need to shut down your legs and focus on your upper body. It's really important that you're swimming efficiently so that way you can maximize your breath. Now, the way that starts is actually with your hand entry. When your fingertips slide into the water directly in front of your shoulder, that initiates that initial rotation and your breath to the side should feel as though it's connected to the entire stroke. A big mistake a lot of swimmers make is they simply drop their hand in, they throw their head to the side, maybe they throw it up, they get a big breath and then they slap their other arm across. It should be controlled and your head is in line with your spine. All of the rotation happens in accordance to your entire body rotating. So if we enter the water with our fingertips, we rotate our head to the side, one eye and one ear in the water and then after we take our breath, the head rotates back down as we're initiating the pull and then we rotate to the other side. Your head can actually initiate that rotation. Big mistake a lot of swimmers make is as they get the breath, the arm starts to sink and we see this time and time again when we do analysis at our retreats. One of the biggest common mistakes that people make is the arm is out there for support and it's holding your body up while you're breathing. The problem there is that we no longer caught any water. We were missing this first third of the stroke and that early vertical forearm is where all the magic happens in swimming. It's what separates the good swimmers from the great swimmers. So we want to make sure as we're rotating our breath, our arm remains extended, we catch our breath, our head is parallel to the rest of our body and then our head initiates that rotation. We rotate down, we catch the water and then we glide to the other side. Let me demonstrate it looking forward to the camera. Hand enters the water directly in front of the shoulder, extend and now we're rotated onto the side. Eyes are going to drop down, initiate that catch and then rotate to the other side. The water line should be right in the middle of your head. Remember, the head is in line with the spine. So if you want to swim fast, you got to make sure your body is symmetrical and that includes the breath. Now a great drill to focus on that specifically is three strokes plus 12 kicks. If you wear fins, it's going to make it that much easier to get a little bit more support and the way the drill works is pretty simple. On your side, eyes looking down, 12 kicks and then you're going to take three strokes and this is your opportunity to naturally incorporate the breath. Same as when you're on your side, get your 12 kicks, take your breath. After your breath, rotate your head down and then initiate those three strokes. It's really important on this drill that you get the timing right and what that means is initiating the breath. When you're on your side, get your breath, close the breath and then rotate into the stroke. A big mistake a lot of swimmers make is holding your breath while you swim. That's not how it works. In fact, you want to make sure you're exhaling while your face is in the water. That way, when you rotate your head, you can actually breathe. You want to think about humming underneath the water. If you're just a beginner swimmer, all you have to do is grab some water in your hands and literally start with a simple hum. Once you get comfortable exhaling underwater, then when you're swimming, you want to apply the same principle. You're pushing out ever so slightly, but you're not holding your breath and you're not exhaling. You're not pushing out all of your air at the same time. So you want to make sure it's 51% external pressure, 49% in, that way you're not having any water go up your nose and then when you're about to breathe, you have a little bit extra of a push and that allows you to have a clear passageway so you can breathe in your mouth when your face is rotated onto its side. So you breathe in your mouth and then your face goes back under, but you're not holding your breath and that's a huge mistake a lot of swimmers make. Another mistake a lot of swimmers make is lifting the head too high when taking the breath. You don't want to see your entire swim cap or your forehead or even your goggles above the surface of the water. Remember, you want to be looking straight down. So a great drill to focus on this improved head position while you're breathing is the paddle on head drill. So the size of the paddle really doesn't matter. You want to make sure it's a flat one and then you can remove the strap and actually the bigger the paddle, the easier this is going to be because what you're going to do is you're going to put this right in the middle of your forehead and then what you're trying to do is you're trying to feel the pressure against your head and simply rotate your head to the side and what that's going to do, it's going to keep your eye aligned underneath the surface of the water. So you want to have the water line directly parallel, cutting through your nose and that's going to create that air pocket and that allows you to breathe. What you're going to notice when you do this drill, if you're not swimming fast enough, the paddle is not going to stick around. It's going to be a lot harder. This drill is actually a lot easier the faster you go and the faster that you swim and the more pressure you can create in the front of the paddle, the easier it's going to be to breathe on your side and not lift your head up too high. The paddle really forces you to keep that alignment and generate that air pocket as you're breathing. Remember, the faster you move, the bigger that air pocket is going to be and this drill is something that you can incorporate with any size paddle, but remember, if it's flat, the bigger the paddle, the more resistance, the more you're going to feel this and the better your breathing is going to get. Another common mistake I see swimmers make time and time again is not breathing with purpose and that includes the type of training that you're doing, the sets, the workouts and the structure. So this is one of my favorite sets we did in college. It's 10-50s freestyle with focus on breath control. You can adapt this to 25s, but if you see there's a progression. On each individual 50, we're taking less and less breaths. If you're doing this for 25s, same principle applies. You want to make sure you're having a moderate but challenging amount of rest. So in this case, we would do it on the minute, 10-50s on the minute and on the first one, we're going to take four breaths. Two breaths on the first 25, two breaths on the second 25. The next one, we're going to take three breaths. One breath on the first 25, two breaths on the second 25. Then on the third one, we're only going to take two breaths, one and one. And then on the fourth one, only one breath, zero on the way down, one on the way back. And in the last one, we won't breathe at all. You can adapt this based on your skill level. So if you start out with maybe eight breaths and work your way down to four, that's perfectly fine. You want to challenge yourself. But if you notice here, this is not only focused on breath control, but when you take that single or three breaths per 25, it allows you to focus on the technique because you're not really thinking about anything else. So if you want more workouts just like this, make sure you check out the MySwimPro app. It'll develop a personalized training program specific to you. And using the AI generator, you can actually type in, I want to work on breath control. And it'll give you workouts and sets just like this to level up your swimming. I have a bonus for you guys. Now, when it comes to making that air pocket, a little bit of physics is involved. So remember the paddle drill. When we swim with the paddle on our head, the bigger the paddle, the more resistance we're going to feel. And that's because as we're moving, the faster we go, the greater the displacement we're going to have. So if you want to create a really big air pocket, you don't want to be swimming slow. And you want to have a natural transition and head rotation. If you lift your head up or you rotate too far behind, you're actually not going to displace the water the most efficiently. So just by rotating your head and keeping one eye and one ear in the water, what that's going to do, it's going to create this air pocket. So right now I can actually see underneath the water with one eye and above the water with the other eye. I'm still able to talk. This is actually still much higher than you need to be. If I were moving, I would be creating an air pocket right here and I'd actually be able to sink my head even lower and I'd be able to catch my breath without even having to manipulate my mouth very much. If you do happen to manipulate your mouth, you might just open it more on the side that's facing up. So it looks something like this. And you can see here, it makes it a little bit easier, but you actually don't even need to do that because if you're moving quickly, you're going to create enough displacement and that's physics in action. Now, if you've made it this far in the video, it means you're serious about leveling up your swimming. Whether you train alone with the MySwimPro app or with a team, the most important thing that you can do is be consistent because consistency is what compounds over time. Now, if you want a shortcut to swimming faster and doing so in less time, you need to join us at one of our in-person retreats. We'll do video analysis, work with you one-to-one and give you the feedback that you need to level up your swimming. Make sure you check out this video right over here where you see a behind the scenes of what it was like at our retreat in Thailand. It was an amazing experience and I can't wait to see you at our next one. By the time this video comes out, we'll probably have most of our slots filled out, but if you can squeeze in, we'd love to have you and I'll see you over there. Happy swimming.