5 Tips To Improve Your Freestyle Swimming Stroke! - Front Crawl Technique Improvements

Whether you're a pure swimmer- Or a triathlete- For many of us, freestyle is the go-to stroke of choice. I imagine many of you are eager to go faster in the water. Or to get into T1 as soon as possible. With a little bit of effort, it is all possible. Yes, there are several aspects to the freestyle stroke. Today, we have five tips to help improve your technique. Let's begin from the top and work our way down. Our head is pretty much the heaviest part of our body and therefore has the biggest impact on our body position. One of the big goals we look to when we're talking about our swimming technique is to have a nice streamlined and flat position in the water. Here on GTN, you likely have heard us talking about this seesaw effect. By lifting our head right up out of the water or a little bit too high, we'll find our legs start to sink, creating resistance against the water. Equally, if we bury our head down into the water, again, that can create resistance. Although that is harder to do and less of an issue. When I'm swimming along, one of the things I look to do is actually relaxing my head down. I'm looking towards the bottom of the pool and then lifting my eyesight up around two meters. I'm looking just around two meters ahead of me, around 45 degrees to the bottom of the pool. That's going to keep your body in hopefully a nice position without lifting your head too much and driving those legs down into the ground. Your head position is very closely linked to your breathing because obviously you need to move your head in order to get your air in. It's really tempting to lift your head up too high to get in that oxygen and as a result, your legs will sink. You want to think about trying to make your breathing nice and relaxed and smooth and you're turning your head to the side. Ideally, not more than half of your face coming out of the water. As you take that in-breath, you turn your head back down to neutral as you exhale. It's the exhalation which can really have an effect on your relaxation. If you're trying to do trickle breaths so you're continually breathing out, that will help you to keep that smooth, relaxed rhythm. Now, if you're feeling really out of breath, you might want to consider breathing more often. You've obviously got the option of breathing every two, every four, every six if you can only breathe on one side or if you only feel comfortable breathing on one side. Otherwise, you could actually alternate it and make it bilateral breathing so that gives you the option of breathing every three or every five. Whatever manages to suit for you so you can feel relaxed and keep it as smooth as possible. We're now moving on down the chain of the body and onto possibly one of the biggest mistakes and that's being too flat in the water. Unfortunately, all this does is just hammers the pecs and the biceps as we pull and we swim our way along. Ideally, we actually want to have some rotation in our stroke. This helps to distribute the load through to our shoulders so that stabilizes, but then using some of the big lat and back muscles to add some power to our catch and our pull. Now, to get this nice rotation in our stroke, one way of thinking about it is actually just to extend a little bit out the front as we catch in the water. Big thing here though is as we move the shoulders round, our hips move in sync with our shoulders. A really good drill for this is actually three swim, six kicks. You do three normal strokes and then on the third stroke, you extend out onto your side, kick for six kicks, make sure that core is set nicely before then starting another three strokes and keep continuing that over and over. Next up, you want to think about where your hand enters the water. Imagine a line that's actually splitting your body in two from your head down to your ankles. You want to make sure that your hand does not go past that midline. If it is, then it's going to be putting a strain on your stroke and causing you to maybe wiggle slightly and be less efficient, but also put more of a strain on your shoulder. Ideally, you want your hand to be going in pretty much directly in front of your shoulder so it's set up in a nice position. Obviously, as Mark's spoken about rotation, it's going to come hand in hand as you're rotating into that as your catch goes through. A great drill just to help remind you of where your hand is entering the water is the salute drill. You're going to simply tap your head on the way forwards. This just gives you a bit of a reminder of where your hand is in the air and then hopefully, it can go straight forwards in front of your shoulder from there. Now onto our final tip, right down to the bottom of our body with our leg kick. Of course, our leg kick provides propulsion, but it's also an easy place to waste energy with an inefficient leg kick and poor technique. Now, ideally, our leg kick should predominantly come from our hips rather than from our knees as a lot of people do do. That's not to say there shouldn't be any movement or flex in the knee. A subtle flex is absolutely fine, but predominantly, that movement and power is coming from the hips all the way through to our feet with a nice flex and toe off through the ankle. If you compare a sprinter to an endurance swimmer or a triathlete, a sprinter will have something like a six to eight-beat leg kick, a really fast and powerful leg kick, whereas a triathlete and an endurance swimmer will have something like a two to four-beat leg kick, providing mostly just balance to their stroke. For those endurance swimmers and those triathletes, a six to eight-beat leg kick just isn't sustainable for those longer distances, which is why we opt for the two to four-beat leg kick. With that in mind, it's actually really important that we work on our kick and make it as efficient as possible so that we can even get propulsion for those slower two to four-beat leg kicks. Efficient swimming is not an easy task to master, but we're confident by following some of these tips today, you'll see some significant improvements in your stroke. Heather Featherstone Yeah, good luck with those, and make sure you practice and stay patient because it does take a little bit of time, but hopefully, these have helped you. You've enjoyed it. Give us a like. Remember, you can follow us on our social media channels, and you can also subscribe to us here on YouTube.