5 Freestyle Fixes That Actually Work

There are so many different things you can do to get faster in your freestyle. In this video, I'm gonna break down five proven ways that you can swim faster for less effort. Let's get into it. Number one, there's a big shift towards doing a lot of resistance training in the pool, whether that be with a parachute, whether that be with weights, and being able to swim and apply more power and build your strength that way. Now the thing is, there's a lot of swimmers who are already doing that, they don't even know about it. This is the very common mistake that I see where people are pointing their toes to the bottom of the pool. They have found that you can actually increase your frontal drag by 42% when your toes are pointing to the bottom of the pool instead of pointing behind you. So that small amount of surface area on the top of your foot, if that is facing the oncoming water as you're swimming, that is like having a parachute out behind you. Creates a huge amount of drag. If you can point your toes and turn them slightly inwards, a little bit like pigeon toed, that's going to reduce the drag and that is going to help you sit higher in the water overall. Because when your toes are pointing straight down, it increases the drag, it drops your hips and drops your legs. So you can generally improve your body position in a pretty big way by just pointing your toes. Now the key to doing this well is, you've got to keep your foot and your leg mostly relaxed. It should be this nice flick of the foot that happens at the bottom of the kick. If you're very stiff and rigid while you're pointing them, you're probably going to cramp in your calf or in your foot and it's not going to be comfortable. So the trick is finding that sweet spot between pointing your toes, but also keeping them relaxed and floppy. And that's what will allow you to be effective with that part of the stroke. So you can reduce a lot of drag by pointing your toes. And I had a swimmer email me last week who said he'd made this one change and he was already swimming three seconds faster each 100. The second one is don't pat a cat. One of the really common things we see with people when they go through their catch in that first movement of the stroke, they do it like they're patting a cat. They are moving their hand like this through the water where their fingers stay pointing forwards. A good catch, so that first part of the stroke, that will have you pointing your fingers down to the bottom of the pool. And the two things that I want swimmers to do when they're going through their catches, point your fingers to the bottom of the pool and bend or hinge at the elbow to set up a good catch position, which we'll explain in a different video, which I'll link to at the top of this one. Now, when you do that, you're going to have a much bigger surface area and a much bigger paddle to push back against the water. And that's what moves you forwards. If your fingers remain pointing forwards through the catch, it doesn't give you much propulsion at all. It's primarily gonna push your chest and your head up, but probably drop the back half of your body. So you need to remember to point those fingers down to the bottom of the pool after you finish reaching forwards out in front. And I think it's a really good cue to help you improve the catch. Tip the fingers, bend at the elbow. The third one, a lot of swimmers that we work with initially when they come to us, they have very low hips and very low legs. And there's a number of different ways to bring that up, which I'll link to a video above here. One of the key things though, is making sure you hold and you press your body in the right way. Your lungs have air and that's where your buoyancy comes from. So you can press on your chest. You can lean on that a little bit and use some core engagement and hip engagement to help bring the hips up. It's a very subtle change and press of the chest to help bring the back half up. But that's a really important way that can help manipulate your body so that the hips and the legs do rise in the water. So if you've got those three touch points of head, hips and heels at the surface, then you're going to be sitting very efficiently in the water. But not a lot of people are doing that. So that's a really quick win that it can take some time to get the balance of it and to get it right. But when you do, that is going to make you so much faster for what's going to be a lot less effort. Number four, quite often we'll see people when they're coming over the top of the water but in their recovery, when they go to enter, they think that they need to reach out and stretch out as far as they possibly can before they enter the water. The thing is, for most swimmers and most elite swimmers, they're going to enter the water first with their fingers, then they're going to stretch out and reach forwards once they're in the water. So the reach and extension should primarily happen in the water, that last five or 10% should be in the water. So if you can learn to enter fingers first with your elbow up and then extend forwards in the water, so you're reaching to not 100% of your capable reach where you go as far as you possibly can, but you're not far off it, then that's going to help you get this nice glide and momentum in the stroke. Especially if you're swimming at a very sort of comfortable pace where you're looking to swim at like a six or a seven or eight out of 10, then if you can enter that way and extend in the water, you'll feel this momentum that you get when you come over the top of the water and you get to carry that momentum into the water and out in front. And that's where you see this really nice tempo that really good swimmers get, where they're going left arm, right arm, left arm, right arm. As opposed to like a hamstring or wheel that's just going, that's spinning, where you'll see that often happen when people come over and they reach out, but they haven't entered yet and then they've got nowhere to go, so they pull straight through. And it's like this hamstring or wheel where you're not really going anywhere. So that's why we like to teach people to typically enter fingers first with a slightly bent elbow and then straighten the arm underneath the surface of the water. And if you've done our five day catch challenge, that's the very first thing that we work on is that entry there. And we've got several drills in that course that show you how to do that. Number five, I was at my kid's swim lesson yesterday and he was doing his lesson. And in the other pool, I was watching some of the lap swimmers go about their laps. And one of the things that really stood out to me as I was watching most of these swimmers is that they were swimming very short. And by short, I mean, when they would enter the water, they would reach out, but not reach out very far. When they would push back, they'd push back and come out before the hit. So they weren't pushing back very far either. So they were swimming short, swimming like they were two meters instead of two and a half meters if you go from fingers to toes. So a really good way to increase your speed is to increase your distance per stroke. And one way to increase that is to enter the water, reach out in front like you're reaching for the wall in front of you, and then pull through as opposed to enter, reach up a little bit, but move that arm down really quickly. So it's great to be long when we swim. I like to think of freestyle as having a base or a start position. And that start position is full extension on the side. One arm is pressing back past the hip, like you can see here. That is a really good starting position. And then you'd move over to the next stroke, same thing, that's your start position. If you can be long in that position, you're probably going to increase how far you travel with each stroke. And that's going to increase your speed. Now, one more bonus thing is to accelerate through each stroke. When it comes to swim freestyle, it should be slow to fast, not all at the one speed. So if you can learn to go through the first part of your stroke, when you're reaching forwards and beginning your catch, that part is relatively soft and relaxed. Then you're going to gradually increase your speed and your power as you go through it. And that means the hand and the arm should accelerate through the stroke. Again, nothing crazy, don't need to go zero to 100, but it should be this nice gradual buildup each stroke that you're taking, like you can see here. And if you can get that sort of timing and rhythm with the movement of your hand and your arm, then you're going to feel that propulsion each stroke, as opposed to if you're just moving everything through at the same speed and the same time, you'll never really get that propulsion, you'll never really feel it. And if you'd like to improve your swimming and work closer with me, jump into our Effortless Swimming Membership, where I'm working with people in there who are triathletes, open water swimmers, and recreational swimmers to develop better freestyle technique and build their fitness and build their overall efficiency in the stroke. And we've got a step-by-step plan inside the Effortless Swimming Membership to help you do just that. Thanks for watching. See you next week.