The Only Video You Need to Swim Perfect Freestyle in 2026

Swimming more won't make you faster. You can swim seven times a week but still have a bad technique. If you want to swim fast you need to focus on five main things breathing, body position, your pulling catch, your kick and one more thing that swimmers ignore the most and this is your training structure. Because swimming is based on moving in a horizontal body position and it's not natural for our human bodies you need to understand the physical part of swimming. In order to float you need to be flat on the top of the water and if you want to increase the pulling power you need to create more resistance with your palm surface. It's Endurance ID and I'm Dasha a former swimmer and a coach with 15 years of professional swimming experience and today I'll guide you through the main parts of the freestyle swim that you need to work on if you want to swim better and faster with less effort not only this year but for the rest of your life. I'll also show you how to structure your swim workout to achieve your best performance ever. Let's go! Breathing is one of the biggest reasons swimming feels so hard and it's not because breathing itself is difficult but because it usually breaks everything else in your stroke. You might think that you get tired because you lack oxygen when you swim but in reality you actually get out of breath because every breath you take affects your body position and your balance in the water. The rule of thumb to remember for the rest of your life is breathing in only with your mouth and breathing out with your nose or sometimes with both. When you turn your head to the side to breathe ideally you're going to have one goggle in the water and one goggle out of the water together with your mouth when you inhale. If both goggles come out of the water when you side breathe that means that your head is too high and when your head is too high usually your hips drop and side breathing usually comes from rotation not from lifting your head so remember where your head moves your body will fold so if you lift it when you side breathe your legs are going to sink and you will swim slow and get exhausted really really quickly so instead you're going to keep one goggle in the water inhale only with your mouth and try to look at your feet when you're swimming and this is going to help you stay really low and breathe on the side. Exactly this I teach in my beginner swim course linked down below. Another breathing thing that you need to remember is the timing for your side breath. As your hand enters immediately prepare for a side breath. When you swim your head breaks the water in front of you and there's going to be an air pocket formed for you to actually take a breath. It sounds easy but in reality what you really need to think when you side breathe is not only how you side breathe but also when you side breathe in other words the timing so don't wait until your arm is almost out of the water because this will actually disrupt your stroke and you don't want to do this so as long as your fingertips touch the surface of the water you're going to start your catch and you're going to prepare for a side breath and remember only with your mouth. Head and body position are the foundation of everything in swimming. If you don't want to be an anchor in the water you need one simple thing. You need your head to be straight not too high or looking too forward. Now you can look at these two swimmers and find the difference. Swimmer A has their head very high and it causes the entire body to be diagonal and swimmer B has their head straight and looking down and that's why the rest of the body has to do almost nothing because the head is in the right position. Again your head goes your body follows. Another thing that you should not ignore is the streamline position. Because streamline position is the fastest position in swimming because the drag is super minimal and this allows you to glide super fast through the water with very minimal to almost no effort and you want to have a streamline position especially during your start and during your turns even though streamline position is not a stroke itself but it's the most efficient way to move through the water without any resistance. This is why it's really important that you practice the streamline position and if you want to improve your speed I designed five swim sets to build speed the link down below. A lot of swimmers think that to swim faster they need to pull harder but in the reality is most swimmers don't lack strength. They need to mechanics to be in place the mechanics of the pull and of the strokes and if you want to do less and move more and not vice versa. If you drop your elbow, if you push too deep with your straight arm, if you rush your stroke or you cart your stroke short no matter how fit you are you won't move forward very efficiently. So let's break it down properly. Your freestyle underwater stroke has four key phases the entry, the catch, the pull and the exit. So the entry is the start of your stroke when your fingertips touch the surface of the water and here you want to enter in line with your shoulder not here diagonal and not too wide and you want your fingertips to enter first not your elbow yeah your fingertips then your elbow to be able to build that pull from this position. The next phase is the catch and the catch is where you catch the water and you start your stroke with the high elbow. Here's important to remember that you need to glide a little longer forward and not to rush your hand straight down because you want to build that resistance with your forearm and your palm surface to be able to actually push off of that and pull. The next phase is the pull and that's the middle of your stroke and where you actually move forward. So here is what you're going to do. You're going to make sure that you pull straight under your body and another thing that you want to avoid is the s-shaped pull. I know we were taught to do this in the past, me for sure, but it's less efficient because when you pull in the s-shape your pull is actually pushing the water sideways and you lose a lot of forward propulsion. So instead of that what you really want to do is you want to do a classic straight pull with a high elbow engaging your lats and your back. And the last phase is the back of your pull or we call it an exit and this is where you really want to push it and finish it by your hip with your arms straight or slightly bent. Here it's very important that you don't cut your stroke short and what I mean by that you don't finish halfway here at your waist because you have built so much power already through your entry through your catch and through your pull. So if you cut your stroke short in the last phase actually it's not going to move you any anywhere far with this kind of technique. So and talking about technique I have multiple drills to work on your catch and on your pull the link down below. Now what you want to do in swimming is you want to take less strokes and move more water. In other words you want to take fewer strokes while moving yourself further. So this is what we call distance per stroke. Some people take 20 strokes per 50 meters, others take 30 strokes per 50 meters and your goal in swimming is to minimize the number of strokes and maximize the quality of it so you could pull more. A very common mistake is trying to swim faster by increasing your arm turnover or kick harder but in the reality speed in swimming is a combination of one how far you go per stroke and two how fast you repeat that stroke cycle. If your distance per stroke is short no amount of tempo is going to save it and the way you're going to improve your distance per stroke is with the sets like 450s or 650s where every other time you're going to reduce the number of strokes you take by keeping the same intensity and trying to keep the same speed. So let's say you're going to do 30 strokes in the first 50 then the second should be 28 the next one 26 and the last one 24. And you can do that by moving more in your catch, gliding more and really thinking about the high elbow pull and not cutting your stroke at the end. This looks impressive yeah? You might even think that this is the right way to kick in swimming but let me show you what really is the right and the fastest kick. First of all your kick in swimming is important but mostly there to support your entire body on float and not that much for actual propulsion. So ideal and the right way to kick is from your hip moving into your knee and then finishing with your foot. Small and fast kick is better than big one for one simple reason. The more space you have between your feet as you kick the harder it is to them bringing them back together and then move them to the opposite direction. It creates a lot of drag and this actually slows you down. So if you want your kick to actually help your stroke make sure that you're going to kick in small and continuous movements from your hip and don't forget to engage your core and this is going to help your whole lower body to stay on float and balance. As a sprinter you can do a six-speed kick where every arm stroke you're going to do three kicks and if you're a distant swimmers you can do a two-beat or a four-beat kick simply because in the open water or triathlon race you don't need legs that much. You only need legs for balance and stability and the fast six-beat kick requires a lot of oxygen to maintain and you'd rather use that oxygen for your strokes. And if you want to know more about techniques speed or swim hacks I have 30 different ways you can improve your swim so check the link down below. Now let's talk about your training structure. If you want to see improvement in your swim you need to do two things. You need to stay consistent and you need to follow specific swim workouts that are tied exactly to your end goal. Let's say if you swim three times a week make sure to spread it evenly. For example, you're gonna do a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. If you swim only two times a week you can do it within the three-day gap. Training Monday and Tuesday and then doing nothing for the rest of the week will affect your performance and bring actually little to no gain. So for one simple reason because you need to develop not only speed, technique, or endurance. In swimming you need to develop the feel of the water and you can do that only by showing up consistently. Apart from staying consistent to swim better and faster you should follow a structured swim workout and it consists of a warm-up, the main set, and the cool-down. Now depending on what your end goal is in swimming the warm-up, the main set, and the cool-down will be based on. So if you're early in the game and you want to improve your technique and develop that feel of the water your main set is going to be based on basically technical swims, the drills like 616, the zipper, the finger drag drill which I actually teach in my 20 drill course the link down below. And if you can already swim and want to build speed and swim faster your structured workouts will be based on the fast sets with lots of rest in between like 425s full out with two minute rest in between or changing gears within the split like 4x100 build up where you're gradually building the speed, negative split where you where the second part of your split is faster than the first one, or descent intervals where you swim faster every other split so let's say you're gonna do 4x200 and every other 200 has to be faster than the previous one. And another thing that you can do in particular if you're working on your speed is changing gears within the split like 100 meters swimming and swimming three strokes easy, three strokes fast, or starting from the dead start without the wall from the middle of the pool sprinting into the wall. And if your goal is your endurance and you're preparing for a triathlon race or an open water race your main set is going to be longer and with the speed that you can actually maintain for a long period of time and the rest between the splits is going to be very minimal. For example you're going to do 6x300 meters aerobic pace. The aerobic pace means the one that you can actually hold for all 300s very steady and the rest between the sets is going to be only 10 to 15 seconds and in this way you can almost imitate the race swim in the pool. Your level will determine both your training structure, how much you train, and what you do specifically every practice. If you're a complete beginner the right learning sequence for you will be breathing where you're starting with breathing on the shallow end and you're going to blow bubbles only breathing with your mouth and breathe out with your nose. Then you're going to move on to floating where you hold your breath and float on the top of the water in a dead man position or in a streamline position. Then you're going to add some legs and you're going to do kicking so the same like floating but you're going to add your legs. Then you're going to add your arm stroke and add drills like 616 or single arm freestyle drill and then you're going to combine all of these skills together and if you want to see a full video check it right here. As an intermediate you will still focus on the technical drills but add in some speed work, threshold intervals, and some aerobic sets and if you're an advanced swimmer you'll be training in a block of 8 to 12 weeks working specifically on your end goal. You're going to start with the aerobic phase where you swim long and easy sets then going into the race specific intensity phase where you're going to do intervals, threshold sets, tests, and then you're going to finish all with a taper where you're going to reduce the volume but still keep the intensity and shorter sprint sets and if you want to train with me one-on-one personally and see the real improvement in your swim I'll leave the link down below you can apply for it and let me know in the comments below what's your swim level and what's your end goal is. Keep swimming and I'll see you in the next one!