Hip Driven Technique: How I Completely Transformed My Freestyle Swimming

To kick things off, over the holidays I gave a friend of mine the mastering freestyle program to try. In just four sessions, he cut his 100m pace from 140 to 136 and dropped his stroke count from 42 to 34. And the reason he could do that is because he's learned to use a hip-driven technique instead of a shoulder-driven one. So if you look at the two types of freestyle, there's the shoulder-driven technique, which is great for but it puts a lot more strain on your arms. Then there's the hip-driven technique, where you rotate your hips more and use that to drive yourself forward. Plus the first couple of modules, as part of the freestyle training program, they build muscle memory. It helps build that muscle memory to see how rotating your body can propel you ahead so your shoulders don't have to carry all the load. That alone can make swimming much easier and usually a lot faster. If you watch Sam Shepard swimming, you'll see he uses a hip-driven technique, not a shoulder-driven one. You can see his hips rotate a lot and he uses that to drive forward, gaining that extra length instead of swimming flat. Look at a barge, it's wide, takes a lot of energy to push forward because it's not very streamlined. It's like a swimmer moving flat through the water. But look at a yacht, it's streamlined and it moves through the water much easier. So, if that's how you approach swimming and you want to power the stroke from your hips, you'll stay more on your side, you'll be more streamlined, and you'll save a lot of energy. That's why the first two modules in the Mastering Freestyle Program cover the fundamentals. Building the muscle memory to learn a hip-driven freestyle technique. You'll find it much easier, take the pressure off your shoulders, and swim a lot better over distance. So if you're a 400m swimmer, a triathlete, or you swim longer than 400m, check out the first two modules of the Mastering Freestyle Program. And they'll really help your freestyle. That's it for this week's news. See you again next week.