How to Swim Freestyle Like the BEST in the World

What's behind Michael Phelps' catch, or Leon Marchand's underwaters, or Ledecky's kick, or even Popovici's glide? In the next 18 minutes, we're diving deep into the stroke technique of some of the fastest freestyle swimmers on the planet. Let's slow things down, dissect their strokes, and find out exactly what makes them the best in the world. Whether you're a beginner or advanced swimmer, I'm sure you'll learn something, so let's dive in. We have the first shot here, As you can see, his body posture is really, really good, meaning his body position is high in the water. He's reducing the amount of resistance that he has. We're going to draw a midline through his body. His eyes are looking relatively down. He's already engaged in a nice, early vertical forearm, so we can pull the water behind him. He's fantastic at that, but right now, I really want to focus on where his head position is and how that extends through the rest of his body. If your eyes are looking forward, then your legs are going to sink. Because his eyes are looking down, his hips are up. Let's go ahead and clear some of that out and take a look at his stroke. Now, what I mentioned is lazy here. I think this was just for a video shoot, which is why his eyes are probably looking a little bit too forward than they should be. He should be looking a little bit more down. If you look at where his hand is, the body line is right there. When you stick your fingertips into the water, you actually want your fingertips to extend on that same line of the shoulder. That's really where his arm should be. If you notice right now, his arm is just floating. He hasn't initiated the early vertical forearm yet, meaning he hasn't started to drop his fingertips to the bottom of the pool, trying to engage and catch that water. The reason why you want to get your arm where that red line is, because that is the most efficient way to move. You're trying to minimize resistance and be like a torpedo. If your arm is just floating and kind of dragging in front like that, it's not really going to be good. This shot, forward looking, is really amplifying his high elbow catch. I mean, look at this. This is like textbook level swimming right now. The elbow is always above the hand, and that's really important both above and below the water on the recovery phase, which is what you see right here, as well as below the surface, because that means you're setting up your fingertips to engage in the water right in front of the shoulders. If you look at his body line, if we draw that line right down the middle of his body, and we just watch that, he's entering the water right in front of his shoulder. That's amazing. Take a look at Kayla Decky's swimming. The first thing I want to pay attention to is the body position. That is the body line. If you look at it, her eyes are looking pretty much straight down. Her hips are high, and her body is occupying very little space in the water. You can improve that by focusing on your head position. After she takes, or before she takes the breath, she lifts her head up. Now, if you take a look at that, if you see now, she went from looking down, and now her eyes are looking forward. Instead of having that flat body line like that, now there's a little bit more displacement of water, and that extra resistance actually slows you down. Now, let's keep watching this video, and let's look at some other things that we notice. One thing that comes to any experienced swimmer is that she doesn't really kick a lot. She's not really using her legs at all. They're kind of just dragging. This is what we call a two-beat kick. That means she's taking one kick per every stroke. This is more to balance the body's positioning. It's not really as a primary driver. I guess the big takeaway here is that you don't want to over-focus on your kick, especially the longer the distance. If you're a triathlete, distance swimmer, having a kick is great for foundational support of your body position, not for driving propulsion. You should be really focusing on the upper body rotation and hip-driven rotation. Another thing that we need to look at with Keito Deki or any good freestyler is the early vertical forearm. We take the stroke, and as you can see, the fingertips are extended out. You're really reaching and trying to maximize that distance per stroke, but as soon as your fingertips slide into the water, we start to initiate that catch. As you can see, the arm starts to bend a little bit. That is initiating the early vertical forearm because we want to pull the water back behind us. We want to grab the water and pull ourselves forward. Let's go ahead and follow this through. As you can see, we have almost a paddle being developed from the elbow all the way to the fingertips. This paddle, this early vertical forearm, allows us to pull the most amount of water because we've increased the surface area. Keito Deki does this better than any freestyle swimmer that we've seen in distance. You can see the bend in the elbow even underneath the water. That's because you're leveraging as an anchor point. You're pulling yourself forward. Now, here's the next thing we want to look at with her stroke. She has a gallop stroke. She breathes every two strokes. Sometimes, swimmers think that you really have to breathe bilaterally. You have to breathe on both sides. While it is good to have stroke balance, there are actually a number of benefits to breathing only on one side. It allows you to have more rhythm. When you're doing distance swimming, you need to have that rhythm. If you notice, she breathes every two strokes. She breathes to her right side. It looks natural. It looks like a gallop. The first thing I want to focus on is his hand entry, where he's entering the water, and what exactly he's doing. I'm just going to go ahead and draw a little arrow right there. These are his shoulders. If you notice, his hand is actually entering the water directly in front. If you look at the direction of his hand, I'm going to change the color of this arrow, his hand is actually pointing that way. If you notice, he's actually going to sweep his hand out and then pull back. I'm going to clear the screen. Now, watch this in slow motion. As he enters the water, he's actually going to sweep out and then he's going to pull. That's why it's so important to enter the water right in front of your shoulder. If you look at when he takes a breath, there's this beautiful position right there where one eye is above the water and one eye is hidden underneath the water. This is his body line right now. This is the horizontal plane. If you notice, there's a delta right there. That difference is an opportunity to reduce drag. You can see how important it can be to maintain a low head position in the water. If your head goes up, then your hips go down. When your hips go down, you create a lot of resistance. You can see this rotation that's happening with the hips. I'm actually going to his body is like a square, but you don't want to spend a lot of time in that position because this is actually the slowest position in swimming freestyle. If you look at this rotation, look how much narrower his body becomes through the water. My box no longer applies, so I'm going to redraw it clear. His body is a narrower entity in the water and that's a lot less drag. That's where his arm is right in front of the shoulder. He's breathing to the side and that's a perfect 90 degrees right there. That's what you want. You want 90 degrees. One thing I want you guys to pay attention to is that early vertical form that she is setting up. Her arm is straight at this point. We're going to watch how her arm starts to actually bend. She's going to position her hand in that early vertical form so that way she can propel herself forward and carry as much speed as possible. We're going to play that and we're going to see that beautiful bend in the elbow. I'm going to have to go ahead and redraw that and it's absolute work of art. Another thing I want us to pay attention to right before she takes a stroke, here it is another angle of that early vertical form. At this point the hand is absolutely vertical. She has a little bit of a head bob. Do you see that right there? Right now she's looking forward and then she actually corrects it as she starts to pull. It looks like if we were to draw this whole section of her body actually pivots down at the same time and that's actually not what it's supposed to do. You want to be your head should be independent. Do you see that? Her head and her hand are pushing down. Now we see this in her competition stroke as well actually. Then one more nitpicky thing that we want to point at right here. If you look at how stretched out this arm is that's a really good in line with her shoulder but look at what she's doing with her hand. Her fingertips are actually above her palm and it really should be the other way around. Really her hand should be as flat as possible here and then if anything to get into that early vertical form the fingertips should be starting to point down. Firstly let's talk about where his hands are hitting the water. Now I'm going to go ahead and pause this. One thing that you notice is his hand is a little narrow on the entry. Actually this happens with both of his hands. Now I know it's really difficult to see so I'm going to go ahead and draw a line that kind of represents the mid section of his body and we're going to look at where the hands are entering. We're going to go ahead and watch this in slow motion and yeah it looks like he's entering a little narrow. You know even someone as good as Caleb Dressel can always find these little things to improve. He enters in front of the shoulder and then he sweeps out just a little bit and that outward sweep is just a waste of time a waste of efficiency and he could actually get into the stroke a little bit sooner or if he's going to increase his turnover he can increase his distance per stroke by just a little bit. Let's break down his underwater dolphin kick. His walls are absolutely incredible. You know here's the body line and Caleb actually starts the pull or not the pull the dolphin motion with his upper body with his fingertips with his head with his chest his whole diaphragm and he's kicking up and down. That's all great and everyone's body is differently so you shouldn't look at Caleb Dressel and think that you have to swim like them. Every athlete is a little bit differently. They have different strength flexibility and that's what you factor in for yourself when you're training. Let's get back to the analysis and watch his underwater dolphin kick. He is using his entire body on that underwater dolphin motion. There it is on the turn tight streamline great body undulation great flexibility and look at the amplitude it's pretty big. If you have a bigger dolphin kick you're going to get more power. You're also going to get more resistance because that white box I just drew is going to be bigger than if you had a smaller white box. If you have a smaller dolphin kick yes you'll have less power but you'll displace less water and you'll have less resistance and every athlete is a little bit different and that's what I wanted to highlight with that point. Now let's get into the mechanics of his actual swimming. What I like here is how his fingertips are extended again his eyes are too far ahead that's fine we'll work with it and what you're trying to do at this point in the stroke you're trying to reach forward you're trying to increase your distance per stroke and Caleb does a fantastic job of that. Next thing you want to do in the stroke is you want to start bending the elbow sort of we can kind of see it now in a sprint you're going to have a slightly straighter arm recovery. Caleb actually does a fantastic job having that bent elbow probably more so than most sprinters. Could he have a little bit tighter early vertical forearm? Yeah I think so but again he's moving really fast generating a lot of power it's balance between resistance as well as power. So this next video here is highlighting his streamline and this is a drill that you can do on your own you can do it from pushing off the wall you can do it starting off the diving block and you basically dive in or push off the wall in streamline and your goal is to maintain this body position and you're trying to be as still as possible engage the core right everything is being engaged right now he's very very tight the fact that he can float is actually very very impressive and it looks like he went about 25 meters just floating this is a skill that's really important to try and master because everyone can benefit from this. So let's get into his free stop I did mention something about his catch that I want to dig into here in slow motion let's go ahead and pause it. I do not know what is going on with his left hand like that is clearly a problem right here I don't know if you guys can see that if I don't even think I need to zoom in it looks like he's got a claw maybe you can get a claw on the screen that is what I'm looking at it's only with one of his hands so now that you've identified it let's go ahead and clear the screen but look how amazing this is on the other side I mean he enters the water head position really good body position really good this arm is extended really good the wrist is a little bit bent maybe that'll develop over time let's go ahead and clear that I want to show you the early vertical form it's happening so fast I think I need to show you it in slow motion I'm going to go back a little bit so you can see it in slow motion wow look at that there it is in slow motion it's really difficult to see from this angle but you can almost see it that's what the arm is doing that's what it looks like he's kind of like mid-stroke but what that does is it allows you to pull the water behind you he's doing it on both hands just ignore the claw on the other hand you can see how that elbow pops up this is why he's so fast this is the secret to speed and he's able to apply it on every single stroke every single 50 and he has the training to back it all up I'm gonna go ahead and just pause it to show a few things if you notice right there I paused on a pretty good frame you can sort of see this high elbow catch and this position that you see right here is how she's leveraging so much water on every single pull now the the body line now if you notice here one area that is interesting is that she does cross over a little bit on the entry probably doesn't need to have her hand enter the water right here could probably enter here now I think there's a few reasons why this doesn't really impact her her swimming we'll talk about that a little bit at the end but just go ahead and watch this here in slow motion you can see where that hand is entering this is right in line with the shoulder this is where you set up that catch you get your fingertips to drive down you can see the hands right here a lot of people ask well why are her fingers open her hand is really firm and gets a lot of water because she's able to feel comfortable you don't want to squeeze your fingers together so much that you're actually reducing the overall size so you want to have a constant pressure all the way through now I want you guys to focus on that hand entry again it's kind of a little bit too narrow for my liking you can see it right here if you notice the hand is moving over in front of the head there's this unofficial rule that your hand can never cross the midsection of your body so watch that here in slow motion and you can really see what's happening but it's a constant drive constant it's it's not like there's any pauses in the stroke now a lot of people will say well looks like she's crossing over now that's just the rotation happening and her strength profile it's not it's ideally going to be in a straight line but because it's three-dimensional and there's some rotation that's why you see it looks like it's an s-pull underwater it's relatively straight though now I really want to focus on this top view because you can see a lot of the things we talked about and one of her secret weapons when she's swimming whether it's the 200 the 400 the 100 if she were to swim a 5k it would probably look the same thing she's able to maintain this constant cadence she's basically like attacking the water right and even though she's attacking the water you can still see how clean the hand entry is when you watch her and Katie Ledecky or other top swimmers they are both and any of them very very good at getting into that high elbow catch especially for distance swimming getting into this position as quickly as possible you know one way to do that is a snorkel you don't have to worry about the breath just focus on this first thing that I want you guys to pay attention to is how good his distance per stroke is he's not taking a lot of strokes huge distance per stroke right there and that allows him to be efficient all the way through the entire hundred meters just goes to show how efficient he is now another thing that I want to break down is his kick look at that kick an absolute machine that kick allows him to almost lean in on each stroke look at this right here do you see how he almost pauses on that arm as it's extended and as that arm is extended the kick is just letting him like hover over the water it's almost like an alternating plank it's all core stability driven by the kick yes he has a great early vertical forearm yes he has a great pull he's able to pull the water behind him but if it weren't for this kick he wouldn't be able to just glide on each of these strokes pay attention to how long he's able to maintain this glide compared to the other swimmers right watch how fast they get into the stroke and he's able to maintain that distance per stroke with his turbocharged kick let's go and watch it right here pay attention do you see how he's like almost floating on that arm he has almost a slight hesitation you can see it right there a slight hesitation holding his line in that alternating plank system now this is really done by focusing on technique and you can only do this when you see yourself swim and here's what he had to say about that as you can see video analysis is so important to swimming fast so if you haven't seen yourself swim you got to make sure you're filming yourself at different speeds different angles just like you're watching in this analysis video now if you want myself or other top coaches to review your footage we do this every single week in our swimming academy so this is a community of people who are really focused on taking their swimming to the next level if that sounds like something you're interested in and you want to take your swimming to the next level make sure you join it i'll see you in there and happy swimming