These 4 Easy Fixes Will Improve Anyone’s Swimming Technique

Everyone from a beginner swimmer to an advanced swimmer has something they can and should be working on improving. Today, we're going to help you figure out what that is and show you how to improve it. Starting with your head. This is something that's obvious with beginners as they lift their head, move it around, and generally have it in the wrong position. Even advanced swimmers can develop habits where their head is not in the optimal position, costing them speed and efficiency. When you swim front crawl, you should not be able to see where you're going. You should only be able to see one to two meters in front of you on the bottom of the pool. Now, this can be very disconcerting for new swimmers, but trust that black line and trust the other swimmers around you. There is nothing in front of you that can hurt you except the wall, but there's a T on the black line to show you when that wall is coming. Put your head down and swim. This head position also requires you to keep your face in the water. If you're not comfortable with your face being in the water, you should start here. Beginners often feel that they should put their face in the water when swimming front crawl, but as often as possible, get their face to the air to breathe. The opposite is, in fact, true. You should keep your face in the water as much as possible and as infrequently as possible. Turn your head, rotate it sideways to breathe. If you're not comfortable with your face in the water, start by just bobbing up and down and putting your face in the water, breathing out under the water as much as possible until you are completely comfortable with your face and eyes under the water. Even advanced swimmers do get their head position wrong. You want to think about your hairline being just below the surface of the water and looking down at the floor one to two meters in front of you. Then, you want to turn one eye and your mouth to the air to breathe, rotating your head rather than lifting it. It can help to think of keeping your forehead in the water while you get your mouth to the air if you do tend to lift your head when you're breathing. A poor head position costs you a lot of efficiency as it presents a larger surface area to the oncoming water. More than that, lifting your head also causes your hips and legs to drop, presenting a larger surface area of your whole body's position in the water. You really need to nail that head position. Next, your hands. Your hands are, of course, the paddles that pull or push you through the water. Like paddles, if you get the angle wrong, they won't generate any force or worse, they'll push you off line sideways. Your hands should be held straight or slightly curved, not cupped or twisted in any way. Your wrists should always be straight and never bend at any part of your stroke. Your hand should enter the water middle finger first and then reach forward and down as if reaching over a barrel. Beginners will often pull back at this point as if pulling on a rope, pulling the elbows towards their bodies with their hands following. To pull the most water, you actually want your whole forearm and a hand to act as a elbow up as your hand comes through underneath it. Experienced swimmers will often find that they've developed bad habits over time, like entering with their thumb first or their pinky first or dropping their elbow during the catch phase. Be aware that to do this properly requires power and strength. If you swim for too long or too far without a rest, your brain will naturally find shortcuts to allow your hand to move through the water with less effort, which is exactly what you want to avoid. While you're learning, make sure that you take plenty of rests and break your swim into lots of intervals so that you don't reinforce bad habits as you get tired. A poor body position is the most common problem for swimmers of all levels. Beginners always feel like their legs are sinking, but even advanced swimmers struggle with this part of their stroke. Often it's because they treat the problem without actually fixing the cause. They will kick harder or pull harder or twist their body to try and compensate for that poor body position. But the real issue is your body rotation. Without good body rotation, your legs will always sink, and kicking harder is not a good solution because it will send your heart rate up and make it that much harder to sustain your stroke. A good rotation starts with your hips. As you drive one hip down, the other hip lifts, pulling your upper body and arm through the water, generating power, whilst at the same time allowing your other arm to stretch as far as possible ahead of you. If you don't rotate your hips, you cannot reach as far, shortening your stroke, and you cannot pull as hard with your stroke. And as if that wasn't enough, your hips will sink. When rotating your hips, remember to keep your legs straight with only a slight knee bend. Don't twist around into a big kick, a so-called scissor kick, to try and keep your balance. To practice this, start with wall glides. Push off the wall and simply glide. After a while, you can add a rotation where you rotate your body before you add in any arm strokes or leg kicks. If there is only one tip, one thing that you take from this video that will help every swimmer, it's this. Stop before your technique fails. Swimmers, and triathletes in general, tend to swim until they can't anymore to really give it to themselves and work hard. But your technique fails long before you get to the point where you can't actually swim anymore. And then you just spend all your time reinforcing bad habits and bad technique. Rather, start with shorter intervals and shorter sessions while you refine that stroke and make it better. And while you're doing that, if you do want to swim longer, use some aids like paddles or pull buoy or even a flotation shorts, those neoprene shorts, to keep your body in a good position and keep your stroke going well while you reinforce that stroke that you're working on. We hope this video has helped you and you've taken something from this video. Now let us know which one of those things that we mentioned was the thing that you needed to work on, if not all of them. And if you've enjoyed this video, hit the thumbs up button to support the channel. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the rest of our videos. One of the swimming.