You’re One Step Away From Breathing Like A Pro Swimmer

When swimming front crawl, most people have a preferred breathing side, but is this a problem and should you fix it? Have you always breathed to the same side? Have you even thought about which side you breathed to? Have you done a triathlon where the side that you were breathing to was less than optimal because you couldn't see the shore or you couldn't see the turnboy, but you just toughed it out because you really can't breathe to the other side? Let's discuss this and the reason why you should give this breathing thing a little bit of time and a little of thought to get your swimming right. Everyone from beginners to elites has a preferred breathing side. It's a bit like handedness. You just naturally prefer one side to another and then years of practice ingrain that side and make it significantly more comfortable than the other and then swimming to the other side starts becoming more and more uncomfortable. It's a bit like writing with the wrong hand. Awkward and messy, but there are some real advantages in swimming. To be able to breathe to both sides, but also there's some real advantages to only breathing to one side. Confused? Let's explain. First, let's clarify what we mean by breathing to both sides. We are not talking about breathing each stroke left and right. You may actually see some beginners jump in and do this where they whip their head left and right trying to breathe every stroke and this is not practical for anyone. We're also not talking about bilateral breathing. You may have this term bilateral breathing. You may have even been encouraged to do bilateral breathing in your stroke, but bilateral breathing is alternating the side that you breathe with every breath, so every three or five strokes breathing left and then right. What we are talking about is getting as comfortable breathing to the right of your stroke as you are breathing to the left of your stroke, not necessarily alternating them each time. Breathing to one side makes a lot of sense. You ingrain a rhythm in your stroke and you get a new breath in regularly. For most people, it's just about the right amount of time between inhalations. Long enough to not feel like you're hyperventilating, but also short enough that you don't feel like you're running out of air. And as you get more comfortable at it, the breath disrupts your stroke less and less. But at the same time, when you breathe to one side, the extra rotation, the slightly different arm recovery pattern and catch and pull pattern of the other arm leads to slight imbalances. Over time, your one arm will get stronger, your rotation to one side will be better than the other, and your kick might even adapt to be more efficient and stronger on one side. Is this imbalance that we're trying to correct or work out? By occasionally breathing to the other side, you're forced to think more about your stroke and about your breathing pattern and about your strength and your flexibility on the other side. There are also big advantages in triathlon races when you don't want to breathe to the wrong side, where you want to be able to see the shore, or you want to be able to avoid the sun in your eyes, or just avoid that competitor who keeps splashing you in the face. There's also one other big advantage of learning to breathe on the other side. You haven't ingrained any bad habits yet. If you've always been breathing to the same side, you've probably been doing it a little bit wrong. When I first started swimming to improve my swim for my triathlon goals in my early 20s, I'd been swimming for years, but I'd almost always been breathing to the right. And rather than trying to correct all those bad habits on the right, my coach suggested I just stop breathing to the right and only breathe to the left. While this felt really awkward at first, like writing with your left hand, after a while, I was actually more efficient and more comfortable and had a better stroke on the left than I did on the right. I obviously went back later on and improved that breathing on the right so that I was more balanced, but still to this day, I predominantly prefer breathing to the left. How do you practice this breathing to the non-dominant side? Well, start slowly. Don't just jump into your next session and try and do the whole thing breathing to the side that you're not comfortable with. Your arms and your stroke will fall apart and they won't thank you. Start with maybe every fourth length of your warm-up, breathing to the non-dominant side, and then you can progress to also bringing in your cool-down, maybe even doing your whole warm-up and cool-down breathing to the non-dominant side once you're comfortable with it. And as you get more and more comfortable, you can start increasing the intensity and doing some of your high intensity sessions, your high intensity intervals, breathing to the non-dominant side occasionally. And if you get really good, you can start practicing bilateral breathing. Bilateral breathing, or breathing every third stroke to the left, to the right, to the left again, and so on, has some real advantages. It really forces you to balance out your stroke, and you'll notice pretty quickly if you tend to overbalance one way rather than the other, or if one side of your stroke, your left or your right, is significantly stronger than the other one, and you can start to correct that. But bilateral breathing also doesn't really work when you start increasing the pace, because most people will find that breathing every third stroke is simply not enough air. They're going to run out of air before they get to that third stroke, and so you're going to have to switch to breathing left or right only when you start increasing the intensity, or when you're in a race. So bilateral breathing is not for everyone. Some people will find that bilateral breathing does work for them, particularly people with fast strokes, because breathing every second stroke, either only to the left or only to the right, actually feels a bit like hyperventilating, because their stroke happens so fast. But most people will find that that's more comfortable than breathing every third stroke, and bilateral breathing is reserved for only the warm-up, the cool-down, and the easy swimming. So have you worked on your stroke? Do you only breathe to one side, or do you breathe to both sides occasionally? Or are you a bilateral master? Let us know in the comments down below. 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