10 Mistakes Beginner Swimmers Make

Are you tired of swimming slow, feeling exhausted when you get to the other end of the pool, and just not making the swimming progress that you hoped for? Well listen up. In this video, I'm going to share with you 10 of the biggest mistakes that swimmers of all levels are making. Number one, it's kicking too much. Now, this is very counterintuitive because you might think, well, I want to swim faster so I need to kick more. Wrong. Your legs are the biggest parts of your body. There's so much blood, so much oxygen is circulating there. If you use them, it's not only going to create a lot of drag, but it's also the most inefficient way to move forward in the water. We're going to talk about a few different techniques on how you can actually swim more efficiently, but it's really important in this video that I explain the solution for each of these biggest mistakes that I see swimmers make. Now the solution here is pretty simple. Just stop kicking. Just like some of these other tips and tricks I'm going to share, they are counterintuitive, meaning what you think is the right way to do something is actually wrong. Yes, you've been lied to. Maybe you've misinterpreted the facts, but here I'm going to dispel some myths for you, and that is don't kick. Kicking will in fact make you slower, it'll use more energy. Certainly in a shorter timeframe, kicking will make you faster, but if you're a fitness swimmer, if you're trying to swim fast over a long period of time, kicking is not the way you're going to get there. Number two, it is swimming too fast. Yes, I said it before and I'll say it again. If you want to swim faster, you have to train faster, except in your warmup. It is so important that you build into the warmup gradually. You have to elevate your heart rate very gradually, so that way you get the most muscle recruitment and you don't over-fatigue your stroke. One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen swimmers make in coaching over 5,000 swim workouts is that swimmers just go out way too fast. You have a warmup, you have a preset, you have a main set for a reason, and if you blow out your first 25 or 50 meters, that's just hurting yourself. I don't care if the pool is cold and you got to get your heart rate warming. No, do it on land, get a good dry land warmup in, and then get in the pool and gradually warm up your heart rate, so that way you're ready to go for the main set. The solution here is to do a proper warmup. It is so important to make sure you're warming up correctly. Number three is swimming with too much splash. This is something that I think a lot of people can really understand, because splash is equal to resistance. Think about it, you're displacing water, a medium that is 800 times more dense than air, and because of that, you're going to swim slower. Instead, think about entering your fingertips very gradually into the water. Your middle and ring finger should be the first thing that touches the water. Try and enter the water without making any splash. If you want to take it to another level, you got to make sure you're using silent swimming. This is where you're listening to the noise that your fingertips make when you hit the water. This is a total body movement. You're getting full mental engagement, so all of your senses are fully engaged. Just got to make sure you're not making a lot of splash. The way that you can do that is by listening, and that's how you're going to beat silent swimming. Number four is looking forward. Now, I have a beautiful illustration here on the board, got to take advantage of it. If you guys like my stick figurines, make sure you like the video. Really appreciate that. Here we have a good swimmer's body position. The mistake is by looking forward. In this example, see the eyes, let me draw it on the board here for you guys. This is the person's eyes, you got a swim cap, cute little swim cap right there, and they are looking forward. That means your legs are going to sink, and as a result, you're going to displace more water, and by displacing more water, you have more drag. Water is 800 times more dense than air, and that's how much slower you're going to go. The solution, instead of looking forward and letting your hips sink, is to just look down. Keep those eyes looking down. There's that beautiful swim cap and the eyes, so we're looking down. The wall's not going anywhere, don't worry about it, and that's going to push your hips up. If you look at the displacement of this red compared to this red, it's so much smaller, and that's why you're going to go fast. Just remember, the wall's not going anywhere. Even if you're swimming open water, you lift your head up occasionally for the spot, otherwise, you should be looking down, and that's going to keep your body positioned much, much faster. Number five is a pretty easy one, but it's not having the right swimming gear. Maybe I should have listed this as number one. You got to make sure you have the bare minimum, and that starts with a swimsuit. I know there's a lot of different kind of swimsuits out there, but what you want is something that you're comfortable with, that you feel confident in the water, and it's not going to be too baggy. You don't want to swim with a hoodie, with a parachute. It feels like a parachute, so the baggier your suit, if you got those big swim trunks, no good. The second piece of equipment after you got a comfortable suit is the goggles. It's so important that you're able to see what's going on. Even though, like I mentioned, you're not going to be looking forward when you swim, you're looking down at that beautiful black or blue line on the bottom, and you want to be comfortable in the water, and having a good pair of goggles that don't leak is very, very important. Next, you want a swim cap. This is especially true for the ladies or anyone that has a lot of hair. The more hair you have, the more important it is to have a swim cap. What you want to do is you want to bundle it all in there, and this will not only protect your hair, but it keeps it from getting in your mouth when you breathe, and it also keeps you swimming faster and more streamlined in the water, which is the most important thing. The secondary piece of having the right gear is your equipment, such as your fins, buoy, paddle, snorkel, so many different things that you can incorporate into your swimming so that you can swim faster. That's why I want to thank today's video sponsor, Nike Swim. Check out how sweet I look rocking my Nike Swim gear. Nike Swim has suits, caps, goggles, and fins for training and competition. You probably know Nike for their amazing running shoes and other sports gear, and their swimsuits are just as high quality with tons of options for every type of swimmer. Nike Swim's hydrostrong fabric is designed for long hours in the pool, and it can stand up to intense competition. The suits are quick-drying and fade-resistant, so your favorite suit is going to last even longer, even with hundreds of hours of chlorine or salt water. There's tons of great styles and a bunch of different colors and prints to choose from so you can stand out at the pool. I've been loving the Nike Swim's vapor mirror goggles. They're super comfortable, they're low-profile to reduce drag, and you look like a boss wearing them. So if you're ready to upgrade your swim gear, you've got to check out Nike Swim. Grab a suit, some goggles, a cap, fins, and other gear all in one place. So make sure you give Nike Swim a follow on Instagram at Nike Swim to see their latest styles and to be inspired to swim faster. Head over to the link in the description below to shop, and thanks again to Nike Swim for sponsoring this video. It's so important to have the right gear, so make sure you check out that link. Number six is holding your breath. This is a huge mistake that swimmers are making of all levels, actually, from beginner, intermediate, all the way to elite, not having a good breathing pattern. What happens is that you have this buildup of CO2, because if you think about it, you need to make sure you're inhaling and exhaling. Inhaling is great. You get that oxygen intake, but remember, your body's building CO2, and you have to release it. So when you breathe out, that's actually where the magic happens. So if you hold your breath, and you're not giving yourself a chance to exhale, you're actually going to hurt yourself, because you're going to fatigue more quickly. So it's really important, take a pause right now, and breathe in your nose with a me, exhale. Do that about five more times while I continue to talk. The solution is to inhale and exhale. Make sure you regulate your breathing, have a breathing pattern, and make sure you have the right technique. Seven mistake here is crossing over. I'm going to go back to my beautiful illustrations here. Illustration number three. I got one, two, three. And it's crossing. Let me explain what crossing over is. When you cross the midline. So if you look at my illustration, I have a dotted red line cutting through the middle of the swimmer. This is the eagle eye view. We're looking down at the swimmer, as if we have a drone looking at the swimmer. The lane lines are right here, and they're swimming right down the middle of the pool. This line is like a laser beam. You cannot cross it. If you cross this line, boom, I just chopped off your fingers. The laser chopped off your fingers. And that applies both above the water and below the water. So when you finish your pull pattern, the solution here is to make sure you enter the water with your fingertips directly in front of your shoulders. This is the stick finger shoulder, and that's where we're going to enter. This is immediately right in line. And the same thing happens underneath the water. So when you get to the pool, which we're going to talk about how you pull, it's going to happen in a straight line, despite your body rotating. So really important that we never cross this line. So the wrong thing to do, let me use the same color. If this arm was taking the stroke, it would be a cross over like this, and that's the pole. And if you cross in front of your head, you're breaking that invisible laser, and it's going to chop off your fingers. So you want to keep your fingers, don't cross over. Mistake number eight is swimming flat. You're not a ship, so don't swim like one. And what I mean by that, a ship, a freighter, think about one of these cargo ships or a cruise liner, it's moving pretty slow for how massive the thing is. And that's because it's just wide and flat. It's really stable, but it's not moving very fast, and it can't go very fast because it's this big moving thing in the water. We want to be more streamlined when we swim. So rather than swimming flat, you want to build rotational momentum. So I talked about with your fingertips here entering in front of your shoulder, and that's not it. You have to continue to extend and reach, reach, reach. And as you reach forward, you're getting this rotation driven by your hips and your shoulders together. And that rotational momentum will actually increase the length of your stroke, so you get more distance per stroke. And that's why you don't want to swim flat. You want to be like a speedboat where you're really narrow in the water and much higher in the water as compared to a cruise ship or a freighter that's just going... It's moving really, really slow. Number nine is having a straight arm pull. If you notice in my illustration, the elbows are always bent, and it's really important to pay attention to where the elbow is and where the hand is. In swimming, a great rule of thumb, we'll call it the rule of the elbow, is that your elbow is always above your hand, above the water and below the water. Let's take a look at this example. Here the elbow, we're above the water, is above the hand. And when the hand goes underneath the surface of the water, I'm going to redraw this so it makes a little bit more sense with my brown marker. This is what the pull pattern looks like, and that's the hand right there. This right here is called an early vertical forearm, EVF, because we have all of this surface area in which we're pulling. Notice the elbow is above the hand, and that's why it's so important to make sure you have this early vertical forearm, and that's how we pull the most water, because we're pulling with the largest amount of surface area, and that's how we pull ourselves forward through the water. Now number 10, and probably the biggest mistake of all of these that I see consistently, is just not swimming with a plan. We talked about the warmup. If you swim too fast in warmup, really going to throw you off, but it's so important to not waste your time in the water. Time is so important. So if you go to the pool without a plan, you're going to fail, because a goal without a plan is just a wish. And that's why you got to check out the MySwim Pro app for iPhone, Android, and you can get a personalized swim training program just for you, depending on what your goals are, what your skill level is, and what you're trying to achieve. The MySwim Pro app, the MySwim Pro coach will dynamically create a program that is specific to you. So make sure you check out the app for a personalized training program. I've also written a book. It's called Swim Like a Pro, a holistic way to improve your swimming, so if you're trying to swim faster, if you want to do it with less effort, with better technique, make sure you check out those resources, and if you enjoyed this content, make sure you check out How to Swim Faster in 90 Seconds. You're going to love it. I'll see you over there, and happy swimming.