How To Swim Freestyle _ Technique For Front Crawl Swimming

Today, we're going to be teaching you the freestyle stroke. We're going to be breaking down the full stroke into sections so that you can become a faster and more efficient swimmer. Okay, so let's start with a few of the basics. Freestyle is performed on our front, face down in the water, and we should be striving to keep our body as level in the water as possible. You should aim to keep your head in a neutral position, in line with your trunk, and looking down towards the bottom of the pool. As a guide, your eyeline should be looking somewhere around one to two meters ahead of you, but try to avoid lifting your head too much as looking forward can create tension in your shoulders and cause your legs to sink. Now, let's take a look at the hand entry. Your fingers should enter the water first, with your palms facing down. This should enter directly in line with your shoulder, and this puts your hands in a position that allows you to flex the wrist just a little bit, all whilst keeping your elbow slightly higher than your wrist. Also, aim to enter the water as smoothly as possible with your hand, as if you were slicing the water, and then slide forward for the remaining couple of inches under the water to get that full extension of the arm. After this hand entry, we then enter what we call the catch phase. This is where we are starting to pull down through the stroke. This is important for maintaining your lift in the water and carrying your momentum. You should do this by pushing down with your hand and your forearm whilst keeping your elbow high. Search for a purchase of the water and hold onto this throughout the catch phase. A good way to imagine this action is that you're trying to put your arm around a barrel. Then from the catch phase, we move into what we call the pull phase. This is when the hand begins to move underneath your head. At this point, the fingers should point directly down towards the bottom of the pool and the palm of your hand towards the end of the pool that you're swimming away from. It's fairly obvious, I know, but to move forward, we need to apply force in the opposite direction. To maximize this, you should aim to keep your arm in a strong position. This means pressing with the hand, keeping the elbow in that high position, an arm angle of somewhere between 90 to 120 degrees. A good way to picture this pull phase is that you're trying to pull your body past your hand and your arm. The hand should track more or less directly underneath the body rather than out to the side. This will maintain your balance and symmetry and avoiding any nasty snaking down the pool. As your hand pulls through towards the hip, it's important to finish a stroke by pushing backwards and extending your arm as your hand exits the water. Now we're moving into the recovery phase. As your arm exits the water at the back of the stroke, you should start by bending your elbow as if you're trying to point to the roof of the pool with your elbow or sky if you're really lucky. To actually get the recovery effect of this, it's important to try and lead with your shoulder so the arm stays relaxed. Your hand and forearm should more or less dangle as it comes through before extending the forearm out to reenter the water at the front of the stroke. Now there are a number of drills and tricks that can help you when you're trying to master the front crawl stroke. One in particular is the skull drill. Now this really helps to build your confidence at the front end of the stroke when you're trying to get purchase of the water for the catch phase. Place a pool buoy between your legs, lie flat in the water, and keep your head up or relaxed into the water, whatever feels more comfortable. Then begin sculling with your arms to propel yourself forward, sweeping out and then back in. If it helps, you can imagine splitting a big pile of sand and then bringing the sand back together to one pile in the middle. Try to minimize any propulsion from the legs, and over time, you'll start to feel you're applying more pressure and getting more purchase of the water. Another thing you can do is to use hand paddles. If you're starting out swimming, I'd actually advise skipping these until you've been swimming for some time and you've built enough shoulder strength. Just start out with some small paddles, short reps so that you're not putting too much strain on the shoulders. Now these will really help to overemphasize the catch and the pool phases of the stroke, and also slow things down for you to work it all out on the go. Now as you begin to master the freestyle stroke, you may want to look at rotating during the stroke too. Now this can be fairly complicated to get the hang of, so make sure that you're comfortable swimming before embarking on any rotation. By rotating, you're able to utilize the larger back muscles and to stabilize the stroke. By rotating the whole body around, taking one shoulder out of the water also means we reduce our surface area in the water, therefore making ourselves faster. To rotate, both your shoulders and hips should move in sync rather than one leading the other. Now this movement can also help making the breathing action more natural rather than feeling like you're craning your head around for a breath. On that note, a good tip for the breathing is to start your breath as your hand exits at the back of the stroke. As the arm comes over during the recovery phase, imagine that that arm then forces the head back into the water as it passes the head to end that breath. Well, that's it on the freestyle stroke. 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