How to Swim PERFECT Freestyle

Swimming perfect freestyle comes down to three things. Perfect body position, catch, and breathing. If you struggle with any of these, then this video is just for you. First, it's important to remember there's only two ways to get faster in swimming. The first is by decreasing drag, and the second is by increasing propulsion. Decreasing drag just comes down to having an improved body position. When it comes to propulsion, this is simply how much water you're able to pull. Most of this comes from your catch, but you can also improve that with your kick as well. If you look at my beautiful illustration right here, I have two different swimmers. One of them has a higher body position in the water than the other swimmer. If you look at this swimmer right here, and I were to draw a line of their body position, it's going to look something like that. If you look at that relative to the surface of the water, you notice the bigger this angle, the larger the displacement is going to be. The bigger this displacement, the slower you're going to move. Remember, the water is 800 times more dense than air. Your goal, if you want to swim efficiently through the water, is to actually reduce the amount of resistance that you have. That way, you move through the water more smoothly with more efficiency. The next logical question is, how do you do that? It starts with your head position. Back to my illustration, if you notice the two swimmers that I have here, this swimmer, their head is completely out of the water. If you were to draw their eyes out, their eyes are basically looking in front of them. Instead, you need to focus on looking almost straight down. If you can just improve your head position by making this small correction, you're going to dramatically improve your overall body position because your body is following your head. You also remember that your legs are dragging down your body. This is difficult, more difficult for swim swimmers compared to others because your legs might be more muscular or more fat. Your body composition can actually make this more difficult for some than others. It doesn't mean you can't have a good body position. It just means you have to have the right core strength to be able to stabilize what's happening on the front of your body and what's happening in your legs. This is all core stability. Here's a pro tip for improving your body position. Grab a snorkel. If you don't have a snorkel, that's fine too. If you do have one, what you're going to do is you're actually going to form almost a streamlined position and you're simply going to kick on the surface of the water. While you're in this neutral Superman position on the surface, you're going to take turns grabbing the water. You're just going to balance and try and keep your legs as high as possible in the water. If you want to make this even easier, grab a pair of fins and you'll float right on top of the water. Now, the second most important thing to swimming perfect freestyle is your catch. This is our propulsion. This is the dominant way that we're going to pull ourselves forward through the water. Before we even talk about the catch and how we pull water, we need to instill this concept that every time we take a stroke, we're trying to maximize the distance that it allows us to travel through the water. It's not about spinning your arms faster if you want to swim faster. Rather, you want to have the maximum amount of efficiency per stroke cycle. The way this starts is as your fingertips enter the water directly in front of your shoulder about half a meter in front, you're going to enter with that middle finger first at about a 45-degree angle. Then you're going to reach and extend to that line. Wherever your shoulder is, it's entering the water directly in that line. Then, only then, can we start to talk about the catch. When it comes to the catch, it's all about this, EVF, early vertical forearm. If you notice, this swimmer is doing a great job because as soon as the fingertips enter the water, you're dropping your fingertips to the bottom and you're creating a fulcrum so you can increase the surface area of which you can pull. All of this forearm is able to pull the water, not just the hand. A lot of swimmers make the mistake in thinking, okay, I'm just going to pull with my hands as fast as I can. The best swimmers are able to really reach and extend, drop their fingertips to the bottom, create a fulcrum, and actually leverage their body and pull their body all the way through and really maximize not only their distance per stroke, but maximize the amount of surface area on every single pull. It's going to feel awkward the first few times you try this. If this is a new concept to you, it's going to feel weird. You're going to think, wait a second, I'm either pulling way more water, or this feels really inefficient because you don't have the muscles and the muscle memory built in this specific way. Now, we already talked about the hand placement, but let's talk about our fingers for a second. When you swim freestyle or any of the strokes, there's three options you have. You can swim with a cupped hand, you can swim with a more relaxed hand with a little bit of space between your fingers, or you can swim with your fingers completely spread out. The fastest and most powerful pull is not when your hands are cupped together. It's not when your fingers are completely spread out. It's actually somewhere in the middle, closer to a neutral and natural feel. That might mean a few millimeters of space between each of your fingers. Not a big space, but a few millimeters of space. What that allows you to do is it increases the surface area because you have momentum in that little space between your fingers. You also have the most power. If you want to improve your catch, it starts with the way your fingertips enter the water, but don't press your fingertips together. Don't space them apart. Have it somewhere in the middle where you have the most natural power. Here's a pro tip to improve your catch. You're going to grab some tennis balls. You can do this drill with golf balls or even just your fist. You're actually going to swim with the tennis ball in your hand. What this is going to do, it's going to reduce the amount of surface area that you have to pull the water. You're actually going to have to pull the water using your forearm. If you don't use your entire arm, you're not going to go anywhere. After you do this for a few 25s, you're going to remove the tennis balls and you're going The third most important thing about swimming perfect freestyle is breathing. When we're thinking about improving our breathing, it comes back to our body position. If you look at our illustration, this image right here, the entire head is out of the water. If you swim with your head out of the water, your legs are going to sink, you're going to use a lot more energy, and therefore, you're going to feel like you need way more air than you actually do. If you swim more efficiently, then you're going to be able to swim needing less oxygen, which is ideal. We still want to have the proper technique. If we look at this body position, we can see that most of the head is completely underwater. If you look at the water line, I'm going to draw it in right here. The top part of the head is over the water and the bottom part is under the water. You want to make sure that you're using your body rotation rather than a head rotation in order to breathe. This comes with when your fingertips enter the water. Back to our fingertips right here, entering the water at shoulder width at a 45 degree angle. You start to enter the water and your body is extending. As you extend, you actually start to rotate. As you rotate, your head is naturally going to rotate with your body. You want to keep your head in line with your spine. Now, I know because I'm standing, it doesn't really look like my head is in line with my spine. If you look at our illustration, this is the spine and this is where the head needs to remain, 50% under the water and 50% over the water. Here's a pro tip to improve your breathing. You're going to grab a paddle, take the strap off, and you're going to swim freestyle with the paddle right in front of your head. The resistance of the water is actually going to push the paddle into your head. Even as you rotate to the side, you're going to be able to maintain the position of the paddle on your head and you're going to be able to get your breath. Now, it's really important that you rotate to the side and try and keep one eye and one ear in the water while the paddle is on your head. Believe it or not, the faster you swim, the easier this drill will become. If you go really slow, it's going to be really difficult to keep the paddle on your head because you don't have enough resistance pushing against the paddle. Breathing is one of the most difficult things about swimming. If you can master this drill, you're going to be breathing and swimming with ease. Remember, one eye and one ear in the water. Try and keep that 50% ratio. If you're wondering, how do I swim with my face halfway underwater? How am I going to breathe? I'm going to get water. What happens is as you're moving, you're creating a wave and an air pocket. This happens even when you're not moving very fast. You can be on your side and you're able to actually get quite a bit of oxygen on your side and you don't have to rush it. When you're on your side getting your breath, you're going to breathe in the oxygen and then you're going to put your face back in the water as you rotate back naturally part of the stroke. Then finally, the next question is how often do you breathe? This really depends on how far you're swimming, what your swimming level is, but if I were to give you a rule of thumb, I recommend breathing every two arm strokes. What that means is every time you take a stroke, you're going to take one more stroke and then you're going to breathe. That means you're going to breathe on the same side over the course of a pool length. Now, you might want to get a little bit more sophisticated in what's called bilateral breathing. This is where you actually breathe to both sides and you'll do that every three or five strokes. You can use this as a drill to focus on balancing your stroke. You don't want to get too strong on one side compared to the other, but that won't happen if you have the proper freestyle swimming mechanics. You can confidently swim breathing only on one side and still have a relatively balanced stroke. It's actually going to be a little bit easier because you're going to develop a rhythm and rhythm is how you can swim longer with more efficiency and that's the goal of what we're trying to do here. All right, so here's the thing. Even if you have the perfect body position, you have a great catch and you can breathe when you swim with ease, it's still not enough because if you swim with improper structure, if you just swim back and forth, you're not going to improve and you're going to plateau so much faster. That's why I developed the MySwimPro app so that you can have a personalized swimming plan anywhere you go, anytime. Every workout, every set, every interval is personalized to you based on how fast you swim with different technique drills along the way. If you're looking to improve your swimming, if you want to swim faster, if you don't want to be tired at the end of a workout, then you have to check out the MySwimPro app. Check it out for iPhone and Android and happy swimming.